He hasn’t left his apartment in six months. The bedroom has a large window that overlooks the street. It also has two doors, one leading to the living room he rarely uses and the other to the kitchen. He avoids that, too, because it has developed a faint smell of rot from not being aired out often enough, and from all the takeout boxes he so often leaves on the counter overnight. And the couch in the living room rather breaks his heart. He bought it on a whim, having seen a similar one in a rom-com he liked. From there, his imagination took its course: If this kind of couch was owned by the kind of person he’d like to be, then perhaps it followed that owning the couch would transform him into that person. So he called the store and ordered one. He spent many pleasant evenings on this couch. He even shared it with someone briefly, and only once.

The window of his bedroom is double-glazed, which makes for an eerie quiet. He mostly opens it to let in the sounds at night, when his own breath seems deafening in the emptiness of the apartment, magnified as if in an anechoic chamber. He doesn’t touch the television. It feels vulgar, filled with nonsense people talking about nonsense things, but occasionally he uses it as a source of light on nights he can’t sleep. His mind feels like a dark well of murky bracken, and he hopes that, perhaps, the artificial light of the screen might penetrate the depths of his sadness. But it never works. His mind remains dark. It’s empty and cold down there. It’s been like that since he was eighteen. He never knew where it came from. He tried to climb up to the daylight many times, but he fell again and again.

Some nights he’s able to sit and read into the early morning hours. He has a keen interest in cities: how they are laid out, what needs they meet, what they are made of. He thinks, if he were to be reborn, he’d like to be an architect, or a city planner.

He has his books and magazines, like his food and everything else, delivered. He eats and reads by the window, the light from the streetlamp spilling in through the curtainless glass, casting his skin in a sepia glow. But mostly he sits doing nothing. Thinking.

From his bedroom window, he gazes at the street below. He watches the people going about their lives as if nothing has happened to them and nobody has ever hurt them. They get impatient at the junction, as if the delay of the light turning from red to green is a personal affront. He watches their gaits, the way some of them list to one side a little and others walk with a spring in their step, like they’re in love and for that reason they weigh nothing at all. Sometimes he feels he should try to walk like that. He ought to be able to do it, he thinks. If he wanted to.

Sometimes he feels sorry for all these people outside his window, but most of the time they elicit no emotion in him at all, and only rarely does he envy them. Occasionally, though, he pretends he’s one of them. He imagines himself walking on the street, feeling the clean air on his skin, wearing a coat, a hat perhaps. Smiling at a stranger and that stranger smiling back, like some monster.

From the bedroom window he can also see the street corner. And if he presses his head against the glass and looks down through the dirty panes, he can see even further away, though he rarely does.

He knows he’s grown pale and strangely thin except for a thick band of flesh around his midriff. He doesn’t mind. Besides, no one sees him, no one looks at him. And does he want to be seen? He chases such questions away, because in their answers he finds only despair.

He writes sometimes, in longhand, until the scraping of the pen against the paper becomes too much of an irritant. Then he gives up and stares out the window again. It’s drivel, mostly, anyway, and even that doesn’t matter; nobody’s ever going to read his scribblings.

The only decoration in the apartment is a small painting that has been in his possession since he was a teen. It depicts a landscape of pale blue hills, with a small path winding through the tiny trees. The artist, whose name he doesn’t recall, lived in the 1950s. She had a strange life, and an even stranger ending: A Danish painter, she became famous at the age of twenty-five for painting a humongous mural commissioned by an anonymous benefactor, which represented, according to the papers, “the strangest visions of beings and possessed landscapes.” No photographs remain, and little is known about it as the city had the mural painted over hastily a few days after its completion. Following that, she settled in an ancient provincial town, where she made a living from painting exquisitely detailed miniature portraits. She lived with her mother, who idolized her. The mother’s death a few years later devastated her. She became even more of a recluse, working in her room and rarely leaving it. All her paintings were macabre self-portraits, full of symbols of death, and full of studies of hands: dolls’ hands, skeleton hands. She would search the streets of her town for rotten pieces of wood in which she found something “alive,” in which she could see a face or a figure; such “soul-pieces” she would carve out and then paint. She brooded obsessively on her own death, and considered cutting off the top joint of her forefinger. A decade later, any mention of her vanishes from the public record. The last known trace of her is the testimony of the town’s priest, who described her as stepping into “a wheel of ulcerous blue” and disappearing.

