It had been a long fuckin day.

She pulled her car into the garage and put it in park. She did not hit the red button on her console that would quiet the engine, nor did she take off her seatbelt. She didn’t even bother to turn off the radio. A commercial played; she’d heard it four times on her drive home. A new Honda Civic could be hers, it proclaimed, for only $199 down and $199 a month. Terms and conditions applied.

A deep breath soothed her a bit, loosened the knot in her chest; her free hand rubbed her eyes until they were blurry. Blurry, yes, but somehow free of the day now. Such a simple act had an impressive ability to wipe her perspective.

The sound of the car door as she closed it behind her echoed from the walls of the parking structure. She was alone and her heels clicked, bouncing off the walls as she strode to the door that let on to her building’s lobby. She’d forgotten her sneakers at home and had had to make the long walk from her office to her car in the most obdurate and unyielding shoes she owned. But of course. Stuff like that always seemed to happen on days like this.

Laura’s mind played it back as she walked: it had really been fucked from the start. She left her lunchbag at home and hadn’t noticed until well into her drive. And calling it a lunchbag was modest: it contained two bananas and overnight oats for breakfast; a quest bar, a bag of grapes, and a bag of strawberries for lunch; a protein shake to close the afternoon. Now she’d have to take a lunch and find something to eat, something that wouldn’t make her feel bloated and sick like most everything from any restaurant did. And that meant skipping the gym, of course, her one reprieve, her blessed noon-hour break.

Just fucked from the start.

She crossed the lobby to the wide rows of mailboxes built into the wall, next to the elevators, and she watched the rest unfold, saw every moment in lucidity. She came into news that her manager had quit. Not Katie, the manager in her current office. That would have brought no reaction besides a small smile, a quiet inner joy perhaps. No, it was Robert, her soon-to-be new manager, the one upstate in the smaller office she was transferring to. Although now he was no longer her soon-to-be manager, only her never-quite-was manager. She liked Robert. He’d been the main reason she’d taken the offer to relocate. That and the tax savings. The city was expensive, sucking her dry like an infected root.

He sent her an email: “Can’t do it anymore. Sorry kid. Life is too short and I have the money to look for something new. Try not to hate me.” She tried.

Her phone chirped in her purse as she keyed the box for 1608. “No thank you,” she said aloud, uncaring if anyone was in the lobby to hear her, which of course, at this hour, no one was.

There was a circular from Stop & Shop in her mailbox. Uninteresting. A quarterly statement from Charles Schwab. Overdone. A letter addressed to Calvin Briggs, former occupant, judging by the mail she sometimes received. These she dropped in the overstuffed trash, unopened. Her electric bill from Con Ed was the only correspondence she kept.

She’d have to shut off the current account, open a new one. Moving five days into the month, just lovely, she thought. Paid rent today, owe first month’s and a deposit at the new place in two days. Her current building couldn’t just let her pay prorated for these five days in July, no—that would have been too easy. They’d gladly reimburse her (prorated, of course). And then there was the lease-break fee; she was only seven months into a one-year agreement. That was one-and-a-half-month’s rent. And the movers. Two guys, one truck, a buck-thirty an hour. Her head reeled. Six thousand dollars, easily, coming out of her account in the next three days. First Trust was going to reimburse her for the lease-break and the movers, their re-lo bonus to her for being such a team player. After they saw receipts.

Her apartment was a mess of boxes, everything stacked helter-skelter, impeding the narrow walkways her 650 square foot one-bedroom allowed. The thought of it amplified her tiredness; she wanted nothing more than to go upstairs and open the mango Whiteclaws sitting in her fridge, next to the leftover Thai. Or maybe the bottle of wine in her built-in wine rack. She was going to miss the wine rack. That and the skyline view of downtown and the mountains. It had only been seven months, but she’d grown quite used to sitting at the small table by the window, eating her takeout, sipping something that burned on the way down as she watched traffic slowly trickle across the bridge, feeling like the queen, someone who’s made it, no matter what anyone had to say about who she was and who she was supposed to be.

