My roommate is a scattered girl of wine breath, of discarded vinyl records and sauce-stained T-shirts. But she pays rent on time and is generally quiet, and unlike my previous roommates, she doesn’t invite heroin addicts over or leave bloody pads on the side of the bathtub. Or, like one previous roommate in particular, cheat on me in my own bed. All she does is go to work and hang out at home, working on her crocheting and calligraphy and various other hobbies. In between, she seems to go on quite a few dates. I know this because she’s asked me several times to check her outfits, to see if those shoes matches this dress, or if I like her perfume. “I’m going on a date,” she often announces excitedly, as if that makes it less weird.
All I have to do is hold my breath when I pass by her room; I’m no hurry to inhale the smoky mixture of incense, perfume, and days-old cracker dust that hangs miasmic around her space. Crackers are one of the few things she seems to eat; I often see crumbs scattered across the counter, wrappers standing like empty snakeskins. But she keeps to herself most of the time, and at least I’m not finding any stringy wads of hair clumped in the shower drain, no gooey peeled-off Band-Aids lying like offerings on the bathroom counter, no rock music blaring into the wee hours of the morning.
What I do I begin hearing, though, is violin music. It starts to emanate from her room in the middle of the night—beautiful, ghostly music that creeps into my dreams like slim pale fingers. It starts and stops sometimes, repeating certain parts a few times in a row, so it’s clearly not a recording. When I wake up the next morning and remember, I’m surprised rather than angered. What is my sauce-stained, wine-chugging roommate doing playing something like this? It’s like what you might expect to find upon stealing out into a garden past midnight, where you’d end up surrounded by fairies, aglow in cool alien moonlight, grass springing damp under your feet.
The music isn’t loud enough to disturb my sleep; I only notice it when I awaken in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
And I hear it in my dreams.
A few days into this habit of late-night violin practice, I run into my roommate in the kitchen as we’re both getting ready for work. She’s preparing bagels, slicing them open with a steak knife as long as her forearm, slathering jam over their soft white insides. Her hair is tied up in a bun and a silver chain slinks around her neck, pooling in the gaps above her collarbones.
“I didn’t know you played violin,” I say to her, as I edge past to grab the teapot.
“Oh, yeah. I just started recently.” A modest tilt of her shoulder, a skittering-away of her eyes.
“No way. It’s so good. You just started?” It seems impossible. “Are you spending all day practicing, or something?”
“Of course not. I do go to work.” She sounds faintly amused. “Just a little here and there.”
I’m aware that my awe is creeping into the territory of obsequiousness, but I can’t stop myself from adding, “Any other hidden talents I’m not aware of?”
“Not at the moment.” But she says it with a little smile, a jewel glimmering in a crevice.
The next day she goes on another date. She doesn’t ask my opinion on her clothing before she leaves, but I know from her attitude when she comes back—blushing, giggling on the phone, love songs leaking from her computer speakers in the other room—that she’s got it bad for some guy. I smile to myself as I paint my fingernails to stop myself from texting my boyfriend. It’s always reassuring to see your personal obsessions echoed back to you in the lives of others; it makes your preoccupation with your own boyfriend, or girlfriend, or self, so much less embarrassing.
The nail-painting pays off; it so happens that my boyfriend texts me first tonight, inviting me to a performance at the Met. His friend Eli is headlining as one of the soloist singers, and asked my boyfriend and me to attend in order to support him. Support, my ass. Eli already has enough support from the crowds who’ve shown up—flying across the country, in some cases—to hear him perform. He bemoans the fame, saying he can hardly go to pick up his goat-cheese-and-spinach salads without someone encountering him, asking for a selfie or an autograph.
But my boyfriend gets nearly as much recognition. And he doesn’t go around flexing his voice either. He treats it as a gift that tumbled into his mouth from the universe, a rare intersection of genes and luck. He knows it’s not anything he earned; he was born with it, emerging from the womb with a pair of lungs as deep and powerful as church organs, filling the delivery room with gleaming shards of sound.
But he isn’t ashamed of it either. He’s sung to me before. And this never fails to make me tuck my chin into my shoulder, grinning my big pumpkin grin, my freckles melting into my flushing face. He can sing for a long time without stopping, his voice rising as warm and soft as a stretch of dark velvet, a lake of bottomless sound.
