Some stories are not meant to be understood. Only witnessed.
Akreda Amena woke before the alarm, yanked from a dream she'd already forgotten—and wouldn't mourn the loss of. The light outside held no conviction: gray enough for rain, pale enough for doubt. The sky was still deciding, and it would take its time.
She lay still, listening. The apartment carried that particular silence of solitude—not peaceful, but occupied. Silence has weight when you live alone long enough. It begins to breathe.
The wall next door erupted. A door slammed—violent, percussive—followed by a man's voice, muffled, cursing. The sound arrived with the regularity of a heartbeat. Thud. Curse. Silence. Then again. This was how her neighbor kept time.
She rose without thinking and was at his door before the sound had finished echoing.
The door swung open. A man in his forties stood there—bloodshot, confused, still in yesterday's clothes.
"You need to stop," she said. It wasn't a suggestion. "When you slam that door, I hear it like it's happening in my skull. I hear it like a warning. And I'm running out of patience with warnings."
He stared at her—uncertain if she was real, or just another voice in his hangover.
"What I see when I look at you," she continued, stepping closer, "is someone who's already decided how this ends. The drinking escalates. The job goes. Then the silence gets even heavier, because by then there's no one left to hear the doors. And you'll be grateful for that silence. You won't want anyone to ever find you."
"I don't—" he started.
"I know you don't. That's the problem."
She walked back to her apartment. Closed the door carefully. The kind of gentle closing that sounds like a threat.
The alarm clock she'd never set began to ring anyway.
She dressed without looking in the mirror. The city outside was already filling with noise—a motorcycle somewhere, revving its engine like a prayer to velocity. For two weeks now, the same bike, the same hour, the same show of recklessness. Someone young, convinced immortality was a choice rather than a temporary condition. She wondered how long before the certainty broke.
Water moved through the pipes in the walls. The building's circulatory system. She could hear it if she listened close enough—the whole structure breathing around her, carrying lives from apartment to apartment in copper veins.