The Door Between Us, by Mieko Kawakami

This is the sixth story in this summer's online Flash Fiction series. Read the full series and our Flash Fiction stories from previous years here.

My apartment is in an old wooden building, built I don’t know how many years ago, a single story, with two separate units, side by side, wedged between dilapidated houses that no one lives in anymore. Imagine three old shacks that would have already fallen down if they didn’t support each other, and you’ll get the idea. My living space consists of a tatami room, a tiny kitchen with a single burner, a leaky shower. There’s no storage. In the back, the space for drying clothes is almost entirely taken up by the air conditioning, and I feel like the wall of the house behind me is closing in.

There was already a woman living in the apartment next to mine when I moved in, but the real estate agent wouldn’t give me her name, and her apartment sign was blank and yellowed by the sun, and we’d never spoken. She was plump, with long, shaggy hair, always wore the same clothes, and, without being judgmental, let’s just say she wasn’t exactly organized or clean. No one came to visit her. Every time I saw her, something in her slumped posture told me that she was either apathetic about life, or exhausted, or had given up, or maybe all of the above.

She had a tic. When she locked her door on her way out, she couldn’t help but shake the handle, over and over again, unable to accept that it was locked. The noise was so violent that, the first time I heard it, I thought someone scary had come to collect a loan, but it was just her. Every time she left the house, she would almost rip the door off its hinges, and all of this movement left visible cracks in the wall between her door and mine. But I have to say, I understand how she felt. When I was younger, I went through a period where I washed my hands so much that the bar of soap practically disappeared in my palms.

Sometimes I would press my ear to the wall between us.

There were days when I could hear the television in the background, but never any of the other noises one might expect. Our bedrooms were mirror images of each other (or so I had gathered from the real estate agency), separated by a thin wall, and sometimes, for example, when I was doing the dishes, I would find myself wondering if she was doing the same thing at that very moment, on the other side of the wall but facing me, out of sight. So when I felt as if life was folding in on itself, I was often struck by the disconcerting fact that my nearest neighbor was a woman whose name I didn’t even know. On the way home from my part-time job, I would sometimes look up from the gray, dead road that stretched into the distance and see our two crumbling doors, bathed in flames by the setting sun, and think that we were twins, both of us, old and alone, side by side. When one door, unable to withstand so much, was finally consumed by the fire, how would the other survive? Something about those feelings demanded to be shared. I imagined myself knocking on his door, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to express myself properly, which made me wish that I could communicate by knocking. To tell him that life had never turned out the way I wanted it to. That I could never get things right. That I had been unable to save the person who meant everything to me. And, most of all, how overwhelmed I was by all the feelings that were pouring out of me. If only I could have told him.

In the spring, night falls before the world becomes too blue to bear. The day I left my part-time job, as I was walking home with thoughts of my age, of the next job I would get, of the money I should make before I die, I saw the woman standing by the door.

Since she didn’t pull the doorknob, she had probably just come home. I’d lived there for four years at that point, but this was the closest we’d ever been to each other without a wall between us. Then a smell pricked my nose, a smell that suggested she hadn’t washed in a long time. Anxious, I nodded my head in greeting. She nodded back. In the two seconds we looked at each other, I noticed that the skin around her eyes was dark and damp. When did it start raining? I thought, utterly confused. But then I looked up at the sky. It wasn’t raining. She was crying. Her greasy hair was plastered to her wrinkled forehead, and the worried emotion she held in her sagging cheeks was etched into my memory. Words came to mind, but I couldn't speak them, much less form a sentence. As horrible as I felt, I had to leave; it was as if someone was pushing me out of my way. Fumbling with my keys, I managed to unlock my door and get in. For several seconds, I peered through the peephole, but I couldn't tell if she was there.

After that, I couldn’t relax. The night dragged on, I pressed my ear to the wall several times. But I heard nothing, felt nothing coming from the other side. I drank water, lay down on my futon, watched TV from time to time, in a vain attempt to distract myself, but this persistent feeling of unease was growing, growing stronger. I pressed my ear to the wall again, but I heard nothing. Why couldn’t I tell her something? The woman was crying. I could have at least given her one of the pork buns from my shopping bag. She was crying. A dark thought crossed my mind: I might be the last person to see her. Then I thought of my own mother, the last time I saw her, and my fingers touched my throat. But people don’t just leave, not just like that. It takes time, a lot of time, for all the parts of them that you kept inside you to disappear. However, as they shrink, the other parts of you become larger and, at some point, everything you had before disappears.

I pulled my ear away from the wall and clenched my fist. My pulse quickened. Then I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself, and saw his door materialize before my eyes, there, on the dirty wall between the two apartments.

I knocked on the door, right in the middle, slowly, twice. Knock, knock, then pause before doing it again. Two more knocks, this time a little louder. Still no answer. Same as before.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.newyorker.com/books/flash-fiction/the-door-between-us The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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