No one had lived there for two or three years, the landlady said. But her placenta was buried in the front yard, under a slow-dying fig tree, and the baby who was once attached to the landlady through the placenta was born in the bathtub. The landlady was skinny and arguably brunette, the kind of Portland white lady that didn’t dye her hair once it began to gray. She wore clogs, and clopped around the house giving them the tour.
Liz, barely a whisper behind Nim’s shoulder, breathed, “Like a horse,” into their ear.
The last people who lived here were Reed students, too. The landlady, Claudia, called them rowdy, noisy kids who’d trashed the place. Claudia said their names, which were all roughly masculine, generic. No one Nim knew. She showed them a mark in the wall where someone had thrown a metal water bottle and left an almost heart-shaped gouge in the plaster.
“A clown lives downstairs, in the basement unit,” the landlady said, and the two of them, Liz and Nim, abruptly stopped walking, gathered together in a little bundle exchanging furtive looks. “She’s in medical school. She’s a good tenant, quiet.”
Liz leaned into Nim’s shoulder again, whispered, “A clown?” Nim said nothing, but gave her a gentle pinch on the wrist that might’ve meant I don’t know, or Keep walking, or Do something.
The house came fully furnished and Nim’s bedroom, the one on the first floor, had peacock feathers in vases. Liz’s bedroom was upstairs and bubbling hot. There was a tiny closet, only half height, a crawl space that Liz could probably fit in if she took off her shoes and curled up like a shrimp. Across the hall from Liz, there was another door, closed. Claudia did not mention this, the third door.
The clown, who was, actually, studying for a doctorate in English literature, climbed up her stairs and into the shared backyard every morning, before Portland boiled over. Barefoot in the grass, she held four hula hoops in one hand, tossed them into the air like strange birds, caught each one on a foot or neck or elbow. There was no placenta in the backyard, but a raspberry bush, and a few old motorcycles that belonged to the landlady’s husband, and a large pile of woodchips with a little sign that said “Not for sale”.
The basement clown, who had a name that Nim nor Liz could ever seem to remember, gathered raspberries in a plastic bowl after she finished her hula hooping. They would congregate in Liz’s bedroom, kneeling prostrate in front of the window, to look down upon this performance. The swinging hoops, wrapped in silvery tape, flashing in the light. The gathering of raspberries, the clown’s elegant hand reaching out to pluck.
The clown was thirty-six and her dissertation was about the poetry of British women in the 1500s. She stood on one end of the long yard, greasy hair in a ponytail. Nim and Liz sat at the other end, in lawn chairs, huddled shyly.
“A lot of it is about sex,” The clown said. “And motherhood.” Nim nodded, as if this meant something to them. “And status. That type of woman, it was only women with status who could write poetry.”
Every night, Liz gathered raspberries and they soaked them in wine that only Nim was old enough to purchase.
Liz studied religion and spent the first day walking around the house in socked feet, pointing out all the Buddhist symbols in this white home. Nim studied literature, which mostly meant that they didn’t know what to study.
It was a summer when everything went quiet and so they both did fake jobs with fake titles while sitting on the couch in the meager air conditioning. On the nights when the air inside the house was hotter than outside, they sat on the stoop and smoked poorly rolled joints.
They spoke to no one else besides the clown and the landlady, and, every once in a while, when he came to move one motorcycle onto a truck and leave a different motorcycle leaning in the backyard in its place, the landlady’s husband. The husband would come without notice, which wasn’t legal in Portland, but no one knew what to do about it, so no one did anything about it. He would knock on the door and ask to use the bathroom, and afterwards they would find that their things had been shuffled around, the caps on lotions slightly askew, the ghost of a thumbnail marring the smooth surface of a lip balm. This, too, no one knew what to do about. He had a soft face, vaguely shaped, so that Nim wasn’t sure they would recognize him in a crowd. He never came when his wife was there. Nim knew that they probably should have been afraid of
the husband, but his face was so young and the disruption to lip balms and lotions so gentle, so inoffensive, that he seemed less frightening and more sad. Once, they found half a wood chip, from the pile in the yard that was not for sale, wedged in the skinny neck of Liz’s shampoo.
The clown performed at children’s birthday parties, but because this was a quiet summer no one’s children had any birthday parties. The parties paid for the doctorate in English literature, but her true dream, the clown said, was to write a memoir. Sometimes, the clown would forget her keys in her car and leave it puffing exhaust into the front window of the upstairs part of the house, the part that the clown did not live in, and Liz would be sent downstairs to knock on the clown’s door.
Every single day was like the one before, stagnant air, gray sky, hot and green and wet. On a Monday, behind the door across from Liz’s room, Liz heard scuttling. They took turns pressing ear, cheek, palm to the wood. And they agreed; inside, a scribbling sound, something or somethings with many legs moving around and around and around.
“Oh god,” said Nim. “Oh, god. What do we do?”
Liz, because she did not know what to do, said, “Nothing. We just wait.”
The scuttling grew louder, and Liz noticed a liquid, slithering down the door as if the wood was weeping.
