"What? What is the point of this page?" Wren huffed out a breath as she flipped to the next page of the rental agreement.
At the top of the page was written 'Living Space Hauntings Agreement's and was followed by three paragraphs of legal jargon. All of it boiled down to: if the apartment is haunted then the owner isn't liable for anything that happens.
"Just something silly we have to keep in there. The building owner insists it's necessary." The manager sighed as he noticed what page she was looking at. The gentleman sitting across from her was in jeans and a polo shirt with a loose tie hanging around his neck. He was a bit portly and sported a genial smile.
Wren pursed her lips and scribbled her signature on the line before continuing. She didn't understand what kind of a weirdo would want her to absolve them of haunting problems? She finished up the agreement signatures and slid it back across the desk.
He took the agreement and flipped through it quickly. Once he was sure, he nodded and slid a key across the desk, "Welcome to the building, Miss Guerra. Please do not hesitate in coming see me if you have any issues."
"Thanks." Wren sighed and grabbed the key before getting up to leave the office.
"And be careful of the ghosts." The manager said with a warm chuckle.
Wren rolled her eyes and pulled the door open. She stepped out of the management office and into the foyer of the apartment building. To the left were clear glass doors leading out to the street, and to the right were two elevators leading to the upper floors. Everything screamed of how old the building was. The etching near the door on her way in said the building was built in the thirties.
Turning, she hit the button on the elevator. The door dinged and opened with a rattle. Then a metal grill behind the door rattled open and she got in. Six buttons led from basement to fifth floor. She hit the five and the grill rattled shut. Then the door closed and the elevator began to go up. It was an older car and it rattled alarmingly on the way up. It didn't help that the thin metal grill was the only thing between her and the walls and doors zipping past.
The elevator stopped on the fifth floor and rattled open. Wren got off quickly and decided she might just take the stairs from then on. She looked down the long, bland hallway with its linoleum floor and plain walls. The doors down both sides were a worn old brown wood. She walked past them until she reached the one at the end with five zero six on the door in tarnished silver numbers. The paint around the knob was peeling and she had to jiggle the key to get it to unlock.
The inside of the tiny studio apartment wasn't much better. Fluffy orange shag filled the entire studio except for the small tile kitchen in the corner near the door. An old gas stove and fridge filled half the space with a small counter and cupboards taking up the rest. Two doors sat side by side on the right. One was a small closet, and the other led into a bathroom with a frosted glass shower stall and an ugly as hell green toilet and sink. The place wasn't a hundred years old, but the décor clearly hadn't been updated since the seventies or eighties.
"Well fuck." Wren sighed with a hand through her hair. The place was certainly not pretty. But the bright side was, for the first time in her life, it was all hers and nobody could tell her what to do. She was an energetic young woman, a fresh college dropout, and she had a promising new job starting on Monday. Her budget was a bit thin but that would fix itself if she worked hard. If it was one thing her parents had instilled in her, it was everything could be solved with hard work.
Except college. After a year of that, she dropped out, looked for a job, and emptied her account of the remainder of the money. They'd originally given her a year's budget and sent her from their home in San Antonio to a college in Philadelphia. They wanted her to get a business degree but she just didn't like all the numbers and shit involved, she knew she would be happier doing something with her hands. So she ran down a job north of there in the heart of New York that was an apprentice at a bakery. She found an apartment and moved without ever telling her parents.
Stepping into the bathroom, Wren looked at herself in the little mirror above the sink. She had softly tanned skin and short, dirty brown hair, her entire appearance screaming of her Latin heritage. Her mother was a Mexican immigrant and her father was a Texan businessman. She was a bit tall of stature from her dad's side, but she had inherited her mother's plump breasts and shapely hips. For a woman of twenty-three, she thought herself smoking hot and more than willing to work her pretty ass off if it meant getting started on the life she wanted to live. She was tired of toeing her father's line.
And then she was wrenched from her thoughts by the clack of the bathroom door shutting abruptly. She looked over at it and frowned. Loose hinge maybe?
She opened it and headed back towards the door. The rented moving truck with the pittance of secondhand furniture she managed to buy with some of her remaining tuition money was still double parked downstairs and she needed to get it all up here.
That full size mattress and five flights of stairs. Her back already ached just thinking about it.
*******
Wren finished unloading and took the truck back. As she road the bus back to her apartment, she had considered the couple other odd things that happened while she had been unloading. Boxes that fell over when she swore she stacked them well. Doors that closed when she wasn't looking.
She couldn't help but go back to that page in her rental agreement. Was her apartment actually haunted? She thought about it the whole time she trudged tiredly up the stairs to her apartment.
Her apartment was starting to look kinda homely as she came in. The mattress that had been the largest hassle to get up here was sitting on a box spring in the far corner. A small padded chair sat beside it and her laptop was sitting in it. Her dresser sat along the end of the bed, and she'd just tossed the few dishes and utensils she had in a pile on the kitchen counter... At least she had done that. Now they were on the floor and the plate was broken in two. The bowl and her two mugs had survived the fall at least.
As she cleaned it up, she kept thinking. This could definitely be some kind of haunting. It wasn't like Wren didn't believe in the supernatural. Her mother had raised her with a respect for ghosts and spirits. This particular one didn't seem too dangerous. It hadn't done anything obstructive or scary. It had only knocked a few things over or closed a door. Wren didn't really know what a bad spirit would feel like, but she figured she'd know it when she felt it and this one just didn't seem right. At least not with what she knew.
Wren loved going with her parents down to her mother's home in Mexico to celebrate Day of the Dead. Her father called it 'a load of hooey' but he would also go through any amount of 'hooey' to see Wren's mother smile. At the celebration, her mother had shown her very clearly what a spirit felt like. The ghosts and spirits of her family, and the families of others from her home, would return on that night to touch upon the living. It was a warm and comforting experience for those that believed because it meant that they were not beyond the care and guidance of their loved ones. So the idea of living in an apartment with a haunting ghost wasn't really that bad to her. She just had to make friends with it first!
The broken plate went in the garbage and she set about putting things away in the kitchen. She put everything thing away with the spirit in mind; putting stuff far back on the shelves or as much in the drawers as she could manage. Everything placed just so it couldn't be knocked over or pushed around so easily. She also set about putting away her other meager possessions, including stuffing her clothes away in her dresser and moving the laptop from the chair to the floor. All her bathroom things went into the cupboard under the sink and nothing got set on the sink itself.
Once she was done, she flopped down on her mattress with a tired sigh. She was exhausted from moving and unloading everything. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and checked the time. It was getting late in the day and she hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. But she had at least thought ahead and bought some extra packed meals at the grocery store on her way here. So she heaved herself to her feet and got a small container of cold pasta salad to eat.
Settling into her chair, she held up a fork and called out, "Spirit that lives here. I am not your enemy. I am willing to share this space with you. Give me a chance. Let us know each other."
Then she set the fork on the arm of the chair. There was a moment of stillness and then a cool breeze ruffled her hair. The fork knocked off the arm and fell on the floor beside the chair. She pursed her lips and sighed. Did the spirit really take her as an invader or someone to be scared off? She picked the fork back up and started eating.
They would be friends yet.
*******
The first week passed. Wren started her new job at the bakery and worked long hours to learn everything as fast as she could. The job seemed promising and her coworkers were great. Even falling exhausted into bed each night, she was happier than she'd ever been at college. Tired as she was, she made sure to keep trying to befriend the ghost. She spoke to the empty room and never got angry at its antics.
