September 27, 2023 Home Improvements Apartment Four By Jacqueline Feldman Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman. One spring evening I pulled in and saw my neighbor Stefanie was sitting on her car, which has the next spot over, with a friend. It was possible to worry for a second that I’d hit her. “Hi, my neighbor,” I said as Stefanie hopped down. She and I had a project to one day go in on compost pickup. We had something else in common, we realized that evening. Neither of us had been told about apartment four. And the vacancy had filled so quickly. We both may have had reasons for considering a move—mine being I have mold—and that apartment, I happened to know, was a two-bedroom, with a bay window, beautiful gold-and-cream striped wallpaper, and decoratively ribbed molding that pooled, at the corners, in concentric circles. It was not, however, perfect. “It’s really loud in there,” I said to Stefanie. “That’s why Alex”—my ex-boyfriend—“had to leave.” I had started seeing Alex during the pandemic in 2020, a month or two after my arrival in the Northampton, Massachusetts, building. He was there already. I had been aware that he paid more in rent than I did. But my thoughts, as I left Stefanie and made my way inside, turned instead to the way I’d had of judging Alex, privately, for giving up his lease on what was truly a nice place … so that it only later occurred to me to investigate my feeling that out of all of us in the building, a converted Victorian that has eight units, each neighbor had a different curiosity, or jealousy: an opinion about which apartment is the best. Or worst—built out of the irregularly shaped old house, they are all different. Read More
July 3, 2023 Home Improvements The Hole By Nicolaia Rips Photograph by Nicolaia Rips. When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?” The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and several inches below the start of my ceiling is an obvious nook—a deep-set crawl space suspended inside my wall. If that weren’t fun enough—“fun” said through gritted teeth, like how the realtor said “Now, this is fun” when he showed me the nook—there’s another feature: a bolted door within the nook. A dusty, intrusive, and creaky wooden door that points up to the sky. Between the bolts that secure the door is a sliver of light, slim enough that you can’t see what’s on the other side. Read More
May 18, 2023 Home Improvements Rear Window, Los Feliz By Claudia Ross Photograph by Claudia Ross. A sign on the dried grass in front of my apartment building named it the Isles of Charm, a label that suggested—correctly—the irony of the complex’s eventual decay. I moved in on a COVID-era deal, meaning I could afford a studio unit in Los Feliz, though only the kind with communal laundry machines that smelled like Tide pods and urine. The walls were thin, and that was how I met my neighbors. I shared a hallway and one tiled wall with Brian and Luciana. Brian and Luciana kept their door open all the time, to let the wind in. The distance between their lives and mine was a door screen and the stuttering hum of my air conditioner. I heard everything. They were older than I was, in their mid-thirties or forties. It wasn’t sex, though their arguments occasionally seemed to have an erotic fervor. Read More
May 2, 2023 Home Improvements An Egyptian Vase By Jago Rackham Photograph by Jago Rackham. On the top of our fiction bookshelf is an alabaster vase. Its rim is broken. Inside it is a single dried flower, and beside it a faux peach, under a large bell jar. The vase is Egyptian and three thousand years old. I broke its rim a few years ago. Each time I reach for a novel I am reminded of the power of carelessness to undo eons of completeness. At thirteen I was sent to Lo’s school. Lo’ is my fiancée. We have been engaged since we were twenty-one and we are now both approaching our thirties. We “got together” soon after I joined the school and have been near constantly in one another’s presence since then. Like a medieval romance—somewhat creepy, somewhat sweet. Read More
April 17, 2023 Home Improvements My Curtains, My Radiator By Mitchell Johnson Photograph by Mitchell Johnson. I moved to Chicago late last summer and spent my first evening alone scrubbing and rescrubbing an old dresser I had found in the basement of my new apartment. It was plastered in dust and cobwebs, and dotted with some small dried-out things that were probably once eggs. Underneath, it was beautiful—maybe a hundred years old, a deep cherry color with intricate metal handles. I cleaned it and stapled fabric to the bottoms of the drawers, which still catch sometimes and deposit small slivers of wood on my T-shirts. Still, it works well enough. I loved the apartment when I moved in. It has big windows and a back sunroom nestled in tree branches. Lake Michigan is just down the block. In the first couple weeks I lived here I would call my friends in other cities and tell them about my lake house, as I called it. It was a warm September, and I spent my days drifting back and forth down the street in my swimsuit. A neighbor told me that some people call Chicago in the summer Chiami. Read More
April 11, 2023 Home Improvements The Dust By Christopher Chang Photograph by Christopher Chang. Where I live is about twenty minutes from anywhere else in Los Angeles. What this actually means is that I live ten minutes from anything when there’s no traffic, and forty-five minutes when there is. In reality, there’s no given instance during the day when I actually live twenty minutes from any geographical point in LA, but it’s an easy way to say I live in the middle of town. The area lacks the socioeconomic and demographic cohesion common to most LA neighborhoods, so it’s not particularly cool or uncool, it’s just twenty minutes from places that are. It’s a neighborhood that’s special in the same way a local laundromat is special—you get people from all walks of life. The building itself is a small, charming holdover from when old Hollywood was just called Hollywood. I park on the street, and I live in one of fourteen modest units, where I am very happy. I’ve lived in old buildings for most of my adult life, and it is my preference to do so. Of course, there are costs associated with living in an old building. You might have an occasional leak or wonky electrical wiring, but these are small problems that can be solved. As with any formative experience, part of the joy in fixing them is the skill gained, or the longevity of the solution. If you fix a leak and you did it right, it’ll take a second for the leak to come back. Once you’ve dealt with something once, it is not such a tragedy the next time. I think that’s what it is to get older: you get softer with age because you’ve experienced a lot of things once, and you’re equipped to do them again if you have to. Remember that first sip of alcohol, or the first cigarette? You turned your back on your innocence, but you didn’t die, so you did it again. However, when a task requires constant maintenance, there is no finish line, so there is no small victory. You never feel done, and it becomes the bane of your existence. The great scourge of my little life, twenty minutes from everywhere else in Los Angeles, is the dust. Read More