paper shortly after. She blamed the North Atlantic Ocean for their separation and found it easier to think of him as drowned. Ruth occasionally imagined them on their sunlit porch, the traveller and the calligrapher, leafing through her old letters to piece together a portrait of a lonely urban ghost.
The clock announced the hour. Ruth shook off the dull pin pricks of resent in her stomach, eager to distract herself with making dinner. As she juggled her umbrella, keys and mail, she knocked a couple of letters from number nineteen’s overflowing pigeonhole.
Ruth glanced again at the lobby’s sentinel clock. It was not too late to drop by with their mail. If she didn’t, perhaps no one ever would. Maybe she would make a friend, another single soul to connect with... Brimming with neighbourly concern, she grabbed the wad of envelopes and ascended the stairs.
The door of apartment nineteen was slightly ajar. She raised her hand beneath the tarnished number and knocked gently, Hello? She breathed. I’m from apartment sixteen; I brought your mail. I thought you might be... She paused, might be what? Here? Hurt? No answer came. Ruth pushed open the door and peered into the room; the bundle of letters dropped from her hand.
She was in her own apartment. She hovered in the doorframe, rechecking the number. Nineteen. The layout of each piece of furniture and painting had been exactly replicated to match hers. The detail extended down to tokens from various travels scattered on her windowsill and the smell of cinnamon tea she brewed earlier that day.
Ruth steadied herself against the armchair to take in the doppelganger room. Her hand grazed over unfamiliar stitching. Looking down to the space beneath her palm, she saw the fabric was intricately stitched with an erratic horizontally striped pattern. She moved her face closer to the chair; the small stripes were stitched words. She mumbled aloud the patterns of text, full moon tonight, getting colder, if only; snatches of sentences. She was unable to place where she recognised the fragments from.
Ruth ignored a mounting desire to slam the door firmly behind her; she teetered to the room’s centre, to view it as a whole. The wild squiggles seemed to leak from the armchair. Her skin prickled when she saw the tiny print on the table, floor, walls and windows. An apartment laced with broken Braille.
The words danced in her eyes; she felt nausea rise. Ruth stared at her feet, which were buried in the tiny paper avalanche of mail she had dropped. All the letters were addressed to her. She opened them frantically, only to find that they were old letters she had written to Clark. Certain lines caught her eyes like hooks, the sky is beautiful here, remember that time, your silence is shattering.
Shadows moved in the corner of her eyes as the words began to hum along the surfaces, vibrating as if they were being spoken aloud. Turning over her hands, she found them covered in ink that dripped like thin dark soup onto the envelopes at her feet. Words emerged on her skin, impervious to her scratching. A high frequency ringing brought her to her knees among the ripped pages.
Behind her, the door closed.