Elizabeth, Who Lives Upstairs

Elizabeth, who lives upstairs, hasn’t been home in hours.

I alerted the super, and he told me that she travels.

I asked him what she does that requires her to travel.

He wouldn’t tell me.

It’s personal.

He flicks the last bit of a cuticle off his hand.

His sandwich smells of red onion and vinaigrette.

I feel queasy, even though I’m starving.

When I starve, I only want plastic straws, and everything else nauseates me.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” the super says, but the night before, I heard three quick whacks of a blunt object, and then what sounded like a person falling to the floor.

Waiting followed.

Waiting to hear someone else clean up the scene of the crime.

A door opening.

Water running.

A breathless phone call.

Nothing.

I got my stepladder and climbed up on it and touched the spot where I heard the body fall and stayed up there waiting to see if blood would come through the floor past my ceiling and into the palm of my hand.

But nothing.

After speaking to the super, I go upstairs and check under the doormat in front of Elizabeth’s door to see if she keeps a spare key there, but nothing except a grocery list.

Why would she keep a grocery list under her doormat?

From my bedroom window, the night of the murder, I saw someone in the window across the street and one floor up holding a pair of binoculars. When the body hit, I saw them recoil. It was hard to tell what they looked like, but I thought I saw a ponytail and a mustache. A cardigan and a bolero. A monocle and a bonnet like something on a giant baby. When I went to get my stepladder, I came back and found that the building across the street had disappeared.

Where did the witness go?

Was I the only witness now?

The grocery list includes six items--

Tuna

Tuna (Expensive)

Nacho chips

Mouthwash

Roasted Peanuts

Limes (2)

Why would you want two kinds of tuna separated by price?

Does Elizabeth have a cat?

And how do I know her name is Elizabeth?

I got her mail once.

I brought it upstairs.

It was a magazine.

One of the monthly ones that tells you how to better your life through soft curtains and teakwood candles and a seventy-eight dollar dish towel.

I slipped the magazine under her door with a post-it attached letting her know that a much more price-efficient teakwood candle can be purchased at the pharmacy two blocks over.

She never thanked me and I never met her.

This was the week my bathtub wound up in the living room. I couldn’t move it back, because my arms were in a locked drawer, and my assistant couldn’t bring the key to me due to her resignation from the position several years earlier.

The night after Elizabeth’s murder, I found several wildebeests marauding in my office and I explained to them that now was not the time, as I had to find a killer.

One of them offered to go upstairs and root around for a body or something proving that Elizabeth was no longer among the living, but you never send a wildebeest to do a Tasmanian devil’s job. 

Unfortunately, none were available to me at that moment.

That night, as I floated three feet above my bed, I looked out the window and saw a different sort of building where the building from the other night had been and this building was made of night and so it was composed of lamps and lampshades and burned out teakwood candles, but not the kind you can get at the pharmacy two blocks over.

In the window where the person with the binoculars was last night there was Elizabeth. Standing there, on all eighteen of her legs, shaking her head at me.

Why was I refusing to solve her murder?

I put on my best tuxedo and made my way upstairs where I found a jungle where Elizabeth’s apartment used to be. There was a lion and the lion was eating something. At first, I presume it was the body of my dear Elizabeth, who lives upstairs.

But upon further examination, I could see that it was merely tuna, and not the expensive kind.

After several weeks in the jungle that used-to-be-Elizabeth-who-lives-upstairs apartment, I determined that she had either been bludgeoned by an intruder or carried away by a cauldron of bats, perhaps even in a cauldron, but not necessarily.

When I returned to my own apartment, I found a family living there, most of them salamanders, but one was a human boy, who informed me that I hadn’t paid the rent and so the super had changed the locks.

“But then how did I get in?”

While I was gone, doors had been abolished. All entryways were now clear, and people came and went as they pleased, wherever it is they wished to go.

That was a lucky break for me as it meant I could stay in my old apartment. The salamanders let me sleep in an extra tank they kept in the living room, and the father salamander loaned me a typewriter so that I could write up my findings in the jungle. The lion I would leave out, as he had been falsely accused, but only privately, and by me.

The salamanders only stayed on in my old apartment until they could move into a nearby aquarium, at which point, my old apartment became my new apartment. The super wasn’t happy, as he had written me off for dead and stolen all my old clothing.

I told him he could keep everything, and I proceeded to only wear the tuxedo I had on for the rest of my days. The salamanders had taught me how to shed my formalwear every three days so that I could grow a new one, and I knew that if Elizabeth could see me, she’d be proud of how much I was able to remember about the night of her disappearance despite so many other things in the world changing so rapidly.

It’s important to remember those who can’t remember themselves.

Even if you can’t remember your grocery list.