Caughtbetwe enarockanda heartattack

text

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Welp, I’ve found things to read on the plane.
Go see this movie.  It has these beautiful people doing things.

(Especially that bottom one.  Oh my god.)

text

Seventeen Reasons Against : Part I

           Fara and Margot, at age nine, had fantasized about living at the Plaza hotel.  The last week of that summer, their father rented two suites for the family, and their au pair.  Fara decided the hotel to be too tall, and Margot insisted that the elevator operator kept coming into the girls’ suite at night.

            After his release, it was found that Aldo would lose near forty percent of his lung capacity, due to a misdiagnosis of a spreading infection.  Several in-the-know attorneys had, upon catching wind of this, telephoned him, and visited his place of work, as a recent government contract had opened all employee information to any inquiring public eyes.

            Aldo, however, had elected to take an undisclosed amount of days at home, for rest.  During that time, Fara made frequent visits, she being in the process of moving between her largely vacant shared apartment with Domino, and her childhood home.

            That was how she met Edward Adam Stoney, Esq, and his dog: Theodore, whose father was a pug with a salty demeanor and mother was an overweight beagle that was embarrassingly stupid. 

            Aldo lived in a tall, oldish building with nice views of older buildings.  It had a gated courtyard in the front that required a key or a tenant to buzz through.  Mister Stoney, Esq. had neither; Fara had both.  When she stepped to the gate, snaking the key from her clutch, and holding a bagged lunch of venison goulash and sourdough, he pulled Theodore’s leash back and scooped him up on one lumbering motion in a ham-hock of an arm.  He wore a very dark brown suit, and it hung like burlap with a sheen of gelatinous sweat caked into its creases and bulges.  There were stray wisps of cloudy hair stretched across his head, and he wore glasses with thick plastic rims and visible stubble.

            “Ma’am, do you know Aldo Moore?”  He had a voice like he was chewing on something acidic.

            “I do.”  She said something mean about him in a corner of her mind.

            He stuck out a pudgy stub of a hand, and she grasped it, leaving the key in the gate.  “Edward Stoney, wonderful to make your acquaintance.  Are you going up to see Mister Moore?”

            “I am.  Is he expecting you?”

            “He should be, ma’am.  You see, I left a call on his machine when I heard about his accident.”  He made a choked belching kind of noise, and wiped a bead of sweat from his upper lip.  Theodore dangled limply in his arm, and stared at the redhead.  “I’m an attorney, you see?  I have to imagine that Mister Moore is distraught at the news that he was so improperly treated during his recent hospital visit, and I thought would benefit from legal counsel for any compensatory steps he would want to take.”

            She stuck out a fist and let the dog lick at her fingers curiously.  He had a scrunched up face that vaguely matched its owner’s.  “I…really like your dog.  What’s his name?”

            “Theodore,” he barked.  “Hell of a dog.  Once saved me from an electrical fire.”  He began to recount the story of his dog’s heroism as she opened the gate, sticking the key back into her clutch.  As he finished, they she pulled open the wrought-iron gate to the elevator, and they both stepped out onto Aldo’s floor, which only had four units, instead of six. 

            Two had been combined for a well-to-do family in the early seventies who converted one of the two bedrooms into a nursery, and the other into a study.

            A third, 17A had been locked shut and entirely written off by the building’s owners in late 1981, after a series of unfortunate accidents.  Not long after the building was completed, the unit’s first resident, the widow of a theatre mogul, burnt nearly half of the unit cooking a Christmas ham.  In November 1963, a piano that had been delivered to the apartment months earlier rolled from its stops and buckled through a wall, collapsing a portion of the floor into the apartment below.  On February 22, 1974, the apartment burned again, an unnoticed gas leak igniting along with a celebratory cigar during a well-attended retirement party.  In March 1981, a handyman punctured a pipe while installing a new water heater, and flooded the apartment in its entirety, again severely damaging the unit below. 

            Apart from these accidents, residents had also almost all made mention of the following odd occurrences while living in the unit: an unusually high number of birds hitting the window, milk and other dairy products souring far before their expiration dates, digital clocks switching between AM and PM settings at random, and round wire hangers often found bent to sharper angles after being left unattended for a number of days.

            Upon receiving an estimate as to how much renovating the unit would cost once more, the building’s owners calculated that they had actually taken a net loss on the unit for nearly the past twenty years, having had to reimburse contracts and lease at a discounted rate.  As such, they stripped the apartment of all furnishings, drywall, insulation, and copper wiring, to avoid any more fires, or the growth of mold.  It was stripped to concrete, rebar, and a handful of discarded construction materials, and, on December 21, 1981, the door was locked from the outside.

            Fara, after first hearing the story about this unit from Aldo, absolutely hated it, and avoided even looking at it when leaving the elevator.  Aldo lived in 17C, which was adjacent to the closed unit.  He only gave it passing thought when he was in either the dining room, or the pantry, which both shared a wall with 17A.

Tags: /rebar