We attend the performance that night and I sleep over at his place. On the way home I catch him glancing at the disappearing back of a woman, and I wrench my hand away from his, a spike of anger coursing its way through my blood. A shadow going straight to my heart.
“What?” he says, grasping for my hand. I don’t answer him. Even a small glance like this reminds me of what happened before. Sure, he apologized over and over again, groveled on the floor until he had rough shreds of carpet sticking in his jeans like gravel in skin, and bought me a necklace worth more than his car, but even if it makes me a bitter person, I can’t forget.
Back at his place, we tumble together into bed. My skin is oily with perfume and I’m breathing in the scent of him: lemons and salt, like someone spilled acid into the sea.
I come home the next morning at six, long before I usually get up. I left my laptop here, meaning I can’t go to work this morning straight from my boyfriend’s place. So, making sure to close the door softly behind me, I creep into the apartment. The lights are all off, the dishwasher finished running, its DONE light blinking proudly in the windowless kitchen. But even in the dimness I see the stripes on the wall that separates my roommate’s bedroom from mine. There is something there—smears standing out, vivid against the pre-dawn light leaking in through the living room window. They’re a little over five feet off the ground, stretching from one doorframe almost to the other.
I picture my roommate coming home drunk, her hands stained with wine or lipstick. Staggering, running plum-purple fingers over the walls.
But these aren’t the chalky smears of lipstick, and not the watery traces of wine—if someone even managed to get enough wine on their fingers for that.
No, these streaks remind me of the mess in my underwear when I got my first period. Bright red drying quickly to maroon, smelling of copper wires and a handful of dirty change.
“What the fuck,” I say aloud. I keep my voice soft. The door to her room is closed. Silence lies over the apartment like a thick layer of dust. I consider leaving a bottle of Fantastik or some other cleaning agent next to her door, but decide it would be passive-aggressive. She’ll probably clean it up when she gets up.
❧
I come home that night to find my roommate dancing in the living room. She’s clad in a matte black leotard and whipping around in a pair of pointe shoes, her figure sending shadows snaking up the wall. Faint classical music is playing, something I’ve heard many times but can’t quite place. Tchaikovsky, maybe.
The air smells like paint, and the white chemical odor transports me back to art-school classrooms: the spaces I spent my youth in before realizing that the laudatory remarks of my friends and family were nothing more than politeness, and that my so-called talent would never earn me even a small amount of fame or money.
As soon as the door closes behind me, she starts, coming out of her pirouette and tumbling off of pointe. Her shoes clack on the floor, loud as the sound of erratic heartbeats. I glance past her; the stains are gone. The wall is shiny. “Did you paint?”
“Ah, yeah. I thought it needed another coat. I’m going to do the rest of the living room this week. It looks a little dull, kind of depressing. It’s been getting me down.” She throws her head back and collapses her spine, sprouting into an arabesque, the sinews in her arms taut like electric wires.
Since she didn’t mention the marks on the wall, I’m not going to bring them up.
“I hope you don’t mind me dancing,” she says, almost apologetically. “It’s just that there’s not enough space in my own room. I’m going to start at a studio soon, so you won’t have to hear me clomping around.”
“Yeah, it’s fine. In fact, I may stick around and watch you, if you don’t mind.”
She comes off of pointe and lowers her arms, her body folding straight and exact, like a creased piece of paper in the air. “I don’t mind at all. I love an audience.”
“I didn’t know you danced at all, actually.”
“Oh, I do. I started a long time ago but recently got back into it.”
“You’re creative lately. Maybe you should dance to, like, a recording of your own violin music.”
She looks like she’s about to laugh. “Oh, I don’t think so…I don’t know any of those dances.”
I watch her a moment longer, then turn to go to my room.
“By the way,” she calls after me. I look back to see her sinking into a low crouch on the ground, then raising her arms in the air. “I’m going on another date tonight, so I’ll be back late. Or late-ish, depending.” She gives me a conspiratorial smile.
“Wow,” I say. “You must really like him.”
“Yes,” she replies. “I do.” She aims the underside of her throat at me, white as the inside of a fish, sprinkled with gooseflesh.
That night, her violin music paints sonatas in my dreams, spinning silver ink across the insides of my mind.
❧
A few days later, I’m lying on my bed. My boyfriend has texted me a picture of a dog with extraordinarily short legs, which I spend some time gazing at longingly. Then I check the news. I shouldn’t have. The headlines scream out at me from the tab on my phone: The nation still recovering from the worst economic crash in a hundred years!!…Dan and Tessa divorcing AGAIN!!!…..Brilliant gymnast found dead!!!
