Decameron: The Corsair of Apartment 4B [II/4]
The first disaster was the pipe bursting. The second was that it stayed burst.
“We’ll send somebody out as soon as we can,” they’d assured her, and Lana believed them. But as soon as they could wasn’t going to be fast enough to save the ceiling in that part of the room, nor the eight boxes of old notebooks she’d had stacked up in that corner, nor that one paper plate she’d had signed by everyone in her freshman dorm. Those were all basically congealed into one big papery pulp at this point.
At least she’d had an excuse to text her cute neighbor.
“Nope,” Hannah had replied two hours later. “It’s all nice and dry over here 🎉”
Well that’s good news, Lana thought, sitting on top of an upturned plastic trash bin and looking out at the (still dripping) mess in her living room.
What she needed, she knew, was something big enough to contain all the water, but small enough that she could move it when it was full. The trash bin had been retired from duty when it became obvious that it was too heavy for her to handle even partially full. Her pots and pans were too small, and the frequent trips to empty them were beginning to make her back and ribs ache.
She’d wanted to mine those old notebooks for inspiration. They were full of drawings she’d made as a kid, when drawing had been all looseness and fun, not starched stiff by art school. She’d been moping around the apartment, kicking herself for not being more productive during the self-isolation time (no distractions!), when she’d thought of the notebooks and dug them out to look at later, to spur her into creative action. She’d been playing Animal Crossing for the fifth hour that afternoon, squatting about two feet from the notebook stack, when the pipes had burst.
Under her bed she found a few long, thin plastic containers. They would be worse than the pots and pans, she knew, unwieldy and horizontal. She kicked them back in place in frustration, and fell backwards onto the floor. The destroyed paper plate signed by her freshman hall, she could live without. She’d never liked half the people on that floor anyway. Half of them hogged the bathroom like nobody’s—
The bathroom. She scrambled clumsily off the floor and stumbled to the bathroom, her hands falling heavily on the handle to the cabinet underneath the sink. She brushed aside the tumbleweed of plastic bags that she kept there to reveal: the perfect container. Plastic. Medium-sized. Ergonomic handles. Wheels.
It was almost perfect, at least. It was full of something heavy, obscured by two gigantic packs of Q-Tips she’d bought once for reasons lost to time. She frowned a little at the weight, but it was certainly a solvable problem. Just dump everything and worry about it later. She heaved the container out and tipped it over onto the tiled floor, then paused and stared at the upturned contents, bewildered.
Bottle after bottle of hand sanitizer littered the bathroom floor. Small ones, big ones, sprays. Some were slightly used, but most were new. Untouched. All flavors. Her floor was covered in treasure. But how did they end up...?
And at once, she remembered. She’d bought them all before, for art conventions. To clean her hands before shaking other peoples’. To rinse off after touching money. She’d never used them much, in the moment, but she’d always felt she should have some on her when she tabled, and she’d always forgotten she already had some when the next con rolled around. She’d been buying hand sanitizer accidentally for years.
She gave two each to the guys who came to patch the pipes, explaining that she was a forgetful artist, not a hoarder, and they were good-natured enough about it to even ask to see her drawings. She held her portfolio up for them from across the room and they clapped, politely.
When they’d left, she sat back down on the trash can and picked up her phone. She looked at her lock screen and imagined texting Hannah about her newfound hand sanitizer fortune. Hannah would text her back right away, she knew without knowing how she knew. Hannah’d ask for a bottle with a wink, and Lana would open her door and Hannah would open hers, and Lana would throw it to her across the hall, and it would all be very cute, and then the next day Hannah would leave her on Seen for eight hours.
Lana stretched out her legs, then she stretched her arms over her head and set the phone back down on her table, reaching for her Nintendo Switch instead. Its screen was the cleanest it had been since she’d gotten it, sprayed down by orange-scented hand sanitizer only an hour or so earlier. Her reflection in the black loading screen was crisp and clear. For the first time in a long while, she looked down at herself and felt young.
Decameron is a newsletter recounting the 14th Century set of quarantine tales for 2020. Read the original story.