Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
He climbed to the third floor in silence, moving down the dim hallway by instinct more than intention, and stopped in front of a familiar door. Most of the number on the peeling plate had worn away. Only a single zero remained, staring at him like a strange, unblinking eye.
He hadn’t meant to come here.
A month ago, this had been his room. Back then he’d lived in it like a sick animal in a trap.
Maybe he’d wandered here because he’d had a little to drink, enough to blur the edges of his mind.
It wasn’t until he pinched the old key from his pocket that he remembered this place was no longer his. He ran his thumb over the jagged ridges of the metal and stood there in a haze of grief, unable to leave.
He knocked. No answer.
Then he slid the key into the lock and turned it carefully.
A crisp click answered him.
He’d half expected it. The new tenant hadn’t changed the lock. The thought sent a small thrill through him—danger, luck, maybe even revenge.
The new tenant was a plain, washed-out little nurse.
The day he moved out, the landlady had brought her to see the room. He’d brushed past her in the doorway, heard the two of them talking. In fact, the landlady had shown her the place while he was still living there. Might as well have shoved him out by hand.
For days after losing the room, a shapeless hatred had churned inside him. As far as he was concerned, the nurse and the landlady were on the same side.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside, breathing in automatically, feeling for the room the way a person feels for an old wound.
It wasn’t even five yet, but the rainy afternoon had already darkened the place into something close to night.
He didn’t turn on the light. He moved through the room by memory, noticing changes by touch and outline. The bed was still in the same place, but the mattress had been replaced. Softer. Faintly scented.
A bowl of goldfish sat beside the TV, and he heard the soft flick of a tail against glass.
The floor was no longer cluttered. The whole room felt bigger.
Nothing of him was left here. No smell, no trace, no sign he’d ever existed in it at all. That made the sadness settle deeper.
He walked to the window. The velvet curtain brushed his face, warm and dry. Outside, rain stretched endlessly through the dark, and something in it seemed to hook into the ache inside him and pull.
A man well into his thirties, still drifting on the fantasy that one day he’d do something big.
Nobody had ever believed he could—except his girlfriend, Mia Carter. And now even Mia seemed completely done with him.
He’d tried business more than once. Every venture had failed. The money was gone, cheated away clean. Debts piled up. Then gambling dragged him down the rest of the way.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2
If Mia hadn’t hauled him back to Minton County by sheer force of will, he’d probably have had his legs broken by now.
Then footsteps sounded outside.
He saw light slide through the crack beneath the door.
His heart leaped straight into his throat.
Without thinking, he ducked behind the curtain. It was wide enough to swallow him whole. He held his breath, waiting—almost longing—for the clean snap of a key in the lock, while another part of him insisted it wasn’t longing at all. It was terror.
For more than ten seconds he stood there in that terror, listening.
Then the footsteps drifted away.
The strip of light under the door vanished.
By the time he stepped out from behind the curtain, sweat had soaked through him.
He found the switch and flicked on the light. A wash of orange-yellow filled the room. Everything looked different from before, enough that for a moment he felt strangely displaced, as if he couldn’t really have lived here after all.
But the old bedframe was still there. So was the old TV. They told him this was the same room.
He noticed a note on the nurse’s computer screen. It laid out her routine in neat blocks—what time she got up, what time she went to work, what time she studied English, what time she did yoga. Orderly. Exact.
He guessed she wouldn’t be back for at least another hour, and slowly his nerves eased.
He lingered there a while, pacing the narrow space that used to be his, steeping in self-pity.
Then he spotted the muddy footprints he’d left on the floor.
He took off his shoes, found a mop, and carefully wiped away every trace.
When he pulled the door shut behind him, he felt a small, shameful burst of pride.
After that, he went to the dogfighting pit.
A skinny dog he often bet on got torn apart that day. The death was ugly—half its head ripped away.
Luckily, he hadn’t put money down.
He decided he wouldn’t go there anymore.
He had found a new way to pass the time.
When the nurse went to work, he slipped into her room to sleep, to use her internet, then erased every sign he’d been there. In this warped way, his empty days began to feel filled.
The nurse never noticed anything wrong.
Sometimes she only seemed faintly suspicious about the amount of loose change in a drawer.
There was no mystery there. He’d taken it.
Through her computer, he set himself to learning everything he could about her.
She didn’t have a boyfriend. The only man she ever still mentioned was some boy from high school she’d never fully forgotten.
She had a best friend at the same county hospital, a woman named Skylar.
Her name was Lena.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Lena was always looking up ways to go abroad. She was taking online English classes. She kept saving money, complaining constantly that earning it was exhausting while also trying to encourage herself to keep going.
Little by little, he worked his way into her online life. He added her under a false identity and became her anonymous confidant, the one person who always seemed to understand.
The more familiar he became with her, the more she seemed to believe she’d found a kindred spirit.
He “asked after” the goldfish she treasured. He “guessed” what her curtains felt like. He even suggested that someday he might travel all the way to damp, far-off Minton County to see her.
In reality, he was hiding nearby in a filthy, cramped internet cafe.
Waiting for dawn.
Because once morning came, he could go sleep in Lena’s room.
Again and again, he rehearsed it in his dreams: what he would do if one day Lena came home early and found him there.
He was obsessed with that strain, that torment. The longer it lasted, the more he savored it.
Until one day, while reading Lena’s chat logs, he learned she had bank records showing about fifteen thousand dollars in savings.
That was when reason rose to the surface, and a different kind of wickedness began to clamor inside him.
He decided he was going to get that money.
The rain in Minton County had a way of needling the people already closest to breaking, and it looked like it had no intention of stopping.
A black band of sky clamped the damp over the town like a metal hoop, trapping it there until the air itself seemed diseased. The county hospital filled with the sick. Lena, in her nurse’s scrubs, hurried from one dying patient to the next, receiving them in panic and sending them off in silence.
Every few days another funeral procession crept down the main road, hurrying through breaks in the rain on its way to Tenmile Slope Cemetery. The cemetery had been hit by mudslides recently. Whole sections had been torn up. People had no choice but to slog through the muck and rebuild the drainage around it.
The whole town had sunk into its most frantic, raw-nerved season of the year. Local television ran disaster footage around the clock—floodwater, repair crews, roadside collapses. Everywhere people complained about grocery prices and utility bills with the bitter unity of the miserable.
One day the fiber line went down too, and he ended up stuck in the internet cafe, killing time with cheap little games.