Up the stairwell breathing in warm, dusty air, and the doors of the other apartments housed stories I would never know. Well, I say that, but some I was partial to as Meeko had a thing for talking at length to the other residents whenever she wasn’t at work. She would relay her findings to me over dinner, although I was sure she embellished a lot of what she heard. The partial stories I was privy to weren’t enough for me to make investigations of my own, but it was always interesting to hear about the lives of other people. I didn’t have much of an interest in the sordid side of life; it was the little things that did it for me, the small tidbits of information that had a habit of getting brushed under the carpet because they weren’t deemed salacious enough to whet the appetite of others. There was a woman on the ground floor—a thirty-something Taiwanese who Meeko enjoyed quizzing from time to time. The woman in question was once engaged, but the guy ran off with the woman’s cousin who had once been living with them. Now she didn’t trust men. She still dated them, but she didn’t trust them. Anyway, this woman, I can’t remember her name, she had a thing for stealing other people’s post. She’d devised a way of intercepting it, and although Meeko knew, she wouldn’t tell me how it was done. I think she thought I would try my hand at it myself, which in truth was something I would probably do. The reason she stole post wasn’t for personal gain, but because she intended to intercept incriminating letters exchanged between cheating lovers. She saw herself as a superhero of sorts; protecting the deceived from a form of pain she herself had been forced to endure. I told Meeko this wasn’t how it worked anymore; that the nature of adultery was now a virtual experience, and as such, love letters were a thing of the past. She agreed with me, but apparently, the Taiwanese woman believed otherwise. As I said, it wasn’t much of an anecdote compared to most you were likely to hear, but it was interesting to me, and Meeko too, for she would always go out of her way to ask the woman if she had found any evidence regarding unfaithful behaviour in the apartments. There hadn’t been, at least not yet.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US