Get Home
She pulled up to the apartment building, a four-story walk-up with no private driveway, and parked her car under the only working light she could find on this side of the block.
Armed with a pizza delivery bag in one hand and her car keys threaded between the fingers of the other, she commenced the climb up to the fourth floor. Gingerly she stepped over broken glass, a discarded condom, a used-up syringe too close to the condom, and on the last flight of stairs, a scurrying creature she tried hard not to identify, real-life practice for her entomology exam be damned.
Somewhere under her, a deep voice yelled words she could not make out, replied to by a higher-pitched voice whose words she chose not to work out. A door slammed hard enough to shake the floor she was on, and a baby wailed.
The door she sought, the last of the night, materialized at the end of the hallway. Before she could drop the delivery bag on the floor, before she could dig her phone out of her pocket for the obligatory proof, the door opened. Heavy bass spilled onto the hallway, accompanied by the stench of alcohol and chemicals she might recognize in a lab setting, but preferred not to here.
“I can’t give you a tip,” a man twice as tall and wide as her said, or seem to, if he could enunciate his words more clearly, “but you can party with us, in l…l…leeoo.”
The man made to grab her arm. She took a step back. “Thank you, but I’m on the clock. I’ll just take a picture and leave. Can you please close the door? I need to show the apartment number.”
For a second, two, three, the man regarded her, unmoving. Then a voice from deep within the apartment yelled for pizza, and the man said, “all right.”
Get Karla Melendez’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
She held the bag up, level with the apartment number; took her picture, shaky but clear enough; placed the bag on the floor, next to the door, and took off, back the way she came. If they opened the door to get their pizza, she didn’t hear.
Down the stairs she ran, past the scurrying creatures, the wailing baby, the condom and syringe pair, and the broken glass.
A man dressed in jeans and a leather jacket stood under the only working streetlight, his boot propped against the pole, smoking what could only be a rolled up joint. It looked homemade, like those of yesteryear; definitely not from a modern dispensary. “This yours?” he said, bending his head towards her car.
She nodded.
“Mm. Get home.”
Something about the way the man dragged on his joint, held the smoke in, tipped his head back, and formed rings above him, made her pause. A distant memory tickled the back of her mind, too fleeting to hold on.
The man motioned for her to leave, but didn’t look at her or spoke again.
By the time she got into her car and checked the rearview mirror, the man was gone. She got a feeling that she should call her mom, but right at that moment, all she wanted was to get home.
Later, in between studying for the entomology and chemistry finals, her mom called. Her grandpa had passed away at three in the morning, in his sleep. His last words, as he lost consciousness, were, “Get home.”
