23
Father was never a tidy drunk.
But he didn’t rip holes in the wall.
Walls. Plural.
Someone had methodically crushed moldering plaster to powder and shattered tinder-dry lath to expose the gaps between century-old wooden studs. The indirect afternoon sunlight through the grime-coated double windows reveals ancient ball-and-tube wiring, dusty veins never intended to see light again. It’s a methodical violation.
No air conditioning. This fourth-floor apartment has been storing up summer heat for days. The sticky-humid air is as still as a mausoleum, but opening the door stirs up enough plaster dust to coat my throat. The apartment reeks of decades of cheap cooking and insufficiently-bathed bachelor.
The bile-green couch sits inverted, legs in the air. Chunks of age-browned foam paddi
