As he reached the end of the sentence, the typewriter went “ding,” but the man didn’t hear it.
There was a girl down the hall who did hear the typewriter. She also heard the beautiful, un-earthly music emanating from the walls. It had begun quite suddenly that last Tuesday. Beautiful melodies vibrating through her, chains of score with no logical explanation. No one seemed to know where it was coming from either. That was the trouble with living in an apartment complex full of deaf mutes.
The man reset his typewriter. The knocking on the woman’s door grew louder.
“I’m coming!” the girl said, putting out her cigarette. Ironic, she thought, that her apartment complex be so full of noise. How then would she be able to file a complaint? She could already hear the pitiless landlord in her defensive voice, “No one else seems to mind the noise,” she would say, then smirk and be on her way with the checks. She was kind of a bitch that way.
It was the man down the hall. She knew him only as the one with a chin mole, because people around here didn’t have names.
“What is it?” the girl said. She didn’t have a problem with being rude because no one could hear the inflections in her voice. The man held out his hand, revealing a perfect, sunshine colored lemon.
The girl frowned slightly.
“I don’t suppose you understand that I’m completely alone here. I don’t have money, I don’t have friends, I don’t even have my sanity. I give up.”
The girl rummaged under her backpack, into the folder holding an article about the ways in which lemon juice could battle addiction. It was what mole man had given her a week ago. That is where she kept her pack.
“Here,” she said, opening the man’s fist and pushing the cigarettes into his paper Mache fingers, taking the lemon for herself. “I don’t suppose you could tell me where all that music is coming from? Unless I really am just going crazy. Then again, I’ve just asked a mute deaf man a question about music.”
The man turned around and gave her an empty smile. Then he was on his way.
The girl bitterly began tearing pieces of peel from the lemon. She would eat the lemon, she decided, the whole thing. But first, she would bite into it, sucking out all the juice, so that maybe her taste buds could feel as sour as she felt on the inside.
To her displeasure, it was delicious. She ate the whole thing, and then the music stopped.
“It sounded like a full orchestra and a woman’s voice,” the girl wrote in a journal, which she had dug out from under her laundry. It was bent in the middle and the ink had run in several spots throughout. But she could still see her name etched across the cover in golden letters: Persephone K. Potts.
“Full strings, definitely some trumpets, and an eerie voice that gets louder when the music gets softer. It sounds like she is calling for someone.”
A door down the hall slammed. That was the signal that meant skinny tall girl had returned home. Skinny tall girl weighed, in Persephone’s estimation, about 100 pounds, stood at least 5”11 in height, and was also very angry.
Persephone had gathered as much by watching skinny tall girl bash her head against walls, throw food out the window, and shout swear words at passer bys.
“Something about her parents not wanting her from an early age and then going deaf from the abuse of foster parents,” the landlord had explained nonchalantly. Of course the landlord had seen so many of these types pass through the walls that the stories of each tenant had all mixed into a giant grocery bag of memories labeled “Neglected freaks.” Persephone had almost started her own grocery bag with the same label, until she had realized that she was one of them.
SPLAT! Persephone looked out her window. A giant cantaloupe was flying through the air. Sometimes, especially on nights like tonight, she hoped for the food throwing, because it meant that some of the remains could be salvaged from the streets below.
