Actual Everlasting Apartment

4.

Imagine an apartment. It has no plot: it exists as a nonstory, a situation. Dusty but intact. An old-fashioned horsehair sofa, dull rose trimmed with mahogany, two stuffed chairs in a complementary dusty blue, ashtray on a metal stand, standing lamp with a pull chain ending in a yellow swag. When the chain is pulled, the light comes on.  

1.  

The furniture arranges itself comfortably—content to see you, content to enjoy the slant and collapse of light through the wide windows. 

3.

The knob always turns and opens the door when you return. The apartment is the cone that fills with ice cream every time you eat it down to the edge, the surprise box that always contains the best surprise. That is, the apartment is a child’s delight, like a grandmother’s apartment with a picture of a shoeshine boy from a previous generation, from a rise to wealth, since lost. 

5.

If repair on the façade begins and the windows are taped shut and covered with butcher paper, you mustn’t worry. Come back. The windows will open again.

2.  

It doesn’t vary. It isn’t lost to time. It allows you to come and go. It holds the whiff of the past without the oppressive odors of mothballs or rot or mold. It’s nothing like life. Return without regret or melancholy. Leave without expectation.

0.

There. 

Jean Kane’s creative work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction online, South Dakota Review, Cimarron Review, Courtship of Winds, Indiana Review, 3:AM, Hotel Amerika, Euphony Journal, Fogged Clarity, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The MacGuffin, Ignatian Literary Magazine, [Volume I: Brooklyn], Nonconformist Magazine, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Pine Hills Review, Posit Journal, Rue Scribe, Slab, Word For/Word, Doubly Mad, Isele, and  the Ginosko Review. Her book of poems, Make Me, waspublished by Otis Nebula in 2014. She received the Otis Nebula First Book Award, and was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.  She is a professor of English and women, feminist, and queer studies at Vassar College. http://jean-kane.squarespace.com/

A Song for Jean