He knew none of that when he picked out her painting as a teenager. He simply liked the tiny trees, the winding path, the pale blue hills.

It’s the painting he’s staring at tonight, while sleep escapes him. He can’t actually see the painting in the dark, but he knows it’s there and enjoys the effort of trying to recreate it in his mind’s eye, down to every last, minute detail. Slowly, his lids grow heavy. He lets himself drift into sleep, but then is startled awake by something bothering him in the space.

A light, he realizes, piercing the dark. It’s coming through the keyhole of the door leading to the living room. But how can it be? There’s no one else in the apartment—hasn’t been for years. The only other person he ever gave a key to was ___, but he certainly would never come back here, let himself in and turn on the living room lights just to disturb his sleep. Perhaps he left the lights on himself? He racks his brain, trying to remember if he even stepped foot in the living room this day, and concludes that no, he didn’t.

He hauls himself out of bed. He straightens his shoulders and works the cricks out of his neck, then takes a deep breath and bursts into the living room.

But, there, he stops. The room is empty. The lights are off. No one is here.

Did he imagine it?

He returns to the bedroom and closes the door behind him, a strange feeling pooling in his chest.

The light through the keyhole is still there.

Slowly, breath held, he brings his eye to the keyhole.

A girl is sitting on the bed of a room he’s never seen before and that is certainly not his living room. There is a closed door on the other side of the room. The girl’s knees are drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She’s wearing a rather old-fashioned frock, and a little young for her age (mid-twenties, he thinks), in a pale blue color he has no name for. Sky blue? Baby blue, maybe. The name makes him shudder. Blue babies.

He’s certain he’s never seen this girl before in his life. She’s looking at something to his left that is obscured by the outline of the keyhole; a window, perhaps, or a painting like his.

He pulls back from the keyhole, closes his eyes and shakes his head, then looks again. The girl is still there, the strange room still neighbors his own inexplicably. He pulls back again and leans his head against the closed door, his heart beating fast. He stumbles to his bedstand and retrieves his phone, the battery long dead. He lets it drop into the drawer again. Who is he going to call? The police? ___? A friend? There is no one.

Thumbing the bony place over his heart, he goes back to the door and opens it. Behind it, his living room greets him, silent and dark. He carefully closes the door again and brings his eye to the keyhole. The girl is now standing by the bed, her arms hanging loose at her sides.

“Hello?” he shouts. “Can you hear me?”

If she can, the girl gives no response. Anger wells up in him. “Get out of my apartment!” he yells, though he knows full well this room is not in his apartment. “Now!”

The girl looks in his direction then, and for a moment he thinks she has heard him, but then she brushes a stray lock of hair from her eyes and walks towards the window that must be there, but which he cannot see.

He lifts a hand and covers the keyhole. His fingers tremble. Then he steps back from the door and returns to his bed. He thinks he’s too agitated to sleep but soon sinks into a fitful slumber. It offers no rest.

In the morning, he looks through the keyhole again. The girl doesn’t show any sign of noticing him, but this time something’s different.

She knows I’m looking at her, he thinks.

The thought makes him jerk back, as if burned. Then, he slowly brings his eye back to the keyhole. The girl still does not acknowledge him, but now he’s sure that she knows he’s there and tries not to show it. Not as if she’s ignoring him, exactly; as if she’s doing her best not to give him away.

But to whom?

His breath hitches in his throat.

Who else is watching her?

A feeling of doubt and shame washes over him then. He thinks, maybe, that he’s being creepy—what grown man has these kinds of hallucinations about peeking into the room of a strange girl in a blue frock?

He decides not to look through the keyhole again, and succeeds for an entire week, trying to ignore the strange unease that builds in his gut. He watches the people from his window as they go about their normal lives. He orders takeout that he leaves uneaten by the kitchen door. Even flirts, half-heartedly, with the delivery man.

But the keyhole beckons, the light shining in the night. Perhaps, he thinks, the girl wants to be seen; perhaps she has a need that he fulfills. He dismisses the thought. What a weak excuse, he scolds himself. What a weak man you are.

