It's Cold Upstairs | ✔

(1) Downplay

The woman on the sidewalk smiles uneasily as I ask her which way it is to Kenteny Street.

"Two blocks down," she says, not meeting my eye. She points a slender finger, then taps it towards the buildings on the road's closer side. "It should be the second turn on the right."

I thank her and excuse myself. Behind me, the clip of her sharp heels hurries away. Like she's scared I'll turn around and ask for clarification.

There's nothing special about Kenteny Street. When I reach the turn, the road stretches away before me, banked with small lawns of bare grass and someone's occasional attempt at a garden. Run-down duplexes squat like frogs behind them. The autumn sunlight is anemic. It dulls the grass and whatever trees still cling to their leaves, but the buildings themselves remain crisp, all rusting brick and deteriorating shingle, concrete porches weather-worn. Dirty windows gleam flat and exhausted beneath a blue sky paled by haze.

I check the house numbers. They start in the eighties, and I'm looking for twenty-three.

Traffic noise fades behind me as I move up the quiet street. Nothing moves. In the absence of any breeze, exhaust smells are replaced by concrete and cold grass and the musty perfume of fall leaves, which scatter the roadsides. I spot a few Halloween decorations. A plastic skeleton on a porch. A bush wrapped in fake spiderweb. Nobody has pumpkins. This is the kind of neighborhood that wants to celebrate the season, but with so few trees and most of its residents working two or three jobs to make ends meet, they simply don't have the energy.

I keep an eye on the lawn-edges. Here and there, people have left things for taking: a cheap speaker set missing a mount, a side table with coffee rings, a small pile of kids' toys. I give a wrapped-up mattress a wide berth. Up ahead, someone's been clearing out furniture. It's easier here to drop something on the side of the road and hope someone else will take it than to go through the hassle of selling, and I've furnished most of my apartment this way. I stop in front of the house and check the number. My heart sinks. Twenty-three.

So this is where dad moved to. The left-hand house in a duplex with mismatched porch roofs and mismatched doors. Dad's is reddish. Mahogany. It doesn't match the faded, beat-up green of the awning, and it matches the brick a little too well to look good. The porch is concrete with a single chair. There's a hole where its seat should be. Bits of wicker hang from the edges, where they drip into an unkempt garden sending creepers up the house wall. Dad was never much of a gardener.

I'm not surprised he's purging furniture. There are things here that mom loved, which means he kept the ones she hated, but there are also things I don't recognize. Probably things he picked up for the move, until he could afford better furniture. It's been a few years.

I want to keep scavenging, but that's not what most people would do when they're here to see someone. I trudge up the concrete stairs to dad's front door instead. At least it's a nicely painted door. I lift a hand to knock, and freeze. Do I knock, or text? Or call? I don't want to call. I lower my fist and stop again with my hand midway to my pocket for my phone. Dad is more likely to hear a knock. He doesn't always reply to texts immediately, which means he's probably like me, and leaves his phone on the other side of the house. Or just ignores texts until they get less overwhelming and he can actually answer them. But I suspect that's just a me thing.

Now I'm dithering. I glance over my shoulder at the street, but it's still empty. I'm glad. And I hope there's nobody watching me out the other houses' windows, but because there might be and I need to choose, I default to my first option and knock hard on dad's door.

Too hard?

Oh well. It's done now.

Now there's someone on the sidewalk at the end of the street. I watch them, becoming transfixed as they let their dog pee on someone else's lawn—maybe on purpose, maybe just because they're on their phone and not paying attention. People do that a lot, I've noticed. And they say the zombie apocalypse will be brought on by a virus.