apartment 7

Shannon Rao || Spring 2022

On the day the heater broke, they danced to Brandi Carlile on the wet tile floor after showering, feet slipping up against the base of the toilet and catching on the baseboards. It was mid-February, and the flurries leaked through the cracks of the windows, haunting the edges of the apartment. The edge of one of those late-season blizzards, and they had forgotten to twist the lock on the front door since returning from the gas station that morning.

Shilpa liked to sweep on Sunday mornings. When Winnifred had first moved in—onto the thick orange couch that now sat empty—she’d unpacked her suitcase on the floor, colonizing the rug. The next morning while Winnifred slept, Shilpa had taken each item of clothing and tucked it gently into the entertainment stand drawers. Winnifred awoke as Shilpa was laying out the rug across the floor, gray stripes smoothed out with fresh fervor. She stayed sprawled out on the sofa, keeping her laugh quiet enough to not disturb the sound of the vacuum.

Before all this, the apartment had been Shilpa’s alone. It was her first time living by herself, a one-bedroom—something she’d been waiting for ever since moving from the childhood mattress with her sisters to the cramped dorm room to windowless four-bedroom haunts in the city. She’d found it online that winter, jumped at the chance to rent it, and had moved in a week before her last lease was up. The rooms had soft, uneven floors and, if she left her bedroom door open, the sun shone across the apartment in the morning, the bars of the fire escape etched across her brick wall.

Winnifred was the one who saw the fires first. The first day, she watched them burning in the distance as she slept on the couch. The building sat above a valley, and she watched as the trees and then houses along the river below began to burn during the night. Sometimes, the wind brought the smoke in their direction. In the morning, they’d be gone, but when she went to the window there would be a layer of ash at the base.

In those days, Shilpa taught Winnifred to play all the card games that she hadn’t played since childhood. Winnifred taught Shilpa how to use the fire escape and tree branches to climb out onto the roof. They would sit up there after dinner and long days at work, laughing against the early sunsets and timeless nights. At first, it was just a catching of hands across the table. Then moments where Shilpa seemed to freeze as Winnifred melted. By the time that Winnifred kissed Shilpa, her clothes had already spilled from the living room and into the bedroom.

It was the electricity that stopped first. It must’ve stopped sometime between the morning and when Shilpa went to use the microwave that evening, but neither of them could pinpoint the moment. They ran over the day in their head, how they hadn’t been using any lights except the battery powered stand hanging above the bed, unable to pinpoint the last moment one of them might’ve flipped on the bathroom lightswitch or checked to see if a computer was charging. That night, they turned off all the phones and computers, laid them beneath Shilpa’s pants in a dresser drawer.

“Don’t you think we should save them, to keep an eye on the news?” Shilpa had asked, and Winnifred had agreed, so they drew out a schedule to mark their own days.

“We’ll check on Sundays,” Winnifred had suggested, “that way we’ll have something to make us keep track.” Work, so long a pressing concern, had become instantly irrelevant.

“I used to wish for time like this.” Shilpa didn’t know how to go on, so she just laid her head on Winnifred’s lap. The sun turned the windows blue to gold to deep shades of grey.

“Maybe it still be worth wishing for,” Winnifred answered.

There was a strange kind of luck in their place on the hill. Below them, the valley continued to burn. The river was no longer a thin space between trees but a thin stream flanked by flames. Winnifred wondered if the ice was melting. Shilpa hung a blanket over the window to block out the light from the fire at night, but sometimes it fell, an eerie curtain exposing the spectacle beyond.

“Do you think we should try to go somewhere, Win?” Shilpa asked one Sunday. They’d stuck to opening one phone for a few minutes each week, but the Internet was long gone. Sometimes, there would be a missed call sitting in the notifications, a POTENTIAL SPAM alert beside it.

Winnifred shook her head. Outside, the air looked hazy. The trees of the valley had shifted from a burning to a smolder, with the arrival of a winter storm, but the mingling of ash and snow only seemed more ominous. They were running out of food. Shilpa stacked cans of tuna and rejected boxes of pasta on the table to inventory.

On the day that they finally decided to go to the gas station, the snow had turned into ice. Winnifred had drawn up a plan that morning. “You’re having too much fun with this,” Shilpa had told her.

“And what else is there to do?” Winnifred asked. “We might as well enjoy the adventure while we’ve got it.”

Shilpa preferred the nights the curtain over the window held and she could pretend the alarm would go off in the morning and wake her for work. She could barely get her arms to relax, even as Winnifred’s limbs spread further into her side of the bed, pressing her into the wall. When she did sleep, she dreamt she was walking the aisles of a grocery store, boxes aligned neatly on the shelves and music shuddering.

The door to the gas station was propped open with a brick. A sweet rancid smell had descended on the store from the coolers in the back. Rummaging through the shelves revealed opened packaging and toppled cans. Winnifred filled the grocery bags frivolously, squinting at the labels in the dim light provided by the glass door. Shilpa clung to Winnifred’s arm, eyes darting between shelves. The shadows everywhere seemed to distort, and it wasn’t until they finally heaved themselves through the door that Shilpa’s shoulders relaxed from their hunched position against her neck.

It was a few hours before they really noticed that the heat had stopped. Winnifred reached out a hand to warm it in front of the heater, and it was only when she realized she could touch the metal that she realized something was wrong. The apartment still held onto some warmth, and they cast aside the wet snowy clothes.

“Should we try the water?” Winnifred suggested, detaching herself from the couch and turning on the sink. “It’s warm!”

Shilpa ran to join her and they let it run across their hands.

Drying her hands on the kitchen towel, Winnifred walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea, Win?” Shilpa asked, drying her own hands and going to stand in the doorway.

“What do you mean?”

Shilpa could feel the steam from the water already warming the room. “It’s just I’d always read about how water makes frostbite worse.”

“Well,” Winnifred answered, “maybe just to warm up once it’s worth it.”

Shilpa nodded tentatively. After all, the mirror was beginning to fog, and the bathroom was already warmer than any other room in the apartment.

It was only after they were shivering in the quickly cooling air of the bathroom that they realized they hadn’t grabbed the towels. Shilpa dried off with a t-shirt before padding down the hall to the bedroom for the towels off the back of the door. She stopped by the dresser and pulled out her phone, carrying it with her back to the bathroom.

“It’s freezing,” Winnifred said, wrapping herself in a towel.

Shilpa reached for the phone and turned it on.

“Is it Sunday already?”

She shook her head. “Here,” Shilpa offered, letting the music wash over them. “We’ll dance until we’re warm.”

The tile floors were still damp, but Winnifred let Shilpa reach for her hands and spin her around. Through the window, new flurries were covering up the darkened ice. If you squinted, you could imagine the view on a holiday card.

“See,” Shilpa offered as Winnifred began to shiver less, laughing as she stumbled, “it’s working.”