on a rainy spring day a person hears someone open the front door of the boarding house and enter the hallway, pass his apartment and go into the living room, he opens his door and looks into the hall and then walks into the living room to check who it is, coming out of the kitchen is the the landlords representative. she says she is dropping off rent receipts for some of the tenants in the house before she has to check on some maintenance issue in the adjoining property. they begin to talk about the weather and then she tells him about a music concert or some kind of rave she went to.
an ethnic-canadian, she begins to talk excitedly about a concert she has been to earlier in the week, reviewing it all for the tenant who has never been to one, swinging her arms to imaginary music and flicking her cigarette lighter in the air. while doing that she gets the lighter too close to her head and with all the spray she has on accidentally ignites her hair. the flames spread along one curl to the next. she shrieks something inarticulate in her original language all the while patting out the flames and hopping around as though she was dancing. "oh so that's what people do at raves" the tenant says chuckling a little. she pauses to give him a dirty look then continues fussing with her burned hair.
the tenant laughs about the way she is dancing around as she is patting the flames out, and then steps into the kitchen to open the side door so the smell of burnt hair would air-out of the building, then so she can't see him trying not to laugh he stands there looking at the yard. she is muttering under her breath what may be explicatives in her first language and then retreats from the living room to the hallway, it sounds like she is digging in her purse for keys and says she's going to the property next door and that she will let her self out the way she came in and lock the door behind her.
the tenant stands at the side door a couple of minutes more, to let the singular disodor of singed hair exit to the yard and then shuts the door, locks it and goes to the front door to make sure the land lords employee locked it as she said she would (but didnt), so he locks it, then goes back to his room. he can't get in, his door he thought he had left unlocked is locked, he reaches for his keys and thinks ("no I left the door unlocked when I came into the hall and the keys are laying on the desk so I couldn't of locked the door behind me and the deadbolt isn't of the type that slides shut when the door closes so how?"), he pulls and pushes the door to see if the bolt may be only a little way out and catching but its locked shut, he thinks of running next door for the landlords rep who would have pass keys on her and then recalls his window is open he goes back to the side door and out in to the yard where he can open the widow all the way and crawls through, picks up his door keys and then walks over to the door where he turns the deadbolt which was in the locked position, opens the door looks out into the hall and he wonders how the doors deadbolt got locked.
not long after this he begins to notice people who could be described as immigrants walking ahead of him on the sidewalk, flicking a lighter in one hand as they move to imaginary music and then stepping to the side of the walk where they would pull out a set of keys and look at them as he walked by on his wanderings to and fro around the city.
Posted with Blogsy