Audrey lay in the bath with her knees drawn to her chest, water grazing the underside of her chin. Evening had settled. The room had fallen into a tender hush, the only illumination coming from the streetlights that filtered through the blinds, cutting her pale skin into latticework. Her breath suspended just beneath the surface, carefully disciplined, steadily reined. Every inhale pulled in quiet resolve. Every exhale dared her to sink lower.
She’d lived in the apartment for only twenty-six days, long enough to stop noticing the burnt bulb in the kitchen, short enough that none of the rooms had learned her scent. The tile still smelled like cleaning fluid. The furniture had come with the lease. A gray loveseat leaned against the far wall like a sulking stranger. The mirror over the sink bore a faint smear of old toothpaste, belonging to someone whose name she’d never learn.
Her phone lay on the closed toilet lid, face down, its notifications disabled. She’d timed the first submersion to the length of a single track from an album she used to play in the kitchen with Benji in the early days of their marriage. There’d been drums under her skin then, a rhythm in her collarbones. Her fingers had always tapped along without thinking. Now she measured time by silence. She slid beneath the water, limbs folding inward like wings.
Beneath the surface, sound became a feeling. The city moved through her in vibrations rather than noise, its pulse carried in the plumbing and the plaster. Pipes clanged three floors up. A television murmured from the opposite wall, its voices flattened by drywall and distance. The man next door coughed, a brittle, sustained effort that seemed to begin in his stomach before dragging upward. She had already passed the two-minute mark when she started counting the seconds between each one. Five followed the first. Seven followed the next. Then nine. The spacing began to resemble something practiced, a kind of private rhythm that shaped the silence between bursts.
She came up cleanly, the water trailing from her lashes in threads as the quiet held its shape around her.
A crack split the ceiling in an uneven line. She watched it until her vision lost focus, then leaned back, her head meeting the edge of the tub with steady pressure. The porcelain cooled her scalp. She spoke Benji’s name once, let the syllables dissolve in her throat. Nothing in the room moved.
Across the courtyard, a window glowed gold. Blinds shifted. A figure lingered, half-shadowed, half-asleep. Audrey reached for the towel, rose with measured grace, and let the air engulf her. Her body had forgotten affection, but she hadn’t forgotten how to perform it. She wrapped the towel around her slowly, allowing the movement to follow the gaze she imagined meeting hers. There was comfort in the choreography, a kind of recognition she hadn’t known she missed. The awareness thrilled her, proof she could still command attention.
When the figure retreated behind the blinds and the window darkened, she smiled faintly, her lips curving with light as the city exhaled, and with it, so did she.
The cough came again, shorter this time, followed by another that caught at the end and stayed there. She leaned back into the bath. The water welcomed her as though it had been waiting.
Audrey sank beneath the surface again. Her body curved along the porcelain, arms folded inward, mouth sealed tight. The breath she’d drawn beforehand filled her with something steadier than courage. Time thinned beneath the water. Her limbs slackened, thoughts scattered. The tub cradled her like a bed left unmade, something that remembered every body it had held.
She rose without gasping, water sliding down her neck as her hair clung to her temples, and when she blinked, she reached for the edge and gripped it while the world reassembled itself.
The man next door coughed again, a pattern with a short burst that pulled longer, never landing evenly. The sound arrived through the drywall with a brittle persistence, the kind that refused to fade into background. She closed her eyes and pictured James from the hallway. He usually wore slippers and carried his keys in a worn leather pouch that bumped against his thigh when he walked. He nodded when they passed each other near the laundry machines but rarely spoke. She liked him for that. His silences felt chosen, not imposed.
She’d given him several histories. One had him divorced twice and quietly devoted to crossword puzzles. Another turned him into a former radio host who’d lost his voice in an accident involving fire. She’d once imagined him as a semi-retired piano tuner who’d learned Morse code for a woman who never arrived. She never wrote these stories down. They lived in her body, stitched into the quiet between interactions.
Steam clung to the mirror. She wiped it with her wrist, then stared. The woman in the glass looked like someone recently thawed. Her skin carried the mottled blush of hot water. Her eyes had gone glassy from holding breath. She touched her lips and felt nothing unusual, though something had shifted behind them.
She pulled on a long shirt and stepped barefoot into the main room. The towel trailed behind her like something surrendered. She passed the small table near the kitchenette and caught sight of a cup she hadn’t washed. It held the remnants of broth she’d made two nights ago. She lifted it, dumped it in the sink, and rinsed it without soap.
The room felt unchanged, but she knew better as her breath had begun to slow. Her chest no longer felt packed with wire; her feet made no sound against the floor.
