Every Day, Invariably, With No Change In Routine Since I Became His Tenant, The Landlord Visited At 6

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Every day, invariably, with no change in routine since I became his tenant, the landlord visited at 6
o' clock on the dot. Before the old cuckoo down the hall could finish its six chimes, the knock
would come and the door open, and he would be there, in all his senile glory. Liver spots,
crumpled skin, old, unwashed clothes and the stale smell that I imagine Egyptologists are used to
when unearthing mummies; it would all be there.

Or I visited him, which occurred quite frequently during my first years as his tenant. There, in his
room, the Egypt smell would multiply till I could stand it no more. If I visited him, he'd be waiting
for me in his unmade bed, his eternally unmade bed, if I might add. He always seemed to know
when I would visit him and when he would visit me, don't ask me how, but he just does. But he'd
smile, a yellow toothed smile that showed perfect sets of artificial teeth, and gesture weakly for
me to sit down. Sit down on the bed, that meant, and so I would. The mattress would creak and
maybe I worried a lot of times that the whole bed would fall down.

The conversation usually went in these general lines:

"How was your day?" The perfect opener, now made stale by countless days of the same
conversation. Stale as his room, stale as his dried breath, stale as his old clothes.

And I would tell him. If I wasn't working on a manuscript, then I was waiting the whole day, or
maybe downtown, shopping.

I'm a writer, or maybe someone who thinks he's one. No. Correction. I don't think I'm a writer.
Maybe fourteen years ago I did, when I submitted an award-winning short story for a local
competition. First place, quite a lot of money won, at least in a teen's eye view. I still kept the
original; it's somewhere in my messy room. Then a couple of poems when I was in college. In
fact, lots of poems that got printed in a nice paperback anthology. Very well received. Very good
cover. Very good everything. The culture section in the daily called it "an evocative collection
that reminisces on lost innocence and childhood." I laughed my head off when I read that. I just
wrote, for Christ's sake! I don't make evocative anything! It was obvious that they didn't know
what they were talking about, and neither did I, to tell the cold truth, when I wrote the poems. I
just wrote what came to my head. What really sickens me is that, twenty years from now someone
will make it a school Literature textbook and force poor unfortunates to look for hidden
mean

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