Mystery

A tune from the stairwell

Nora played the first track on May Keene's USB drive and saw a staircase in her mind: brown paint, a cold banister, someone behind a door telling her to go home. She stopped the player so abruptly that May spilled tea. The track was forty seconds of a song used during the 2004 tenants' campaign. Nora had been nineteen. She remembered the song. She did not know whether the new image belonged to that evening or to twenty years of telling herself stories about it.