Clouds pulsate outward like water torpedoes. Sometimes the clouds sweep so far and thick across the sky that they become sort of inverted: the blueness embraces the role of clouds, sneaking through gaps in the white. Below, a few from my Notes app, looking like a writing 101 class prompt: Whenever I can, I make short notes on cloud formations. By then, it will be the only indication I lived here at all. I like to envision a future tenant noticing it everywhere, spilling inward, onto the floors.
Some brands claim the product can last a century, though I don’t understand how anyone could know that for sure. Tonight, after another trip to the hardware store, I read that expanding foam retains its form for 80 years. I bought more cans of foam, and late at night I filled holes that weren’t really holes yet, chasing three-inch ghosts in a trance. For a while, I was hyperaware of my apartment’s sounds: the hum of the refrigerator, a creaking wall.
My ears are attuned to the patter of their footsteps and to furious, faint scratchings at the new foam blockages. In its final form, it recalled Erwin Wurm’s tubby Fat Cars.Įven after physical evidence of mice stopped appearing, I heard them constantly. The substance spurted out like whipped cream, before expanding and hardening. Along the cracks between the floorboards and walls, and in the interior corners of the heater units, the exterminator sprayed polyurethane foam from cool metal cans. They padded the walls first-gaps between the oven and the kitchen counter-stuffing them with steel wool pads that had been chopped in half. Eventually, after multiple appeals-and only when a corpse showed up in the kitchen sink-my landlord agreed to pay for an exterminator. One female, I learned, can have between five and 10 litters per year, each averaging six to eight babies. Sticky traps were laid first, topped with globs of peanut butter, then plastic traps were loaded with a sugar mixture prepared by my landlord’s family. They’re framed as a rite of passage, likely by necessity, packaged with other small miseries like clanking pipes and bar fridges. Rodent infestations are not unusual in Manhattan, especially in buildings adjoining construction sites (mine). Each time, I noticed fresh pellets of shit. I began to spend evenings at my boyfriend’s place, returning every few days to switch clothes and wipe the kitchen counter. I would write cross-legged on the couch, avoiding contact with the ground. I stopped throwing extra pillows on the floor at night. They entered by squeezing through wall cavities I could not see-holes lodged somewhere deep within the heating vents that sat below my home’s windowsills-a blur of fur across floorboards.
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