Rented Room
Cory Stockwell

AND SO I WAIT in a rented room. I say room but it’s really an apartment, an apartment in Manhattan that I really can’t afford, but I’ve gotten it as a sublet. There goes the advance. It’s very long and very narrow. I set up my little writing table in the front room. From there I can see across the street, which is also very narrow. The man in the apartment directly across from me is entirely visible even though he’s never once turned to look at me, not once. Whatever the weather is he always wears the same thing, a loose pair of green pants with a drawstring and what in my country is referred to as an atlet. I only ever see him when he’s in his kitchen, which is at the front of the apartment facing the street, and he only ever does one thing in there: take a can of beans from the cupboard, open it, empty the contents into a saucepan, turn on the element, stir the beans, and eat them directly from the pan with a large spoon. Then he washes the saucepan and spoon, sets them on the counter to dry, and leaves: later he’ll repeat the whole thing. I’ve never seen him open the fridge or take a glass of water. Then again I’m not always there. Sometimes I go to the library of the Yunus Emre Enstitüsü to read. I spend the entire afternoon there in silence. Lately, though, I haven’t been going there at all. Mostly I sleep, and when I wake I sit just in the kitchen, looking at the front room. It’s bathed in light, which is strange as it faces north. The chair is bathed in light, the little table is bathed in light, light flows through the translucent white curtain—the perfect setup, really. It’s when I see it from the kitchen that it seems impossible, it seems impossible to get there, to get from here to there. The light is just too perfect and I know that if I go stand in it or sit at the table it will cease to be so. So I stand in the kitchen, where I eat an apple and watch for any possible movement, but there’s nothing, nothing but the occasional flutter of the curtain in the wind from the window that’s open just a crack.

For Agustín Fernández Mallo

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Cory Stockwell is a Minneapolis-based writer and translator. His writing has appeared in The Common, The Oxford Literary Review, Cultural Politics, and elsewhere. Translations include books by Jean-Luc Nancy and Cynthia Fleury, and poems by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Juan de Dios García, and Simon Johannin. He lectures in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

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