She paused near the window. Across the courtyard, the blinds still hung open. The man she’d seen earlier hadn’t returned yet, although hours had passed. She placed a palm against the glass, then let it fall. Her reflection didn’t interest her tonight.
Behind her, James coughed again. She counted the seconds until the next one and mouthed the opening line of a song she hadn’t heard since college. The melody returned in fragments between coughs, no clearer than memory, but steadier than silence. She whispered each word as if they belonged to someone else.
She tilted toward the tub and filled it again.
Audrey reclined into the heat with her chin lifted and her mouth closed tight. Her ears submerged first, then her hair, then the last crescent of cheekbone, until the water sealed her in its hush. The pressure mounted slowly, each second spooling into the tight hollows of her chest. Her spine arched against the porcelain, and her legs shifted to lengthen, calves brushing slick tile, toes grazing the faucet with a tenderness that felt earned. Beneath the surface, her heartbeat staggered, then steadied. The ache in her lungs was almost lovely.
She held.
Held again.
When she rose, the silence split cleanly, as though her breath had cracked glass. Her eyes blinked hard, scattering beads of water. Her lips parted with a soundless gasp that she refused to voice. She touched her throat to find it still intact.
The building answered with stillness. Somewhere above, a door closed with careful precision. Pipes groaned. A chair scraped a floor. She’d begun to recognize the unique vocabulary of every neighbor. The couple in 4B fought with sharp vowels. The man above her played piano with the sorrow of someone who hated every note. James coughed in minor keys with the regularity of a metronome left on overnight.
She leaned against the cold ceramic wall and listened. His cough had shifted. What once came in triplets now arrived in disordered pairs. She imagined him sitting in his kitchen with a blanket over his lap, head bent toward the radio, hands around a chipped mug. The floor between them might as well have been paper. Every sound rose unfiltered. She would’ve recognized his breath if he’d whispered.
Outside of their laundry room interactions, he’d spoken to her three times since she moved in. Once in the elevator, twice in the lobby. He always wore socks inside his sandals and looked directly into her face with a gaze that contained no expectation. She appreciated the economy of his presence. When he nodded, he did it slowly, like punctuation.
She stood and wrapped herself in the towel that clung to her tightly, the fabric stiff with old detergent. She pressed her palm to the mirror until her print appeared. The fog broke where her skin met the glass. She wrote nothing. She stared at the shape she’d left and walked away.
In the kitchen, she poured a glass of water and drank until her stomach pulled tight beneath her ribs. When she opened the fridge, the light flickered and settled. A container of spinach had gone dark around the edges. She threw it out, rinsed the container, and stacked it neatly in the drying rack.
Then she returned to the window. Across the courtyard, the man had reappeared. His blinds hung open. He looked up, then looked away. She stayed for another full minute, then turned off the light.
The fourth bath would come soon. She wanted silence first.
By the time the water cooled again, Audrey’s body had begun to recognize the bath as something more than temporary reprieve. Her muscles, softened by heat, responded without hesitation, guiding her down into the basin with a certain grace. She settled along the curve of porcelain until her ears dipped beneath the surface, her jaw clenched, her eyes open to the ceiling light above, blurred now by the film of steam.
The building had fallen into its late night rhythm after midnight. The couple above her had turned off their television; she’d tracked the moment when the laughter ended and the silence turned full. Someone two floors below boiled water too long, leaving a kettle to whistle until its scream flattened. From James’s unit, no music played, but she imagined he’d turned on the radio again, something classical, something heavy with strings and minor chords.
She held the breath she’d taken as though it belonged to someone else. Her body resisted, then obeyed, then trembled at the edges. She didn’t close her eyes. She’d learned early that darkness under the surface made time scatter. Instead, she let the water distort the corners of the ceiling, waiting for the shape of her will to emerge. Her hands floated near her knees. She hadn’t intended to break her record, though some part of her had already decided the attempt mattered.
Rising slowly, she let the air return on its own terms. One hand wiped her face with the practiced motion of someone used to disappearing. Her eyes stayed open long enough to adjust, then she turned toward the wall where James had begun coughing again.
She reached for the towel and pressed it to her chest. Her reflection in the mirror had nearly vanished in the fog, but a faint outline remained, a halo of condensation surrounding her silhouette like the edge of a dream still in reach.
In the kitchen, the tiles gripped the soles of her feet with a chill. She opened the cupboard with no appetite, only the need to complete a gesture. The cereal box felt weightless in her hand. She poured a few flakes into a bowl and ate without milk, letting each one soften against her tongue before swallowing.