The new place was bigger. And cheaper. It had a better gym, but not better enough that she could cancel her membership at LA Fitness. But there was no view there. No doorman. It wasn’t a high-rise. Her view would be a courtyard, a meager pool, some trees beyond the parking lot. She’d grown up in the suburbs; that’s what she told herself. It would be like coming home.

Chirp-chirp again, from her purse. “Fuck you.” She spoke through gritted teeth. Farther from him, farther from all this idealized bullshit. This Instagram life, this little performance she maintained for all the lurkers. A little peace and quiet would be nice. No more traffic. No more crazy homeless people following her down the street, forcing her to finger the lipstick-shaped stun gun in her purse as she furtively stole glances over her shoulder, trying to avoid eye contact but stay aware at the same time.

She was almost free. Most everything was packed. There were two nights left of living in her clutter, navigating her way through the maze of boxes. Then she’d be unpacking, settling into a new place, and her mind would open up again. She’d be able to think, to breathe, to relax. She’d be far away. Just two more nights.

The thought brought her momentary peace. She’d wanted a drink, but the last few unused boxes were calling to her. Well, why not both? She’d sip and pack. Finish up the leftovers. Maybe take a pull from her weed pen and take a shower. That would relax her enough to help her find sleep. And then she’d be one day closer.

Laura turned toward the elevator. She made it two steps before the thought rudely interrupted her progress, freezing her on the marble floor.

The storage room! She had a unit, one of the half-size ones. There was all sorts of junk in there. Junk that needed to be sorted through, packed. She stood where she was, tall and elegant in her professional getup, rubbing at her temples, her eyes closed. The door to the storage units was right behind her. If she didn’t do it now it would become tomorrow’s problem, and she wasn’t the type to let something that could be handled today leak into the next, polluting it like a toxic river.

“Ughh.” The sound escaped her, closer to a growl than any word she was familiar with. She turned, pushed the door open. It slammed behind her, making her jump the way it always did.

It was a wide room, almost like a warehouse. The floor was carpeted where she stood, but only for a small patch; the rest was cold hard concrete. To her right was a series of lockers for Amazon deliveries, and a package room for the bigger stuff. Straight ahead, across the long room, the door to the stairs. There was one floor beneath her and thirty-eight above her.

As always, the smell was the most notable part of the experience. A lost smell, a secret smell. It wasn’t the pleasant scent of antique stores, old books like cinnamon; this was that other smell, the forgotten one, the smell of rolled carpets that no one wanted but couldn’t muster the strength to throw away; the smell of unlabeled boxes, the smell of bulky winter gear hibernating. It was a neglected smell, one that no one person took responsibility for. It was dust and darkness.

There were two types of units, full-size and half-size. Both were constructed the same: chain-link cages separated by thin strips of wood. It allowed her—and everybody else—to see the contents locked inside. The half-size ones were cut in two, one on top, one on bottom, stacked on each other like the boxes waiting for her sixteen floors up. Unit 132 was a bottom one.

Laura turned left and began winding her way through the maze. The wall in this direction was even farther than the one which held the staircase; rows and rows of chain-link cages stretched in either direction from the aisle she progressed. The sound of her heels was louder in here than the garage; a lonely sound.

Again she turned to the left. S132 was toward the end, on the right. Hers was easy to find; she’d left a small strip of red electric tape on her padlock, because when she first moved in she kept getting lost. As she walked, she observed the units that surrounded hers, the junk that people stored. Here, an old printer with the fat gray cable coiled on top like a sleeping snake. Towering above her like sentinels, three snowboards, scuffed and beaten, leaning on the fence-walls. More rolled rugs. To her left, framed paintings of unhappy people staring lifelessly toward the artist. Stacks of paperbacks, their covers tattered. Clothes. CDs. Vinyl records.

