At first, there was a grace period between Fredricka and me. It helped that we almost never crossed paths. I spent my free time exploring the neighborhood, and in the flat I mainly lurked in my room. Fredricka, when we did encounter one another, maintained the minimum of civility: how was I liking the neighborhood, the weather—that sort of thing. When I happened to mention that I was in the market for a bookcase, she even said she’d keep an eye out for one.

About the bookcase. Technically, Fredricka was the one who found it. First she checked her storage room in the basement. Nothing. Then, a few days later, she knocked at my door, breathless. I had to come quickly, she said. Her neighbor was dragging his bookcase to the street as trash, and she’d flagged him down for me. Out on the sidewalk, she watched as he and I tried to haul the thing into the building. Shuffling backward up the narrow staircase, peering over the frame, I smiled down at her with what I thought was a grateful expression. But for no reason I could discern, she just glared back at me. Then, tetchily, she hovered behind us as we made our way down the hall. Both times that I scuffed the wallpaper, she gasped theatrically, and once her neighbor had left, she thrust a water spritzer and a washrag at me without a word.

Whatever goodwill had existed between us exploded in that moment. And, ultimately, after four months of mounting acrimony and mutual resentment, I moved. That’s the short version. The long version—if you want to bear with me a minute—requires cataloguing at least a few of the small, petty, spiteful things she did to antagonize me.

For one thing, Fredricka was unavoidable. She passed long days lying in bed in a white nightgown, glowering at the television, waiting for someone to do something she could scold them for. Bedridden, she somehow managed to maintain a panoptic knowledge of all goings-on in the flat, such that if her tenants transgressed any of the hundreds of obsessive details in her lease—by leaving a light on, the faucet dripping, the refrigerator door ajar—the iron-eyed old harridan would crawl out of bed and hobble down to the offender’s room, leaving them a mercilessly worded, martinetish Post-it note to find in the morning.

I discovered this for myself about a week after the bookcase incident, when—upon leaving my room—I almost stepped on a plate outside my door. It was one I’d washed and stacked in the drying rack the night before. Squatting down to inspect it, I found a Post-it note stickied to its center: You missed a spot. –F. The plate looked spotlessly pink. And then I saw, beside her note, a forensic little thumbprint of grease, which her naked eyes couldn’t possibly have been hale enough to see. I picked up the plate and went to the kitchen. She was sitting in wait at the table, and she sucked in her cheeks as I entered. When I apologized, she sneered: ‘Don’t say you’re sorry. Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.’