Undeliverable as Addressed

          We lived in a factory once, an old brick building with wide plank floors and no curtains on the windows. It’s a place we left some time ago, this city of our youth. We watched other people’s lives without trying and brushed our teeth in the dark, just let the lights from the empty building across the courtyard be our night-light. I always wondered who the lights were for. It was a furniture company, you told me. I never saw furniture in its empty rooms. Sometimes squatters hung blankets in the coffin-sized windows. Sometimes we heard whispering, heavy things being moved, broken bottles in the courtyard.

          We lived behind fortress walls, under church ceilings. We had more room than in any past apartment. Too many empty rooms we couldn’t fill. The walls watched us and hushed our voices. Sound was too loud there, daylight too bright. It was never dark in that place.

          Once a crib showed up in the courtyard, almost new, huge slashes cut in its mattress. I said we could wash it and get a new mattress. It was real wood, hard work to drag up the stairs. We could paint it white, I said. I pictured it white in a shaft of moonlight.

          You cut yourself on something when you bent to pick it up. A jagged slice of metal. The bleeding didn’t stop. We spent three hours at the clinic waiting for your tetanus shot while an old lady asked everyone if they knew where she could buy ghost cards. Everyone looked away from her hedge-like eyebrows, her prickly upper lip. Her stare was fierce.

          When we woke the next day it was noon. I could tell by the harsh, pure light that fell unfiltered through the tall windows, across your sleeping face, across your bandaged thumb. I saw your hand in the light. I saw how pale it looked, mottled and slack. All of a sudden I looked at my own hands. Then I woke you up, because I was scared.

          Now that the crib was inside it looked older. The wood slats were chipped and cut, as if whoever slashed the mattress had tried to chop through the frame. The front folded down on metal hinges marked with tiny red specks. I wondered who had slept in that crib.

          I thought we would paint it white but we never did. We walked to the hardware store that same day. We bought white paint. The paint can stayed in a corner of the empty room, rusting. The crib stood next to it, another space we wouldn’t fill. Sometimes I thought I heard the walls crying. At night I thought I heard the mattress whispering, down in the courtyard far below. I knew we would leave that place soon.









Kathryn Kulpa lives outside Providence, where she does this and that, mostly that. She was the winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for her short story collection Pleasant Drugs (2005). Her short stories have appeared in The Pedestal, Flashquake, Pif, The Florida Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Rhode Island and is the editor of Newport Review.