Katherine Plumhoff
- Before Nico moved to this apartment
She spent two years in a children’s home, where the police sent her after she called them herself, and before that, she spent six years alone with her mom in a two-story house on the other side of town where nothing was thrown away after her dad left, not even bread ties. Those were kept in a marble box smooth as a river rock on the dresser that no longer held any chinos. The kitchen drawers were stuffed with glossy half-sheet circulars that foamed up like tides with offers for 2-for-1 jars of tomato puree, free fries with every kebab, 10% off a blowout, €200 off a rhinoplasty, we buy gold, we buy cars, we buy books, let your house smell like roast dinner and not wet dog this Christmas. The oven was unusable, full as it was with old receipts. The microwave stored empty packs of gum and chicken bouillon.
In her new apartment, it doesn’t bother her, what the people in her building carelessly toss and let tumble from their windows onto her ground-floor terrace: pastel plastic laundry clips, dog-chewed tennis balls, union pins, paper towel rolls, empty packs of cigarettes plastered with pictures of preemie babies curled under breathing tubes, cigarette butts, cigarette butts, cigarette butts.
She sweeps them up and throws them out.
- After Milagros gets a condolence call from the Spanish navy
She pulls a blouse from a cedar shelf on the pantry-turned-closet and drops it out her kitchen window. She drops tweed capes, square-necked blouses, linen suits, delicate veils, tassel-trimmed skirts, batiked shirts, silk crepe de chine pajamas printed with peacocks, fur coats and stoles. She drops thick wool jumpers and delicate paisley robes. She drops a falling fur and doesn’t see it smack the girl who lives on the ground floor right across the face.
- Now in the elevator
Nico’s arms are full of her neighbor’s dropped clothes. She feels trapped. She leans her forehead against the cool mirrored wall. She’s never understood the relationship people have to their things. It’s clear to her: keep what’s precious, cull what’s not.
When Nico last saw her mother’s closet, it was packed with old keyboards and used coffee cups.
Nico will tell her neighbor to be more careful, to keep her clothes pinned securely to the clothesline when she’s airing them out.
The door opens.
Nico is greeted by a large, dark-skinned woman in scrubs who tells Nico she just had to put her patient down for a nap. She says the woman’s son died. She says it’s best not to wake her.
The door closes.
On the way back down, Nico’s back is throbbing under the weight of the clothes. As she’s ferried downstairs, she thinks of her half-empty closet, her mom’s too-full house, the hangers she’d need if she was going to keep her neighbor’s beautiful fabrics, hangers her mom definitely has, filched from the dry cleaner for decades and stacked in tangled piles like ghost bikes in Nico’s old bedroom. Nico considers calling, telling her mom she struck gold at a neighborhood lost-and-found, asking her to come right away, to not forget the hangers.
The elevator thuds to the ground floor and Nico exits her building’s lobby. She hefts the clothes up one more time—they’re lighter now, like gravity’s glitched—and lobs them, effortlessly, into the wide gray maw of her favorite dumpster.
She waits to watch a stranger tie and chuck a bag before going back inside.
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Katherine Plumhoff writes short fiction. Find her stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, Cimarron Review, X-R-A-Y, The Forge, and Best Small Fictions, among other places. She lives in Valencia, Spain.