Across the courtyard, light spilled from one window. The man who’d watched her earlier had returned to his usual corner. His figure leaned toward the glow of the screen, unmoving. She didn’t look away, though she didn’t offer him the ritual again either. Tonight, the performance had already done its work.
She faced the room again. Steam no longer rose from the tub, yet the air clung as if something still unfolding had been left unfinished. She refilled it one last time, water rushing in with the promise of something final.
This time, she would go deeper. This time, she would stay longer.
Audrey entered the water with the composure of someone who’d rehearsed disappearance to the point of ritual. Beneath the water, the world rearranged itself into pressure and rhythm, her heart a submerged metronome, steady enough to carry her deeper.
Though her skin registered the waning heat, and her lungs began their quiet protest, neither sensation seemed urgent while her mind hovered in that liminal space where thought ceased to matter and the body, stripped of narrative, floated free of time. She focused on the weight in her chest, letting it teach her where the threshold might begin. When the pressure sharpened, she rose with determination, her mouth parting only after her head cleared the water’s surface, her first breath shaped by a quiet conviction she hadn’t felt since before the divorce took hold of her voice.
The towel, stiffened by earlier use, offered no comfort as she wrapped it around her, yet her hands remained steady while she adjusted it, and her legs, now steadied, carried her across the cool tile with the kind of balance that came only after surrender. At the edge of the hallway, she paused with her fingers on the wall to feel the seam between drywall and paint, a fault line that reminded her of the way cities shifted beneath buildings.
From beyond the bathroom wall came the sound of fabric moving across a rigid surface, followed by the low creak of something wooden bearing weight, and she recognized James’s presence without needing confirmation, his patterns familiar enough now that she could place him within a few feet, even without light or direct contact. She imagined him standing by the window, as she’d done earlier, one hand at the curtain, the other tucked into a pocket, his cough held back by the same impulse that had kept her quiet for weeks.
In the kitchen, she reached for the glass she’d left beside the sink and filled it again, the stream of water flowing with a rhythm she didn’t try to control, and when she drank, she didn’t stop until the cold reached her chest and settled there sharply.
When she stood at the window again, the blinds across the courtyard had fallen halfway, tilted just enough to suggest uncertainty rather than closure. She allowed the image to linger for a moment, then turned toward the door.
Her hand reached for the handle.
Her body had already made the decision.
Audrey drained the water with her foot pressed to the side of the tub, her weight shifting only slightly as the sound of the water thinned. She stood for a moment after the last of it circled away, her body carrying the imprint of heat, the towel gathered and wrung once before she folded it and placed it neatly over the edge of the sink. The mirror, still covered in condensation, reflected nothing more than the outline of her shoulder as she reached for the sweater hanging from the back of the door, its fabric stretched slightly at the collar from long disuse. She pulled it over her head without adjusting the sleeves and stepped out of the bathroom with the hallway light catching the side of her neck.
The air in the kitchen had cooled. She passed her hand along the countertop, her fingertips catching on the edge of the cutting board she hadn’t used since moving in. One cupboard remained open by an inch. She closed it with the back of her wrist. At the sink, she turned on the tap, rinsed the glass from earlier, and set it upright to dry beside the dish she’d already placed there, the two now aligned. The refrigerator emitted a brief hum that faded before she crossed to the other side of the room. She paused at the window, not to look out, but to draw the curtain with one motion, the fabric folding in on itself and holding the shape.
She walked to the small drawer beneath the counter, opened it, and slid the unopened envelopes into the space where the appliance manuals had been stacked by the previous tenant. She didn’t sort them. She closed the drawer and ran her palm once across the surface before turning toward the door.
She placed her hand on the knob, turned it gently, and stepped into the hallway without adjusting the collar of the sweater. Her other hand rested briefly against the frame as the latch clicked behind her. She didn’t reach for the light switch. Her feet moved across the rug in even rhythm, each step absorbed by the fibers flattened by years of use. A breeze rose from the stairwell, brushing past her knees and carrying the scent of something metallic and faintly bitter. She didn’t react to the sound of movement above her. She continued forward without lifting her gaze toward the ceiling.
The door to James’s apartment stood closed at the end of the corridor. The light above it flickered once, then steadied. She had already settled on her decision. Out of want. The kind that recognized itself in another's quiet need.
The sweater clung to her damp skin, a warmth still pooled beneath her ribs.
She raised her hand, curled her fingers once against the wood, and knocked with a sound firm enough to carry through.
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Ceremony
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