01: new neighbor

The cut on Mingyu’s palm stopped hurting hours ago, but it is just now when emerges from a dark alleyway and under a streetlight that he notices the bruise surrounding the broken skin. A fog of hazy purple surrounds the crimson river on his palm and throbs and throbs. If he looks closely, he swears he can see his own heartbeat. Perhaps his own heart in his blood. Red vines twisting with blue veins—forests of life that he wants dead. Maybe he can throw his heart against a car window and hope it ends in stillness.

He takes a deep breath and regrets it. The air tastes like dirt, and the stolen alcohol he stole threatens to make a second appearance. His hand throbs again, but he bites his lip and forces himself to open the door to his apartment building.

It smells like smoke in the lobby, but it’s better than the trash on the streets. The carpet is old, muddy, and fraying in places, but it feels like heaven as opposed to stepping in wet gum fresh out of a passerby’s mouth. Mingyu steps over a strange area on the carpet, and he tumbles over. He makes the mistake of using both hands to stop himself because his injured palm—his right one—makes direct contact with the ground, and an explosion of pain travels up his arm and into his heart.

His heart. Mingyu doesn’t know why it hurts there, because what ing heart? But it does.

Very carefully, on shaky legs, Mingyu rises and looks behind him to see where his tripped, but he finds nothing but inch after inch of old carpet.

He punches the button for the elevator with his left hand, stumbles in, and presses the 11th button for the 11th floor. Because the elevator is disgusting and old, it takes a few moments and ominous creaks before it actually starts to move. Each sound that the elevator makes startles Mingyu. Every time he uses this cursed elevator, it conducts a symphony written from nightmares. Sometimes he has dreams of the elevator breaking down and killing him. What’s scarier is that sometimes, he becomes angry that the dream isn’t real.

The 11th floor is not the last floor of the building, but it is the most hazardous and neglected that it might as well be. Aside from him, there are on