I stood as the bus came to a halt. Struggling down the steps, I landed in the late afternoon sun. Jenks made more annoying circles around me. He was worse than a mosquito. “Nice place,” he said sarcastically as I waited for traffic to clear before crossing the street to my apartment house. I silently agreed. I lived uptown in Cincinnati in what was a good neighborhood twenty years ago. The building was a four-story brick, originally built for university upperclassmen. It had seen its last finals party years ago and was now reduced to this.

The black letterboxes attached to the porch were dented and ugly, some having obviously been broken into. I got my mail from the landlady. I had a suspicion she was the one who broke the boxes so she could sort through her tenants’ mail at her leisure. There was a thin strip of lawn and two bedraggled shrubs to either side of the wide steps. Last year, I had planted the yarrow seeds I had gotten in a Spell Weekly mail promotion, but Mr. Dinky, the landlady’s Chihuahua, had dug them up—along with most of the yard. Little divots were everywhere, making it look like a fairy battlefield.

“And I thought my place was bad,” Jenks whispered as I skipped the step with dry rot.

My keys jingled as I balanced the box and unlocked the door at the same time. A little voice in my head had been saying the same thing for years. The odor of fried food assaulted me as I entered the foyer, and my nose wrinkled. Green indoor/outdoor carpet ran up the stairs, threadbare and fraying. Mrs. Baker had unscrewed the lightbulb in the stairway again, but the sun spilling in the landing window to fall on the rosebud wallpaper was enough to find my way.

“Hey,” Jenks said as I went upstairs. “That stain on the ceiling is in the shape of a pizza.”

I glanced up. He was right. Funny, I never noticed it before.

“And that dent in the wall?” he said as we reached the first floor. “It’s just the right size for someone’s head. Man … if these walls could talk …”

I found I could still smile. Wait until he got to my apartment. There was a dip in the living room floor where someone had burned out a hearth.

My smile faded as I rounded the second landing. All my things were in the hall.

“What the devil?” I whispered. Shocked, I set my box on the floor and looked down the hall to Mrs. Talbu’s door. “I paid my rent!”

“Hey, Rache?” Jenks said from the ceiling. “Where’s your cat?”

Anger growing, I stared at my furniture. It seemed to take up a lot more space when it was jammed into a hallway on her lousy plastic carpeting. “Where does she get off—”

“Rachel!” Jenks shouted. “Where’s your cat?”

“I don’t have a cat,” I all but snarled. It was a sore spot with me.