Mine was an aged building that sweat under the pressure to remain standing. Mold had bruised its damp walls, like storm clouds from an artist’s brush. White awnings like sails webbed freshly-carved stone buttresses hewn long ago, and that once seemed to herald a new prosperity. But these too turned a uniform gray. The moon was keeping me awake. The moon and seventy three chinchillas that had made a nest for themselves in my pantry.

I was lying on a mattress I call “Sadie,” watching projections of the phosphenes frolicking in my eyes when I saw the tear. In truth, I’d noticed the flaw in the wallpaper before, but from this angle the curled ridge looked far more prominent–more inviting. I leapt up, danced a little dance, edging gracefully over to the tear in the wallpaper, and heard as tiny feet skittered across linoleum in response.

With a graceful but precise maneuver, similar to those I’d honed in Central American jungle dales, I swung my arm around and caught purchase of the torn edge, and then stepped away from the wall, tearing the damp paper down to the yellow, varmint-stained moulding. And then I stood still in spent victory.

The webs between my toes tingled and I realized that I’d been standing for hours, staring at the newspapers that lined the walls beneath the faded wallpaper, spongy and moist. I pressed my thumb into a block of text and it gave away almost immediately. I felt something cold, and there was a sucking sound as I pulled my thumb free. I don’t remember which came first, the high-pitched ring in my ears, or the uninvited tears. My sadness, though, was absolute, and I sought solace in the fuzzy words on the pages I lived in. I curled up by the warped floorboards with my hand against a column about a provocateur who arrived by rail in NOLA.