This story is presented as part of this week’s New to Town issue.
The landlord opens the door to a tiny room. It radiates the possibility that I have been wrong about everything.
Every decision in my life has led me to this point, and I can’t believe what it looks like: The space is 10 feet by 9 feet 3 inches. This living room/dining room/office/bedroom/closet is 175 square feet total, according to my calculations.
A standard window lets in light, but it has a view of a wall, just waves of corrugated steel. A doorway leads to a small galley kitchen, where there’s a full-size fridge, a four-burner gas stove, and a sink with a mirrored medicine cabinet above it. I catch my own face in the mirror. I have a hard time looking at myself, here, in an apartment this teensy, at age 34. If I take this place, that mirror is going to have to come down.
What I’m most worried about are the shared toilet and shower. Three other tenants have access to them. The shower turns out to have hexagonal tiles and a curtain pinking with mold, much like any other old house. The toilet, with a separate entrance off the hallway, sits in a closet the size of an outhouse, so small that you can rest your head on the door from a seated position—or at least that’s what I surmise from the paint layers worn away there. A painting of flowers above the toilet only draws your eye to the ceiling, or what used to be the ceiling. Maybe it rotted away. The wallpaper flaps open under dark beams dripping with cobwebs, giving this closet with a toilet a murdery ambience.