Many days Liz stood with her back against the door. Skin pressed to wood, she could tell that the inside was growing damper, that the something inside with the legs would soon be swimming. The water seeped under the cracks, even though she had duct taped the jamb. The carpet outside the door was already spongy. If she pressed her hand to the fibers, liquid bubbled up, a damp imprint of her fingers. She felt a certain responsibility for the second floor, because she felt it was hers to take care of and hers to sop up the water, but once the wet reached its fingers to Liz’s bedroom, she called to Nim, showed them how to press their bare feet into the carpet and make the water surge around their toes.
Nim’s joints were older than their body and soon the humidity from the Portland summer and from the door upstairs made their knees, hips lock stiff. They used a honey-based balm to
regain the bend of tissue and muscle, to mend the tears in their fascia. When Nim’s joints hurt too much for the stairs, Liz would sit alone in her doorway and watch the water leak. The scuttling grew louder and sometimes beetles would wedge their way into the hall, like birth, like creation. They were fat beetles, glittery. Liz caught one to bring to Nim, marooned downstairs. Nim had dreams of the beetles crawling onto their face, their forehead, smoothing out the wrinkles. When the dream-beetles settled on their limbs, the creases where ball met socket, Nim would wake youthful again, the joint lubricated and slipping easily in and out of place.
When Nim was born the nurse broke their collarbone. It never knitted itself back quite right, so they’d sit and watch the door and rub the notch in their chest over and over again.
The clown turned thirty-seven and because it was a quiet summer only Nim and Liz were invited to the party. The clown performed a few verses of a poem by Katherine Philips who was some woman that was alive in a far away country during a far away century:
Then let our flames still light and shine, And no false fear control,
As innocent as our design, Immortal as our soul.
Nim and Liz clapped politely.
After she had finished the poem, the clown said:
“There’s water dripping into my apartment.”
Liz sucked in breath. “Is there?”
The clown did not respond, but smiled at Nim, at Liz, and the smile was tight, no teeth.
One morning Nim awoke and there was a beetle, prismed and material, perched on the crease of their hip bone.
The landlady’s husband began to leave them notes in the bathroom, nothing frightening, just “I like the painting above the bathtub, the one of the two ships in the ocean”, “It is so hot out today”, “I am worried about my motorcycles.” They hadn’t seen him in days, but the notes
still came, on thin strips of notebook paper, curled up like messages in bottles, stacked tidily on the bathroom counter. Sometimes they were curved like love letters around one of the beetles, a carcass, lying dismal and dead in the sink.
Mold grew like fine mist on the ceilings, the notches where walls met. Saltwater dripped down the stairs, collected in a puddle at the base. The house became jungle, heat and steam and damp, bugs catching the light. They began to spread. Opaline chunks of insect on bedframes, on their clothes, in the sink and on the sofa and wedged inside the air conditioning unit. Liz and Nim could not bear to speak about the beetles, could only point, only gesture meaningfully when a bug came too close to eye or lip.
Liz awoke in her own bed, in her own room, an inch of water coating the floor and a beetle on each eyelid. In the way that the bathroom notes did not frighten her this did not frighten her, but she waded to Nim downstairs, a beetle in each hand, palms out, and said:
“We have to open the door.”
Nim was eating an egg and turned their face away from the beetles in Liz’s hand.
In the end they held hands and when a big wave like religion poured out, white rapids blustering around the stairs, they were not afraid. Beetles were caught up in the waves, flailing. Salt coated the shells of their ears. Ocean swam down the tall staircase, and when the first floor became interior lake, when the steps were half drowned, Liz and Nim on their knees shuffled to the doorway, made open.
Inside the door was a room. It was small and rotten, moss on the beams, and the landlady’s husband stood in the center. He was hunched over his knees, chest to thigh, and he did not seem afraid, only wet, and tired. Fat insects like new quarters nestled in his hair.
He looked at them, and his face was kind and young, and he said, “I’m sorry. For this. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
The clown’s apartment had flooded and she had broken a window to escape from the basement and then broke a second window to climb into Nim’s and Liz’s house, and her hands
were bleeding but strong, made for swimming and plucking raspberries. She emerged from the sea and crawled up the stairs.
They were silent and they gathered here like this, the water draining, the beetles floating downstairs and out to the streets of Portland, to become wild in grass, to become outside in the way that Nim and Liz and the clown and the husband, in that quiet summer, could not become outside. And when each beetle had scurried out, when they had absolved themselves of their placement like jewelry on arms and hair, the clown reached her hand out and pulled the husband to his height. Her eyes were green and sad.
Nim stood up, then Liz, and they crept into this room, this cave, where there were no longer insects but leftover husks remained. They were not afraid but they were wet and tired, and they felt sorry for the husband. Nim said: “We forgive you.”
Jude Singer is a fiction writer and poet living in Portland, Oregon. He writes about being transgender, having a body, experiencing grief, and strange weather patterns. He was a 2022 finalist for the New York Time’s Modern Love College Essay contest.