Years ago, when his mother had downsized, he’d moved his old bedroom furniture from Harrisburg to NYC. The bed was a twin and plenty big enough for him, but the furniture was heavy maple. He’d damn near given himself a hernia moving it all in here, and now he risked one again as he grunted and groaned to angle the nightstand out from the wall for a look.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

A section of the floor, maybe three feet in length, appeared to have separated from the side wall. Just a few inches, but if he angled his head right, he could see into the apartment below.

This wasn’t good. In fact, this could be very bad. The building dated from the late 1940s, which made it like three-quarters of a century old. It just might be coming apart. He didn’t want to be here if it decided to come crashing down.

He understood how he’d missed the gap, hidden away as it was on the floor behind the nightstand. But it opened into the ceiling of the apartment below. How had anyone missed that?

He decided to go check.

He didn’t know his neighbors much beyond a non-committal nod in the hallways. Didn’t really want to. Not because he didn’t like them or anything, but he wasn’t looking for friends here. He had a few writer friends around the city and they’d get together now and again for drinks and dinner and to bitch about the industry. But truth was he’d actively avoided making friends in the building. He had to bang out a minimum of 2K words every day—what he called his Daily Duty—to keep the royalties flowing and pay the rent.

Frankie took the graffiti-bedizened stairway down to the third floor. Apartment 3F was directly below his own 4F. He knocked and waited while he assumed he was being checked out through the peep hole. Then he knocked again.

Finally, a tentative “Who’s there?” from the other side.

“Hey, there. I live above you. I think we share some structural damage. Mind if I come in and take a look?”

The door opened and a familiar wrinkled black face peeked out. He recognized her but her name was a blank space in his mind. He’d helped her carry her groceries up the stairs more than a few times.

“I know you,” she said in her Jamaican accent. “You that writer mon.”

He bowed. “One and the same, ma’am. Look, I won’t be a minute but I’d just like to check out your ceiling.”

She hesitated, then swung the door open. “I guess I can trust you.”

“Seriously”—what the hell was her name?—“I’ll be just a sec.”

The rooms of her apartment were laid out exactly like his but hers were richly redolent of cooking spices. Jerk chicken, maybe? His mouth watered as he hurried through the front room to the bedroom where—

He stared in shock. The ceiling was perfect.

“Whassa mattah?” she said, coming up behind him.