This is the sixth story in this summer’s online flash fiction series. Read the entire series and our flash fiction from previous years here.

My apartment is in an old wooden building that was built who knows how many years ago. It’s just one floor with two separate units next to each other, sandwiched between dilapidated houses that no one lives in anymore. Imagine three old huts that would have collapsed long ago if they weren’t supporting each other and you’ll understand what I mean. My living space consists of a tatami room, a tiny kitchen with a one-burner stove and a leaky shower. There are no storage spaces. In the back, the space for drying clothes is almost entirely taken up by the air conditioning and it feels like the wall of the house is getting closer behind me.

When I moved in, there was already a woman living in the apartment next to mine, but the real estate agency wouldn’t tell me her name, and the doorplate on her apartment was blank and yellowed by the sun, and we’d never spoken. She was plump, had this shaggy long hair, always wore the same clothes, and, not that I’m one to judge her, but let’s just say she didn’t have much control over herself and didn’t pay much attention to hygiene. No one came to visit her. Every time I saw her, something about her slumped posture told me that she was either apathetic about life, or exhausted, or had given up, or maybe all of the above.

She had this tic. When she locked her door to leave, she couldn’t help but rattle the doorknob over and over because she just couldn’t accept that it was locked. The noise was so violent that the first time I heard it, I was sure someone sinister had shown up to collect a loan, but it was just her. Every time she left the house, she nearly ripped the door off its hinges, and all the tugging left visible cracks in the wall between her door and mine. But I have to say, I can imagine how she felt. When I was younger, I went through a phase where I washed my hands so often that the bar of soap practically disappeared in my palms.

Sometimes I pressed my ear to the wall between us.

There were days when I heard a television in the background, but never the other sounds you’d expect. Our rooms were mirror images of each other (or so I’d discovered at the real estate office), separated by a thin wall, and sometimes, when I was washing dishes, for example, I’d find myself wondering if she might be doing the same thing at that very moment, on the other side of the wall but facing my direction, out of sight. And so sometimes, when I felt like life was folding in on itself, I was often surprised by the bewildering fact that my nearest neighbor was a woman whose name I didn’t even know. On the way home from my part-time job, I’d look up from the dead, gray street stretching into the distance and see our two ramshackle doors ablaze from the setting sun, and think that we were twins, the two of us, grown old and lonely, side by side. If one of the doors, unable to withstand so much, was eventually consumed by fire, how would the other survive? Something about these feelings screamed to be shared. I imagined myself knocking on her door, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to express myself adequately, and I wished I could communicate through knocking. Tell her how life had never turned out the way I wanted it to. How I never seemed to do everything right. How I hadn’t been able to save the person who meant everything to me. And most of all, how overwhelmed I was by all these feelings pouring out of me. If only I could have told her.

In spring, night falls before the world becomes too blue to bear. That day, when I left my part-time job and came home, my head full of thoughts about my age, about the next job I would find, about the money I would have to earn before I die, I saw the woman standing at the door.

Since she didn’t pull on the doorknob, she had probably just come home herself. I had been living there for four years at this point, but we had never been this close without a wall between us. Then a smell tickled my nose, indicating that she hadn’t bathed in a long time. I was nervous and nodded in greeting. She did the same. In the two seconds we locked eyes, I noticed that the skin around her eyes was dark and wet. When did it start raining? I thought, completely confused. But then I looked up at the sky. It wasn’t raining. She was crying. Her greasy hair stuck to her wrinkled forehead, and the worried emotion she carried in her sagging cheeks was etched in my memory. Words flashed in my head, but I couldn’t say them, let alone form a sentence. As awful as I felt, I had to go; it was as if someone was elbowing me out of the way. I fumbled with my keys, managed to unlock the door, and went in. I peered through the peephole for a few seconds, but couldn’t see if she was out there.

After that, I couldn’t relax. As the night wore on, I pressed my ear to the wall several times. But I heard nothing, felt nothing coming from the other side. I drank some water, stretched out on my futon, watched TV now and then, in a vain attempt to distract myself, but this persistent unease grew stronger. Again I pressed my ear to the wall, but I heard nothing. Why couldn’t I tell her? The woman had been crying. I could have at least given her one of the pork buns in my shopping bag. She had been crying. A dark thought raced through my mind: Maybe I was the last person she had seen. Then I thought of my own mother, the last time I had ever seen her, and my fingers touched my neck. But people don’t just disappear, not like that. It takes time, a lot of time, for all the parts of them you carried inside you to disappear. But as those parts shrink, your other parts grow, and eventually everything you had before is gone.

I took my ear off the wall and clenched it into a fist. My pulse was racing. Then I took a deep breath, tried to calm myself down, and saw her door materialize in front of my eyes, there on the dirty wall between the two apartments.

I knocked on the door, right in the middle, twice slowly. Knock, knock, then pause for a moment and then knock again. Knock twice, a little harder this time. Still no answer. Same as before.