I read about the economy for a while until my stomach is good and stonelike, and then I click onto the last story.
The famed gymnast Anton Oprokiev was found dead last night. He initially disappeared on Monday the 14th, and friends claim he was meeting someone that night. However, there is little hope of finding who this was, as Anton’s phone is still missing. He was 27.
I return home the next day to see a pair of long black loops laying on the floor, in the same spot where she was dancing earlier. A couple of wooden bars are set up on a platform, standing a couple of feet off the ground, glowing with the rough luminescence of scraped bones.
I can guess what they’re for. I have seen a few gymnastics programs on TV.
I want to get out of the apartment that night anyway. My roommate is making her weird egg dish again—as far as I can approximate, it’s an omelette with whatever leftovers happen to be in the refrigerator, with a generous scattering of spices—and taking slugs out of a bottle of wine. It’s not my wine, so I don’t mind really, but it’s not something I want to spend my evening watching and listening to: her scrawny back, the hiss of the pan, the sound of her scraping burned spices off the guts of it.
At my boyfriend’s house, we watch an old movie where everyone speaks in long, languorous voices and chain-smokes and call each other darling. He seems distracted, glancing towards the window whenever there’s a noise outside, but I don’t blame him; the movie is very slow.
Sitting there, I almost tell him about my roommate’s behavior. Almost—except he’s been condescending in the past. I remember the way he reacted a few months ago, when I told him I was worried about the white spot in my vision. Oh, you have another eye. It’s okay, you won’t go blind. How the hell would he know? It eventually went away, but he acted as though my fears were irrational. Since then I’ve avoided telling him any of them, lest he slap a hypochondriac or anxiety label on me.
I fall asleep, anyway, before I can tell him.
I wake next to my boyfriend, my mouth fuzzy and dry. The sky outside is stretched tight with anticipation; beneath it, the city is beginning to wake up.
I crawl into my clothes and gather up my things. I packed my laptop last night so I wouldn’t have to come back to my place to grab it before work. There’s a thought—so I wouldn’t have to. I wonder how much of the walls she’s painted over by now. If the whole place smells like paint by now.
After work, I call my boyfriend, asking if I can come straight back to his place that night. But he doesn’t answer. I trudge home in the gray twilight, my shoes rubbing against my feet like a nagging question asked over and over again. My roommate isn’t home when I get there, and I feel a faint wash of relief as I close the door to my room and sink into the mattress.
I seek solace in my phone, in the artwork that’s always inspired me. But my mood plummets even lower as I browse through painting after painting: women with glowing faces upturned to the moon, hungry landscapes bristling with teeth, men with bright owl eyes and slate-colored feathers arcing over their brows. It’s everything I wanted to do, everything I wanted to achieve. These paintings splattered across social media, accumulating renown and thousands of clicks and likes—they are of a standard that I could never reach. Only gaze at from below, mouth open, thoughts swarming like carrion birds.
Why weren’t my paintings good enough? I roll onto my back. The simplest answer, Occam’s Razor: because they were imitative, lacking originality or bite, like objects without shadows. They would never make anyone startle, gasp, peel away from themselves.
I call my boyfriend again, but he doesn’t reply. I’ve sent him a couple of texts since leaving work, but those, too, have gone unanswered. I try to forget the glance I saw him give to the woman walking on the street, how her figure was longer and slimmer than mine, her hair a dark sheet like glass.
I throw my phone aside in disgust. It lands beside me with no noise at all, and the thick bedspread swallows it up.
Later, once the frames on the wall no longer reflect the sunlight but instead glow silver in the streetlamps, my roommate comes home. I hear the door close behind her and a flick as she turns the light on. Probably wondering why it’s so dark. She starts clattering around, moving things in the kitchen.
The apartment at night is febrile, tense, noxious with the smell of something I can’t describe.
Where is he? I think. Where is he?
At that moment, my roommate begins to sing. There’s a wall between us, but I can still hear her clearly. Her voice is as warm and soft as a stretch of dark velvet, a lake of bottomless sound.
Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, HAD, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Monkeybicycle, Atticus Review, JMWW, and elsewhere. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2024). You can read more of her work at https://www.amydebellis.com.