Little pieces of people’s lives, she thought. The discarded pieces. But that wasn’t quite right: the discarded pieces went in the dumpster out back. These were the unneeded things, the ones that her neighbors hoped they might find a use for in the future. Maybe when the seasons changed and the sun went away for a while, or maybe these things were just biding time, waiting for a bigger place, somewhere for them to belong.

Or sometimes, they were things that belonged in the dumpster that people couldn’t bring themselves to actually put there. Memories, mementos, packaged nostalgia.

She was almost to the wall before she realized she’d gone too far. Lost in her head again. Sleep sounded nice.

Her unit was packed to the brim, efficiently because she was an efficient woman. No wasted space in S132. There were four metal chairs, teal, stacked on top of one another. Remnants from her old, bigger apartment. They were to be patio furniture at the new spot. A cat carrier for Butters, her orange tabby. Little asshole she was, but cute. Underneath the chair were paper bags from the grocery store filled with Christmas ornaments; the artificial tree was crammed in a plastic garbage bag, in the corner. There were also Halloween decorations—little ghosts and goblins and jack-o-lanterns. A twenty-four pack of beer, oddly, stuffed to the far end. Plastic, see-through storage bins filled with clothes. Winter clothes this time of year; she’d planned to swap them out for her shorts and tank tops in September, but in September she’d be somewhere new.

A moth fluttered past her head. She made a mental note to throw everything she planned to take with her in the dryer or hit it with the vacuum, lest she bring the pesky little fuckers with her. Another task. Lovely.

With another deep sigh—she’d lost count of how many exasperated, dragging breaths she’d taken this evening somewhere on the bridge, sitting in traffic—she fumbled through her purse, found her keys. Her phone was in the way so she checked it. One missed call and four text messages from Ryan. Her teeth grinded.

The key that opened the lock on the unit was a small one, so of course she dropped her whole set trying to isolate it. Bending over to grab her keys from the floor without screaming was a Herculean effort. Who was it that said that absolutely everything that can fuck you will find a way to do so? Newton? Einstein? One of those smart people, surely.

She struggled with the lock. The chain-link door was bulging from everything she’d stuffed inside and she had to lean her body against it to make enough room for the lock to open. She decided then that she’d throw half of the stuff away. It was in storage for a reason. She was not a wasteful person by nature; it physically pained her to lose possession of absolutely anything that was still functional. But she was exhausted and frustrated and ready to take her goddamn shoes off.

The chain-link gate rattled as she pulled it open.

First up, a Coleman tent and a Coleman portable stove-top, both unopened in their original boxes. She’d meant to go camping. Last summer. She still meant to, although this summer was now rapidly ticking away. She tossed those to the left, her keep pile. Not off to the best start, she told herself. Next she found some paintings she’d done in art class as a kid. Can’t throw something like that away. To the left. An old yearbook. It had signatures and well-wishes from her closest friends in seventh grade. Irreplaceable. To the left.

Ah! Here, something to discard: a straw hat. Where had she even gotten this? Goodwill? She threw it triumphantly to the empty slot of concrete to her right. A new pile. And she was on a roll now; up next was a circular clock with a reindeer on the face. Nana had given it to her three Christmases ago. It was ugly, hideous, just the worst. But Nana died six weeks later and she couldn’t bear to part with it. Time heals all wounds they say. To the right.

A rattling sound echoed from the high ceiling. It sounded like someone idly running their hand along the chain-link cages as they passed through a row. She lifted her head, listened for footsteps.

Nothing.

It struck her then how utterly empty the storage room always seemed to be. This was a cage of cages, a room of rooms, a place that held all the stuff no one ever wanted to visit.

Sitting at her feet was a rectangular bin filled with sweaters and beanies. If only it had been winter and this bin could have been full of shorts and sundresses and t-shirts. She’d have thrown it away in a heartbeat. But she loved her cold-weather gear. Fall was her season. To the left.

Here was something that deserved to go to the right, deserved to go directly into the trash can by the stairwell: a small box filled with memories. What she should do was pick it up and walk it there right now, right this instance, without further thought. Yet what she would do, she knew, was open it, open herself to it, allow it to once again sink its hooks into her soft heart and weigh her down like an anchor.

The box made her wonder how many other people in this building had similar boxes, perhaps sitting in their own storage units or the backs of their closets or underneath their beds. Boxes with memories. Memories you loved but memories you also hated. Memories you wanted to love, because they were good memories, happy moments, but happy moments made with the wrong person.

How many people were silently refusing to move all the way on by keeping these little boxes of misery?

She pulled the top and peaked inside. There was a small stuffed cat. It made her chest hurt. Pictures she’d had printed from her phone. She saw her own smiling face, the arm around her—but she turned it face down before she could see the rest. An envelope with a letter inside; what a nice letter it had been. So carefully written, so full of young, eager love. The outside of the envelope was unadorned with a name; it could have been from anyone, for anyone. There was simply a heart on the front, hand-drawn, black ink.

She closed the box. Put it in between the two piles.

Laura crouched down, extended her arm, pulled the Christmas ornaments free. With a sigh she put them to the left. Too many old decorations inside, family keepsakes. She hadn’t the energy to sort through, to separate the good from the bad.

There was a paper bag in the corner. If it contained what she thought it might, it would be another win, another item to put in the pile to the right, the one slowly getting dwarfed—

The cage rattled again, and this time there was no mistaking the sound. Something was moving inside one of the storage units, one a few rows deeper. Either that or someone was sitting outside it, rattling the chains.

“Hello?”

Her voice rolled off the walls, passed through the open links in the gates. It sounded strange, unlike her regular voice which was confident, present, a voice which commanded board rooms and demanded accountability. Instead it sounded like the voice of a frightened child.

No one answered. She kept her head raised for a moment, looking so much like a fox; sleek and alert. Her brown eyes stared at the ceiling, at the cages around her, at nothing.

She bent to continue her task, but her mind insisted on suggesting answers for the questions now dancing around her brain. In her mind’s eye she saw a pile of junk coalescing, forming into something almost human, something that was becoming sentient, and with each passing second it was becoming more aware of its situation. She saw that junk-humanoid growing upset, becoming indignant. Me, forgotten? ME? She saw its rolled carpet arms bashing the door of the cage which held it; she saw two old socks, rolled into dark knots, becoming its demanding eyes. The thing in the cage had old pencils and pens for fingers, and it had a gaping mouth with teeth made from old jewelry or perhaps rocks kept in a shoebox, sharp rocks, rocks that could cut and gnash and—

But that was stupid. It was a silly thought coming from an overworked and overstressed mind, and she snuffed it, mercilessly.

Laura reached for the Halloween decorations. To the left, absolutely to the left. Halloween was her favorite holiday, and it was right around the corner, and she’d had these decorations since she was a little girl.

That took care of everything close to the door; for the rest she’d have to climb inside, on her hands and knees. She dropped down, crawled into her storage unit.

A new thought announced itself: What if that sound really had been someone walking the aisles, rattling the chains, goosing the cages? What if he had been watching, waiting for the pretty young woman to climb inside her cage, and then, once she was down on all four, crawling like a mutt, her back turned, he’d run forward on silent feet and slam the door, shut the lock, rattle the chain-link triumphantly. And she’d be stuck, unable to escape. How horrible would that be?

She looked over her shoulder, panicked. There was no one there, no one coming; she could see down the aisle. Her paranoia had bested her; her tired mind had gotten another one over her. If there was any doubt, all she had to do was look down at her arms, covered in gooseflesh, or feel the small hairs that were sticking upright at the back of her neck.

“Hello?”

Her blood went cold.

It was a man’s voice, coming from somewhere deeper in the storage room, now behind her. From where she’d heard the chains shaking. Laura scrambled out quickly, slapping at the floor like a toddler.

Once outside of her small unit she stood, grabbed her purse, immediately wrestled for her stun gun. She could feel her heartbeat throbbing in her temples, behind her eyes, shaking her vision.

“Is someone there?” The voice spoke again, rows beyond where she stood. It was a low voice, pitiful, but something in its tone made the skin on her arms harden all over again. It sounded lonely.

She didn’t answer. Instead she swallowed—it took a great effort—and tried to slow her breathing.

“I can hear you over there,” he said, from somewhere in the dark distance. “Please.”

The smart move was to leave, to stuff everything back into the unit, shut the lock, and go upstairs, quickly. Yet she found herself slipping out of her heels, silently, leaving them with her piles of junk. With no loud clicks to betray her she began to slowly walk toward the end of her row, to turn left, to move farther into the room.

She walked past the first open aisle—he wasn’t there. It was too long a row to tell with just her eyes, but her ears had suggested he was a few rows in, somewhere deep in this sprawling depository of junk.

On her toes she moved to the next. She didn’t think he was here either, but still she gripped the edge of the cage that bordered the aisle, peaked her head around slowly.

“Please, I-I need help.” His voice was closer now and it startled her. Two rows beyond where she was standing. She crept closer, walking on the balls of her feet.

Her head slowly bent the corner. Her long chestnut colored hair hung down, dancing along the edges of one of the cages, and she jerked it away, suddenly sure a hand was going to appear, to grab her, to pull her face against the chain-link.

The row seemed empty. She was sure that the voice was coming from down here, but maybe her estimate had been off, maybe it was one more down.

That’s when she saw the fingers, poking through the chain-link. Halfway down the row, on the left. Someone was locked inside one of the storage units.

Okay, so call the cops, the voice in her head suggested. Go wait in the lobby and call the police.

She would, she decided, once she got a look at the guy. She just had to see his face, had to see where that voice was coming from, because it was a strange voice, sad, desperate, almost familiar but not quite.

Her feet moved silently, bringing her closer, and closer, and closer, and just one more step and she’d be able to see, because his head was turned away, she could only see the back of it, the close-cut black hair, the white skin, just one more step.

He turned.

“Oh! I knew I heard someone. Oh my Lord, thank God. Oh my God.” His face lit up, the eyes growing, the mouth stretching upward. She stopped where she was.

“Goodness are you a sight for sore eyes. I thought maybe I was just imagining those noises and I might really be alone here.”

He was wearing gray slacks and an open throat white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal pale forearms. His hair was jet black, darker than the night pressing against the walls of the building, and he had beard stubble that started just above his collar and went almost to his eyes. Eyes which were dark and tired and desperate. From where she stood the pupils looked black, but most of his face was in the shadows. He was smiling and it was a very full smile, a wide mouth that took up most of his face.

She noticed the lock on the unit, keeping him inside. It was a small silver padlock, much like the one on her own unit. There were some empty units in the room, those no one was currently renting, but management kept those shut with their own padlocks, red, easy to spot, this way when someone asked about availability, they could walk through the rows and find an open cage.

So that meant this unit belonged to someone. And whoever that was, they’d closed the lock on the door. After this man was inside.

He followed her eyes. “Say Miss, you think you could let me out of here? Seems I’m locked in.”

A peculiar thing happened: it seemed initially that she would close the distance between where she stood and where he sat, that she would crouch down, level their eyes. She took the first step toward him, then another, then paused. Why should she do such a thing?

“What’s the matter?” he asked, his brow folding down in a look of consternation. She noticed the wrinkles radiating out from the corners of his eyes, reaching for his hairline like thinly carved streams.

“Wh—” She cleared her throat, tried again. “What are you doing in there?” Her voice had gone soft again, that infuriatingly infantile tone she’d used before. How she hated the sound.

The man in the cage looked down as if the answer might lay somewhere on his clothing. He looked at his open palms, the way a man coming out of a fugue state might inspect himself, as if to make sure he was still whole.

“I don’t know.” His dark eyes lifted, locked on hers. “Honest to God, I’m not sure.”

“Well how’d you get in there?”

“I can’t remember.”

The room was silent between each exchange, the only sound the softly humming overhead lights.

“I should call someone, someone to help.” Her cell phone showed no service, a final and declarative X where the signal bars should have been. Unsurprising; she never had service in this concrete tomb.

“Yeah okay.” He shifted forward, leaned closer to the cage and Laura found herself taking an involuntary step back.

“I don’t have any service in here.” Her tone was apologetic. “If I just go into the lobby.” She turned to walk.

“Wait!”

Slowly she turned her head. He was sitting on his knees now, fingers laced in the chain-link. 

“Don’t do that. Please.”

“But I can’t call from in here.”

“Just please don’t go. Please. I—I don’t want to be alone again.”

“I don’t understand.” And she didn’t. None of this made any sense. The absurdity of the situation struck her all at once: here she was, in the middle of the night, standing in the empty storage room, talking to a strange man locked in a cage.

“Can’t you just help me?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said, some of her natural fire returning to her voice.

“No. Not like that. If you leave, I’m worried you’ll never come back. Just please. Please don’t go out there.”

Without thought she dropped her phone into her purse, backtracked to where she had been standing. It was the strangest thing: she’d almost felt like herself again with her back turned, with distance between them, but now, standing here, locking eyes with this stranger—she felt her mind floating, felt the disorienting confusion that had accosted her initially.

Instead of helping she was talking with him again.

“You must remember something. People don’t just find themselves locked in cages in storage rooms.”

He leaned back again, further into the shadows. And hadn’t his eyes seemed just as black when he was leaning forward with his face in the light? Laura thought they might have, but then that thought floated away, carried by some invisible wind.

“I was at a party. A dinner party. That’s the last I remember.” Now his knees were drawn up to his shoulders, his feet splayed out in front of him, toes pointed toward her. Chin to his chest.

Absurdly, she heard herself ask: “Do you know anyone in the building?”

He lifted his head in the darkness. “I don’t even know what building this is, Miss.”

“It’s 735 King Street.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well where do you live?”

“I live on the hill. Out west.”

“Which hill?”

“Prune.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Prune Hill? It’s just across the Harrison Bridge.”

“I don’t know any Harrison Bridge.”

His head lowered again. His hands were laced across his knees, picking idly at each other. He was studying his belt-buckle.

“I don’t know what to tell you then,” he said softly.

Laura realized she was sitting, her back against the cage on the far side of the aisle. She jumped, looking over her shoulder, fearing that something might be pressed up against the chain-link, breathing on her, drooling on her. And when had she sat down? Why?

When she turned back he was closer, no longer just a shape in the shadow, she could see his face again, the lines that raced from his eyes to his temples, the heavy bags underneath those dark, sad eyes. The man was sitting cross-legged against the door, fingers once again tracing the chain-link.

“Look, I really think you should just let me call someone. There’s nothing I can do—”

“But isn’t there?” He smiled again and it was such a full smile. She noted how perfectly shaped and perfectly white his teeth were, like veneers. It was a smile that should have been charming but instead made her skin crawl.

“I—I don’t follow.” Her voice was deflating again, losing its authority.

“You don’t need them to help me. You can do it yourself.”

“But I can’t!” The words left her with much more force than she intended. When she spoke again she spoke quietly, as if not to disturb this empty room of forgotten belongings. “Even if I could, I…I’m not sure that I should.”

“Why not, Laura?” And now his voice was low, mellow, perfectly reasonable.

“Because I don’t know you. I don’t know who locked you up.”

“I’m a person locked in a cage and I need your help. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

“But I don’t know why you’re locked in a cage. Prisoners are kept in cages, murderers and rapists are kept in cages. Bad people are kept in cages.”

The smile slowly faded from his face. It was a handsome face, but not in a way that made her want to trust him. He slid backward, back into the shadows at the edge of his cage. She realized they were both sitting the same way now: back against the wall, knees in front of their chests, hands hugging their legs.

“Good people are put into cages sometimes, too. Misunderstood people are kept in cages. People with good intentions and bad results are put in cages.”

“I know that,” she said. “Which is why I want to help. But I don’t want to do it on my own. Let me get someone who can help.”

He chuckled, the sound rising from the darkness so much like water gurgling down a drain. He raised his head and his dark eyes softly reflected the light, almost the way her cat’s did.

“No,” he said. “I can’t let you leave. If you do, you won’t come back.”

“I will though. I promise.”

“That’s what they always say.”

She could hardly see the stranger now, backed up against the wall. It was her and a glowing pair of eyes conversing in the empty storage room. A chill wormed its way down her spine, freezing her to the floor.

She went to reply, but he cut her off. “You think you’re the first, Laura? The first person to find me here, locked inside? No. Not even close. They always say they’re going to go get me help, but they never come back. Maybe they’re lying. Or maybe they forget about me as soon as they walk through that door, I don’t know! But it’s always the same.”

The eyes winked out in the black. She had the impression he’d lowered his head again.

“Always the same.”

“How do you know my name?” she asked.

The eyes reappeared. “You told me.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did. When you first found me. You asked me my name and I asked you yours.”

“I did not.”

“You did.”

“Then how come I don’t know your name?” Her voice was rising, but not in the way she wished it would. She sounded like a scolded child arguing with their parent, fighting a losing battle, one it had no authority to wage.

“You must’ve forgotten. They always seem to.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Then how do I know you, Laura?”

“You don’t know me.”

“Oh. But I do.”

Silence fell again. She found she couldn’t look away from the stranger’s eyes. It was like when she was a kid and she would find herself trying to fall asleep in her dark bedroom. She hated total darkness. She had wanted to sleep with the tv on, but her father wouldn’t allow it. So each night she’d lay awake, trying to find sleep in her black bedroom, the only light the thin glow that crept in under her door from the hallway and the meager shining of the moon if it happened to be hanging outside her window. And she would stare at the carbon monoxide detector plastered to her ceiling, the thin green light on its face; she’d stare at that light, letting her eyes slowly fall out of focus, letting the corners of her vision go a deeper, more total black, she’d stare and stare and try not to blink until that little green light was the only thing in the entire world, just her and the green light.

And now it was just her and the shining eyes of the stranger in the cage. The storage room might as well have been her bedroom and she might as well have been a six-year-old girl and not a twenty-eight-year-old woman. She was eyes, he was eyes. There was nothing else.

With effort she broke their gaze. She was sitting on the cold concrete floor of the storage room, surrounded by the forgotten smells, the cages of personal neglect.

“Even if I wanted to help you,” she heard herself saying, “I couldn’t. I don’t have the key.”

“But don’t you?”

“No, I—”

She looked again at the padlock. It was small and silver, just like hers, and now she noticed something else, something that made her head feel light and untethered, as if it might just float away, float to the ceiling where it would stay forever—pinned to the ceiling like the helium birthday balloon of some absent-handed kid.

There was a red strip of electric paint on the front. Just like hers. It was her lock keeping the door closed.

When she managed to take her eyes from the lock, she found the stranger sitting at the front of the cage, his hands on the chain-link again. His movements seemed to produce no sound.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said, raising her hand to her eyes, rubbing them until her vision was nothing more than bright, circular flashes. She felt ill. Hot and cold at the same time. On the verge of puking, of passing out.

Now he leaned forward even further, placing his white flesh against the ridges of the chain-link; it cut grooves into his face, separated it into small square sections; each eye had its own section, up top, and down below his wide smile painted itself across three.

“What’s happening is very important, Laura. So I need you to listen. You are at a crossroads. Do you understand? And when you reach such an intersection, you must make a decision. It’s time for you to make your decision. What’ll it be?”

“How am I supposed to make a decision when I don’t even know what I’m deciding?”

“It’s simple. Will you open the door and set me free, or keep the lock closed against me? Will you remember or will you forget? Will you stay inside your cage or will you finally open the door and leave?”

She emptied her purse on the floor. The keys fell out, even though she remembered leaving them in the padlock of her unit. But wasn’t this her unit too? After all this, was this not also her cage? It was her lock on the door, after all.

“Take your time,” the stranger said, leaning back. “I’m not going anywhere.” He slid back into the darkness with a rueful laugh. “Unless you decide I am.”

“I don’t know what to do.” Slow tears were coursing down her face, darkening the makeup around her eyes, cutting a stream toward the corners of her lips.

“Do we ever?”

She lifted her keys, shifted through the set, looking for the small silver one that would open the padlock. The stranger was nothing more than a pair of burning eyes in the darkness again. She shuffled forward on her butt, reached out for the lock.

Her mind was playing back his words, all of them: Oh. But I do. You can help me yourself. You are at a crossroads. Do you understand? It’s time to make a decision.

What stopped her was simple enough: song lyrics. Lyrics to an old song that she hadn’t listened to in years. They flooded into her head, freezing her where she was: Some say that he went down to the crossroads and met the devil, boy.

She looked into the cage, into the darkness at the back, but the eyes were gone. Half of the cage was illuminated, half dark, and as far as she could tell, totally empty. She snapped her head to the left, to the right, realizing where she was, what she was doing. She quickly gathered her belongings from the floor, threw them into her purse with reckless abandon, shot off the floor, ran to the end of the row, down the aisle, back toward the door, fear and panic choking her breath, trying to slow her the way it always did in her nightmares. She ran past the row with S132, darting her head in that direction as she did, noticing the open door of her unit, her stuff strewn across the floor, not caring.

Right before she reached the door to the lobby, she heard a sound from behind her, a stealthy sound, someone rattling a cage in the distance, somewhere far back in the room where she couldn’t see. And she could hear them laughing.

The next day was not so long, and that was a good thing. It was the fourth of July. They hadn’t given her the day off, but they’d generously sent everyone home at noon. She’d spent the morning staring at her computer screen, pretending to work but not really.

She’d had a terrible sleep the night before, her mind plagued with nightmares in which she was a little girl, trying to fall asleep in her old bedroom, staring at the green light. But then the light would change from green to red, a bright red, the color of burning fire or perhaps the electric tape on her padlock. Then another light would appear next to it. They were eyes she was looking at. She knew this because they were looking back at her. And then she would hear someone rattling around inside her closet, laughing a low, ugly laugh.

When she arrived home, she parked in her garage spot, happy to see other faces. Happy families sporting their red white and blue, heading to picnics and barbeques, maybe setting up chairs to see the parade or the firework show.

She had work to do.

But before going upstairs to finish her packing—tomorrow was the big move—she knew she had something else to face.

Laura pushed open the heavy door to the storage room. She waited in the silence for a moment, waited to see if she was alone. A moment later she began walking down the long aisle to her left. The smell of dust and decay was stronger than ever. She realized that the dim lighting provided by the overhead bulbs was the same in here whether it was one pm or midnight; there were no windows.

She snatched a glance down her row. Her stuff was still on the floor, the door to her unit still agape. Nice to know I have trustworthy neighbors, she thought. Had trustworthy neighbors, that is.

She continued down the aisle, past the next row, and the next, and the next. There she stopped. Her heart was beating loud in her head again, shaking the sides of her throat with her pulse. Slowly she leaned her head around the corner. The row was empty.

You can do it, she told herself. You’re not scared.

Then she was walking. She found herself walking on the balls of her feet again, like last night—that is, if last night had even happened; she was beginning to think she must have fallen asleep while unpacking her storage unit, had a nightmare—this time in her sneakers instead of barefoot.

She reached the stranger’s unit. It was empty. There was a red padlock on it. The ones the office used to mark the unrented units, the ones available to residents. It was split in half by the light, just as it was last night. The back half all shadows, the front scuffed concrete. She crouched down, put her hand on the chain-link.

There was something on the floor, toward the back. Most of it was in the darkness.

Laura pressed her face to the chain-link, strained her eyes to see.

It was an envelope. There was no writing on it, just a hand-drawn heart in black ink. It could have been from anyone, for anyone.

She decided that it wasn’t for her, and she left.