The ceiling was creaking again.
Not a polite, occasional groan. No, this was the full haunted-house symphony: a long, rolling scrape, followed by a heavy thud that rattled the cracked light fixture over my bed.
I blinked at the glowing red numbers of my alarm clock. 6:12 a.m. I had been asleep for exactly… I did the math with the sluggishness of someone who’d worked a twelve-hour night shift. Three hours. Three glorious, irreplaceable hours.
Another thud. Something clattered. Was he bowling up there? Training elephants? Rearranging a corpse collection?
“Unbelievable,” I muttered, pushing the thin blanket aside. The February air needled my bare legs. My apartment, like the rest of the building, believed central heating was more of a suggestion than a responsibility.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A delivery notification lit up the screen.
Your GroMart order has been delivered. Enjoy!
It was the only good thing about payday: the one big grocery order that meant I wouldn’t be living on stale crackers and hospital vending machine peanuts. I pictured bags of fresh produce, bread that wasn’t off-brand white bricks, actual vegetables that hadn’t been drowned in cafeteria sauce.
The thought got me moving. I shoved my hair into some semblance of a bun, threw on an oversized sweatshirt over my sleep shorts, and slipped my feet into mismatched socks. I grabbed my keys and trudged to the door.
A draft slid through the hallway, carrying the familiar smells of the building: Mrs. Alvarez’s perpetual simmering onion-and-garlic base from 2B, old wood, the faint sweetness of someone’s fabric softener. Comforting, lived-in. Home, in a frayed, hanging-on-by-a-thread kind of way.
But when I opened my door, the doormat was empty.
No brown paper bags. No groceries. Just the chipped green paint of the opposite apartment and the stain near the elevator no one wanted to discuss.
I stared at the bare floor as if I could will my groceries into existence. The notification blinked up at me from my phone, mocking.
“Delivered where?” I snapped at it, because sleep deprivation makes you brave and stupid.
Down the hall, a door opened. Mr. Chang from 4F shuffled out in his slippers, nodding at me. “Morning, Nurse Chloe.” His English was thick with accent, his kindness even thicker.
“Morning,” I managed, trying not to sound like a woman on the verge of a public meltdown over missing carbohydrates. “Did you… see any delivery guy?”
He shook his head. “No. Maybe downstairs?”
Maybe. Or maybe—
Above my head, another heavy thump, closer to the wall this time. I followed the line of sound with narrowed eyes.
My upstairs neighbor.
The mysterious fourth-floor hurricane who had moved in two weeks ago and immediately turned his apartment into a percussion instrument at all hours of the night. I’d never seen more than a blur of him through the stairwell window—tall, hood up, carrying what looked like his whole life in mismatched duffel bags.
I’d complained about the noise once, through the thin ceiling, because confrontation with actual human beings was risky, and walls didn’t talk back.
“Some of us work nights!” I’d shouted upwards after a particularly vicious midnight dragging-of-something-heavy.
He’d shouted back, “Sorry!” in a voice that had sounded half-asleep and totally not sorry.
Now my grocery order had mysteriously vanished from in front of my door. My phone still said delivered. The timing was suspicious.
