Invisible Women

Hidden Women 3

The woman down the hall is a hoarder, and her tiny apartment is a labyrinth of boxes and trash. She never emerges from her layer of debris, and yet somehow it grows to consume the edges of the walls and all the empty spaces in between.

The woman down the hall slinks her body over and between, collapsing into the tiniest spaces because that is where she feels safest.

She is a rat, this woman. We imagine her apartment is a three-dimensional maze, and she maniacally rushes through it, chasing the scent of something absolutely delectable.

We have never seen this woman, but we know she is real. At nights when it is quietest, we can hear the shuffle of something moving somewhere, the scrape of her skin against all that trash.

Her apartment stinks of rot. It is a landfill, a dumping ground. It smells of teenaged boys after gym class, that irremovable odor of adrenaline and adolescence. It hovers for yards around her door. For a while, this smell drove our guards away, but we are a diligent kind. We do not waver. Sooner or later, someone will come or go. She is human, and she must eat to survive.

She has been here longer than any of us, longer than the groundskeeper and the landlady, and we hope that somehow she will survive until after we are gone. We would hate to have her myth destroyed for a heart attack or high cholesterol, something mundane. We have invested too much imagination and effort into creating her, this hidden woman, this woman who has forgotten the rest of the world.