He lasts another week before he gives in. Still, his patience reaps rewards; when he looks through the keyhole again there are flowers on the table, two tulips in a vase.

He stares at them a long time.

Where did they come from?

Did she pick them? For him?

The girl appears then. She looks at him—at the door. She opens her mouth, moves her lips to form words. No sound comes out. He knows what she’s saying, though, or thinks he does.

Come in.

He tries the door, something tightening in his chest. He turns the handle and pulls the door open and bursts into his empty living room, no girl to be seen, no tulips, no vase. He shuts his eyes and tries to breathe. The air smells faintly of rotting flowers.

I’ll send her a message, he decides, returning to his bedroom. Slip a note under the door.

He writes some words, then erases them. It was a silly idea. What would he even say to her?

So he brings his eye to the keyhole again, and watches, paying no attention to the feeling of unease that sits heavy in his belly. Days pass this way. It seems to him her face becomes a little more desperate and a little more fearful every time he looks—perhaps so does his own, but he doesn’t bother to check. His speculation about the girl deepens. What happened to her? How did she end up in that room, being watched by a lonely stranger?

He finds no answers. Sometimes he has this peculiar feeling of being watched, too, but when he peeks through the keyhole, the girl ignores him or pretends not to know he’s there. Yet he finds himself looking at her for hours at a time, afraid, perhaps, of missing the one moment that will shed light on the mystery that is their neighboring. He doesn't leave his room for days on end. He forgets to wash, forgoes meals. He keeps both doors locked, the keys hidden away. He stares at his painting sometimes and remembers the artist’s story. Wonders: did that story infect him somehow, that he would end up like this? Rejects the idea; he does not believe in curses. Sleep evades him, and the people outside his window hold no interest for him anymore.

When he does sleep, he dreams of ___. He’s come back, let himself in with his own key. He showed ___ to the door, let him look through the keyhole, told him, see? See? I’m happy without you, too.

One day, the girl is sitting neither on the bed nor at the table where the vase used to be. Instead, she’s kneeling by the door on the opposite wall of her room. Peeking through the keyhole.

He closes his eyes, fighting a sharp, sudden vertigo. He waits for the room to still itself and then looks again. This time the girl is standing, facing him. She moves her lips like she did the previous time, trying to talk to him and not daring to.

“Come in?” he asks, and his voice sounds strange, half-choked and giddy. “You want me to come in?”

The girl shakes her head slowly and mouths the words again.

No, that’s not what she’s saying. That’s not what she said before, either.

Coming, she whispers to him. Someone’s coming.

The world shifts around him and his mind fills with murky water. A violent kaleidoscope, twisted streets, torched fields. Blurred figures stepping through wounds of ulcerous blue, love’s shrapnel, a word sinking into soft flesh. An abandoned house without windows. An old, lonely man, who used to paint.

He falls away, sits on the floor, his back to the door. He feels sick; his gut twists in its familiar way. He understands it, then, what this feeling of unease building inside him was. What it’s always been.

Someone’s coming, the girl said.

Is it a warning, he wonders, or a promise?

Slowly, he raises his eyes to the other door of his bedroom, and he knows. Somewhere, in another room, a stranger is staring at him through the keyhole. The man presses his hand against his chest to calm the churning there. Already he feels an affinity with the stranger on the other side of the keyhole. Who are they? How long have they been watching? He doesn’t know.

His heart rate somewhat under control, he stands up and walks to the window. Conscious of the stranger’s gaze, he turns his eyes in the direction of the window but registers nothing of what’s happening out on the street. Still, he pretends to be interested. He does not acknowledge the stranger on the other side of the door. Not yet. After a few moments, he returns to his bed, sits on it, then stands again, always aware of being watched.

For the first time in a while, he feels special. He glances at the keyhole, brings his fingers to his temples, smooths back his hair. What does the stranger look like, he wonders, and what might he look like to the stranger? Do they feel an unease, with their eye pressed against the keyhole, like he did when watching the girl? He doesn’t know. But he knows their relationship will only blossom from this day on. For that stranger, perhaps, one day he, too, will mouth the words.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors