I sit down on my chair and sigh. That was a waste of time. I switch on the tube. Fukkin’ yoga. Stretchin’ bastards hogging up my airwaves. That means it’s early early early, I was behind that thing’s couch for about six hours, then inside the parking garage for about 45 minutes or so. Time sure flies when you’re... doing a bunch of stuff. Or however the saying goes. Check out the skinmouth’s apartment, check, follow him to where the shed used to be, check, sit my ass around and come up with something else to do... check. I turn my chair back to my window and peer out, sittin’ and watchin’.

The sun comes slowly up, which is what it usually does, and I don’t see much of anything out there worth noting. That business building is a pain in the ass. It blocks my view. No one comes in or out the front entrance so I guess the building just opened? that would make sense seeing as how it appeared out of nowhere yesterday. Or today, or however long I’ve been up. It doesn’t matter. I keep watching. Here comes one of the security guards I saw last night, not sure which one since I didn’t get a great look at either, but I recognized fat fingers and a gut that was probably filled with some kind of microwaved breakfast from the break room.

He was looking back and forth, fast, like he was finally going to find that sneaky fella that got away from him last night, as if you can find someone after looking fro them for five hours. This isn’t hide and seek, unless you’re a big dummy, you hightail it out from wherever you are. That’s how you get caught, hide under a car for a long time, then they just bring in a dog and promise to give it a little peanut butter snack if it smells someone suspicious in a place where that person shouldn’t be. You can hide for a while, but only until you get the opportunity to be where someone wouldn’t expect you to be Like away from where they’re looking for you.

He passes by, then about 30 minutes later, the other one walks past the front of the building. He looks up, like there’s something to see. He stands there for so long, that I get curious and walk up to the window, looking up where he is, but I don’t see anything. Maybe he’s looking at a bird or a particularly interesting airplane that he’s never seen before. Jesus. What a guy. I should call and report him to his boss for being a time waster. A cloud watcher. I shake my head and sit back down. The security guard looks back down, then walks to the entrance to the building. Holy shit. This could be it. The first person to ever walk into that building.

He stands in front of the entrance for a while, looking at his fingernails, then he reaches out to the push bar on the front door and gives it a shove. It opens! He didn’t even use a key or one of those cards that makes things beep open. That means anyone can go inside and have a look. A good long look. I start pacing my living room.

I can’t. I can. I won’t. I sit back down and turn the chair away from the window, back at the TV. I flick it on and there’s some guy bent over a hole, talking to a guy crouching next to him. He says “now, the thing you have to understand about holes, is that they can be any depth, and can still be called a hole! Isn’t that interesting?” The man crouching next to him is nodding enthusiastically. “Now, take this hole here.” He gestures “It’s not too deep, only a few feet down, but the second you put your shovel in the dirt, it’s a hole. It’s the same hole! No matter how much deeper you make it! Isn’t that something?!” The man next to him says “Sure is! Now when do we put these pilings in? How deep does it have to be to keep the bridge up?” The main man says “this is it! It doesn’t matter how deep we make it! Haven’t you been listening to me! We can put the piling in right now and they’ll keep the bridge up until thunder rumbles from the sky and Jesus himself comes down a golden ladder and says it’s time for all the cows to come home. It’s a hole no matter how deep it is!”

I turn off the TV, making a mental note not to cross any bridges any time soon. I’m buying time. I know myself. I’m going to do it, but if I pretend that I’m not, maybe I’ll forget. It’s a bad idea, going inside that office building. Something off about it, like it’s only there as a prop, just like the parking lot surrounding the shed. I busy myself in the kitchen.What do I have in here. When was the last time I went shopping? I look through the fridge, there’s the pickles, an open tin can of sourkraut with the lid lifted halfway like the blade of a buzzsaw. Too dangerous. Better to wait until it’s gone bad, then I can just throw the whole mess away. how long does it take something rotten to go rotten?

I check the freeze. There’s a frozen pizza wrapped in plastic, but it’s grown icy tendrils that’ll only make the pizza wet if I try to put it in the microwave. Buying time, la la la. I walk to the bathroom and go through my medicine chest above my sink. The setup is surprisingly similar to the skinmouth’s bathroom. I wonder if the buildings were made at the same time by the same people. Nothing much in here, an old blue comb with bent tines. I stand on tiptoe and look on the top shelf. Goddamn it. There’s a small bar of soap wrapped in brown paper. Does everyone have one of these kicking around inside their house? I didn’t put it there. Who keeps these?

I put the bar to my nose and inhale deeply. It smells like a faint cheap flower that’s been pressed in a book for 100 years. Smells like a grandmas armpit. I put it back. I’m not doing anything with that. I’m going to leave it there for the next people. that’s probably how this whole thing comes about. 700 people live in a place and at least one has to leave a cheap bar of soap on the top shelf of a medicine cabinet. Probably someone named Michael or Doris. “I’ll just put this here, never know when I’ll need a tiny bar of shitty souvenir soap that I got that one time I stayed in a hotel.” Then they leave it because they get so old that the top shelf grows out of their reach as they shrink into their spines.

I go to my bedroom. I have sliding closet doors too. Not an uncommon feature, but it still gives me pause. I don’t like that my place is pretty similar to the skinmouth’s. I slide one of the doors and see that I also don’t have anything in my closet, just a few leftover hangers, also more than likely left by Michael or Doris, either being kind of leaving in a hurry. Or one of them died and the family had to clean out the apartment in a hurry and they stopped seeing things after hefting Doris’s hoarded Goodwill purchases for three straight days. The people doing most of the hefting were probably friends with Doris’s kids or something. Though they were going to get away easy by just hanging around for a few hours, filtching some small things while Doris’s kids weren’t looking, then helping themselves to free pizza which they were promised, despite saying they would have helped out anyway, but secretly knowing that they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the pizza. And some small valuables.

Everyone is a robber. Then Doris’s kids forgot the pizza because of how torn up they were. Doris was so young, she was only 89 and in the prime of her life. She really knew how to light up a room. Forget her racist rankings and dead cats under an avalanche of National Geographic magazines. Maybe she could light up a room, but it was probably just the reflection off of her huge dentures that she bought from a website based in India. Doris’s kid’s friends are hungry and there isn’t anything good to steal, but now they’re stuck for three days, and one of them gets a lung infection and has to skip eights days of work. For pizza and knickknacks! Could have skipped the whole thing and saved that eight days at work money and just bought yourself some cheap glass paperweight shit and a pizza to wash it down with. I shake my head. Poor Doris. She had such potential. What ever happened to you.

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I give the hangers a swipe and they jangle around, disturbed that I wasn’t using them like they were supposed to be used. hangers aren’t for hittings. They are for hangings. I slide the door closed. I can still hear them jangling and settling in there. I have good ears. Good ears for hearing jangling thing inside small spaces.

I walk down the hall toward the living room. There’s the other room, in the same fukkin’ place that the skinmouth’s has his other room. I roll my eyes. I go in there too. Not having to walk slow through the dark has it’s advantages so I can see right inside without having to guess first. Ah ha! see? We’re not the same. I’m not the same as the skinmouth. I got some things in here. Not a drafting table either, but at least it’s not empty all the way. I Have a little rug in here with a wingback chair sitting on it. This is my sittin’ room. My parlor in case of guests or an impromptu painting session, or whatever you do in a sittin’ room. Drawing room. Sorry. I sit down on the chair and sigh contentedly. Or sigh with some kind of emotion other then content. Maybe trepidation? Pensively? Pensively sighing? that doesn’t sound right. I don’t feel pensive. I feel thirsty. I stand back up and sit back down, sighing thirstily.

I heave up and walk back to the kitchen. I walk to the kitchen a lot. It helps me think. Helps me kill time to forget. Shit! I just remembered. I was getting along pretty well until I thought about it too hard. I take a quick look out the window. Just looking for birds or something. Not checking on the building. I open the oven and it makes that sproinging spring sound. I’ll remember that sound in case I hear it in the wild. There’s nothing in there. Why would there be? It’s not a good place to store things unless you want to accidentally catch them on fire. I haven’t done that before, but I know it’s a possibility out there in the world. Preheat your oven for a delicious pot roast, then little Jimmy from upstairs calls down, “Mommy! I smell something funny!” Then goes back to his room to keep playing video games. No one heard little Jimmy, but he wasn’t wrong. Something smells funny.

Little Jimmy’s mom is outside, gardening, or at least attempting to garden. She’s pulling thing out of the ground that don’t look like they’re supposed to be there, all the while checking google on her phone to see if she can identify what she’s pulling up. She googles five leaves, red stem then the state she lives in and what comes up is a picture of exactly what she pulled out. It’s an herb that takes a thousand years to come to fruition which means that this was planted by indigenous peoples and is the rarest plant on the face of the fuckkin’ Earth. She curses under her breath “I fukkin’ hate things that grow from the ground. I’m fukkin’ done with this. We’re putting in a pool.” She wearily stands up, her gardening knees crackling and popping like bubble wrap.

She looks behind her and there’s a thick smoke coming from the open kitchen window. She sprints inside and beholds a belching black smoke spraying out from the oven. Just then the fire alarm goes off above her head, adding to the confusion. “Jesus fuck!” She yells, grabbing a potholder and opening the oven. The smoke pours out tenfold. Now the top third of the kitchen is awash in foul and pungent storm of smoke. She slams the door to the oven and runs upstairs to grab little Jimmy who squawks when she tears the video game controller from his sticky hand. She thinks briefly that little Jimmy’s hands were always sticky. how many times did she have to tell him to wash them? Sticky little smelly fukkin' fingers.

She picks him up like a football and runs out the front door, yelling “fire! Fire! Got a fire here!” Forgetting that she could have turned the stove off and gave the interior a spritz with the fire extinguisher under her sink. There’s only one fire truck in the county which is currently being worked on by a retired tugboat mechanic with bad hearing. He was doing it for free and has been working on it for three months now. Every time the fire chief stops by his house, the fire engine is in more and more pieces. Jimmy’s mom starts calling everyone she knows, and after an hour, three cars show up, but only one of her friends thought to bring some water which has mostly sloshed out of the five gallon bucket placed in the front passenger seat. “I forgot to put the seatbelt on it.”

By then, the second story has collapsed onto the first story. The bucket, half filled with water, is splashed unceremoniously onto the porch, which isn’t even on fire yet. They all sit back and watch as everything the family ever owned floats away in tiny little ashes, settling around the neighborhood like delicate confetti. Little Jimmy is crying about his video game. He’s put 72 hours into it and was about to get final completion, which Jimmy’s mom has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t give a shit about Jimmy’s video games. She’s thinking about the painting she made herself hanging proudly over the mantel, the couch she was still paying for, and the stash of $197 in the top drawer of her dresser.

After the fiasco, Jimmy’s mom gets a call at the Motel 6 she and Jimmy are staying at from the guy bulldozing what’s left of the house into a big pile. He says he uncovered the oven and opened it up and he’s no expert or anything, but that’s where the fire probably came from. Jimmy’s mom looks at Jimmy who’s laying on the bed, watching a flashing cartoon on the TV. “No shit, I already told you that.”

“You did? Are you sure it was me?”

“Pretty sure. This Rob?”

”No, this is Allen.”

”Okay, then, no, whatever, is the insurance agent there?”

”Yeah, she’s right here, you want to talk to her?”

”No, Allen, I want to keep talking to you since you have so much to say about something I already know about.”

Allen passes the phone to the insurance agent, mouthing the word rude. The agent gets on the line. “Ma’am? Are you there?” “Yes, I’m still here, just like I was about eight seconds ago when I was talking to Allen. When do I get my check?”

”your check?”

”yes. My check.”

”This might come as a surprise, but after cataloguing the contents of the oven, it’s my position that this fire was intentionally set. The fraud investigator is on his way and will have some questions for you. Also present will be an officer of the law who will also have some questions.” “Are you fukkin’ joking?! That’s my house! Why would I want to burn down my house?! So I can stay in a shitty hotel that only has two channels on the TV?!” “I’m sure I don’t know ma’am.” The agent looks at Allen and mouths the words so rude. Allen nods like I know, right?!

“I’m not at liberty to discuss an ongoing fraud investigation, but I can tell you that there’s a drippy burny substance consistent with plastic inside the oven. Quite a lot of it I’m afraid. So much so that it couldn’t be anything other than an intentional attempt to burn down an entire house. Which is what happened.”

”Plastic!? What the fuck you mean a bunch of plastic?!” Jimmy’s mom looks over at Jimmy who is staring intently at the TV. Very intently.

“A bunch of plastic. Looks like a bunch of plastic. What’s not blackened by the fire is blue with some red mixed in.”

”Blue with some red mixed in?! I don’t even own anything plastic that’s red and blue!”

Jimmy slowly gets up from the bed and walks toward the bathroom. Jimmy’s mom drops the phone. “What did you do! What did you do!” She’s grabbing him by the collar and Jimmy is blubbering “You told me to clean my room! I Just cleaned my room!”

Like I said, an oven is not a good place to store things unless you want to start an accidental fire. I close the oven door and get moving to my bedroom. Need to do this right. Need to dress the part. Can’t go waltzing into an office building looking like you don’t belong in an office building. Time to bust out the ‘ol fancy duds. No more wasting time.