Bite Mark on the Door

I woke to the thin light of morning slipping through the blinds. The town outside slept in a pale glow that did not quite belong to the hour. My kettle whistled and I poured coffee into a chipped mug the color of rain. The stove clicked; the fridge hummed a patient song. I moved through the kitchen with the measured rhythm of someone who counts on chores to keep fear from knocking.

The day began with the same list I have kept since the first winter I lived alone here. Wake, brew, stir, check the windows, wipe the counter, scan the news, step outside only after a second cup. The news came filtered through the same static that clings to radio towers after a storm. They tell me the city is waking to a sickness that travels by touch and breath and fear. They tell me the world is larger than our doors and smaller than our worst thoughts. They tell us nothing about what happens when the sunlight touches a street that refuses to warm up.

In the hallway, a sound tugs at the edge of hearing before it becomes real. shuffled footsteps. They are not loud, not aggressive, just a patient, nervous shuffle that moves from apartment to apartment, from wall to wall, as if someone is testing the building for a way out. I tell myself it is the old pipes telling old stories, that the house has a memory and I am only listening too hard. But the sound keeps returning, a second foot catching on a thin plank, then another, then a short scrape that ends as if someone pressed a hand to the floor.

I try to ignore it as I wash the sleep from my eyes and check the door. The door to my world, the door that is a small line of metal and fear. On it, a new mark has appeared. A bite mark on the door. The teeth mark is dusky, not fresh but not old either, as if something pressed its mouth to the wood and left a careful impression. It does not stretch across the pane or the frame; it sits in a neat crescent, a souvenir from someone who wanted to remind me that something lives outside the hinge. I lean in and sniff the air near the door as if scent could reveal what I cannot see. The wood smells of varnish and damp. No blood shows, only the shadow of a mouth that has tasted me without breaking me.

I open the window a crack and feel the morning lean toward me like a hand that wants to touch but not to harm. The street below wears its morning like a coat that no longer fits anyone. A bus coughs up a plume of exhaust and moves on; a couple passes with metal carts and the bright notes of a child singing from a neighbor's apartment. The everyday routine, the little rituals that once offered comfort, all seem to have learned a new, wary rhythm. The city is waking to something it cannot name, or to something it has named too many times and forgot the sound the words once made.

The corner store where I buy bread is already crowded with the pale and cornered. The clerk looks at me with eyes that have learned not to blink, and he does not smile when I say good morning. He hands me a loaf with the same practiced care as ever, but a line of chalk on the counter marks a warning I did not notice yesterday. The whispers travel in the air between customers, thin as breath and twice as afraid. The store smells of yeast and fear, of something that wants to be warm again but knows it cannot be. Outside, a dog pads along the curb with a slow, measured pace, the kind of movement that belongs to a creature that accepts a world the rest of us pretend is friendly.

Back in my building I pass the lobby and see the notice board that holds schedules and lost keys and a dozen little lives I do not know. On the floor near my door is a paper cup left by someone who says hello in a way I cannot trust. The cup is stained with coffee rings and a small smear of something darker, and in that dark there is a taste of rust and time. Someone has left a list of names, perhaps a memory of the people who used to live here and who no longer do. It is nothing you would trust, nothing you would show a guest, and yet I read it as if it is a map. The names are written in a careful hand, but the list is longer than the people I know. The more I look, the more I wonder if the floor itself is listening.

At breakfast I listen to the morning broadcast on the old radio that sits on the kitchen shelf. The voice has a restless cadence, a careful calm that never sounds real. It speaks of a contagion that does not obey borders, that travels by ordinary contact and ordinary fear, that rides the elevator buttons and the stair rails, that slides under doors in the quiet between heartbeats. There is talk of the infection spreading to apartments one by one, a creeping tally that matches the miles of the day. The words do not tell me anything I did not expect, and they tell me nothing about what I should do right now.

The day has a way of showing you its teeth in the small hours and then pretending those teeth never existed. I go out to the mailbox to fetch what used to be a harmless mail day, a day when bills and grocery ads and a flyer about a used book sale would have made me smile. There is a note tucked inside the sleeve of the mailbox, a thing written in a neat script that I recognize only once I move the flier aside. It is my name, written as if to greet me, but the handwriting trails into a shadow and the ink feels wet against the paper. The words are not friendly. They say only a single sentence, and when I read it, I am sure the room tilts, the floor under me accepting a different weight. It is a memory, a trick of the brain, or something else: they remembered my name. The phrase sits there like a seed that has not yet sprouted, and I do not trust the way it sits in the corner of the page.

I return to my apartment with the loaf under my arm and the note in my pocket. The bite mark on the door looks almost ceremonial in the daylight, the kind of wound that belongs to a story you tell yourself as a child to stop the fear from growing teeth. I touch the mark and feel the grain of the wood beneath my fingers, the way it remembers every time the house has been afraid. The kitchen clock, once a friendly metronome, ticks with a slower insistence. Each tick seems to press a thought into the room: this is not a test; this is someone else choosing the moment when you must decide if you run or stay.

I stand at the window with the loaf and the note and the sense that I am being decided for. The world outside has a new daylight, not bright enough to erase the dread but bright enough to remind me that there is nowhere to hide that feels safe. People walk with a careful pace, as if every step might be a last step, as if the day itself is testing how long they can pretend that everything is ordinary. A radio voice in a car speaks of a rescue mission that will arrive at dawn, then halts, as if it has learned too late that the dawn never truly arrives for all of us.

The morning passes through the rooms of this building as if it is rearranging furniture while I am not looking. My coffee goes cold in the cup that I hold as evidence that I am still here. The note whispers I am not alone, that something else has learned my name and chooses to call me by it in the quiet hours of the morning when the air holds its breath. The hall outside my door grows silent, then grows loud again with that same shuffled footsteps that haunt the memory of my feet only when I am alone with the world, and not with the city.