When Mai Mingle woke, the room was dark. Through the gap under the curtains, she could see it was still night.
She was a light sleeper and woke several times a night, but the reason she woke this time was different. A small, sharp sound had pulled her from the low WHIR of the room's background noise.
'What's that noise?'
Her mind was foggy with sleep, and it took her a moment to process it.
The metallic scraping continued, then with a final CLICK, the lock tumblers shifted. The door CREAKED open. Its hinges, long unoiled, were as stiff and heavy as an old man's joints, their sharp protest tearing a wound in the silent night.
'Oh, someone's picking the lock on my front door.'
'If Mom knew about this, I can only imagine the lecture I'd get—*A girl living all by herself, and you don't even think to block the door with a chair at night?*'
Her mother never trusted the world. She would check the gas four or five times before leaving the house, always glance in the back seat before getting in a car, and never allowed her to return a stranger's nod or smile.
Mai Mingle had always thought her mother was a bit overly anxious, but she never expected someone would actually break into her home tonight.
The sounds that followed were muffled, but she could vaguely make out a person walking in. Beams of light flashed intermittently under the crack of the door. A flashlight.
Unfamiliar footsteps moved with a dull thudding in the living room. An occasional SQUEAK rang out. Mai Mingle knew that sound—he had just stepped on the floorboards by the kitchen door. A pipe had burst there one year, warping the wood, and ever since, it had often voiced its shrill opinion.
A burglary was a rather rare occurrence.
She closed her eyes again, focusing on the thief's movements.
First, he opened the door to the next room—a small, narrow space she had never really used. It had once been painted as a nursery, then served as a study, and was later converted into a walk-in closet, but none of those functions had ever been truly realized. Now, it was just a dusty storage room.
A single glance would reveal that the room was piled high with junk, not worth searching. Sure enough, the thief's footsteps immediately retreated, and the door was shut with a THUMP.
In fact, you probably couldn't find much of value in the entire building combined.
Things did disappear often in this low-rent apartment building. Once, Mai Mingle hadn't latched her door properly. By the time she noticed, a pair of ankle boots from the shoe rack by the entrance was gone. She had been so furious she went knocking on every door to ask about them, but to no avail. But things getting misplaced was one thing; it was rare for an outside thief to go to the trouble of picking a lock and making such a fuss, all to rob people from whom there was nothing to be gained.
It was funny how clearly she remembered such a trivial thing. The boots were calfskin, a sleek and shiny brown, and they had a smart look to them. She never managed to find another pair of shoes she liked as much.
'Let him take whatever he wants. It's not like I have anything of great value anyway.'
The thief moved to her bedroom door. The moment it opened, the beam of a flashlight cut through the darkness and found Mai Mingle instantly.
The intense white light shone on her face, bright even through her closed eyelids. She remained perfectly still, feigning sleep.
A stranger's voice let out a surprised, "Huh?"
Mai Mingle resisted the urge to move or make a sound.
The thief's footsteps pattered as he walked in. He did a quick circle around the bedroom, not even opening the nightstand drawer, and then left.
'How could he possibly steal anything by being so careless? Mai Mingle was starting to feel anxious for him. You have to have a little patience when you do something, you can't be afraid of a little hassle.'
A minute or two later, he came back into the room and approached her bed. A cloud of human warmth hung in the air above her.
"Hey," the man's voice called out as a hand pushed at Mai Mingle's bony shoulder. "Hey, wake up."
'I guess there's no point in pretending to be asleep anymore.'
'Why wake me up? If you want to steal my valuables, can't you just look for them yourself? Not just a thief, but a lazy one too. People these days, really.'
Mai Mingle opened her eyes. A dark figure was hunched over by her bed, looming above her.
Because the flashlight was aimed down below the edge of the bed, the thief's face was lost in shadow. At the edge of the light, she could only see the pale bob of an Adam's apple moving up and down as he spoke.
"Don't be scared. I just want to ask you something. Is there someone named Mai Mingle here?"
"...That's me. Do we know each other?"
The man sucked in a breath, straightened up, and scanned the form under the blanket.
"You—You're her?" As if refusing to believe it, he raised the flashlight and swept it unceremoniously across Mai Mingle's face several more times.
She hadn't looked in a mirror for a long time. She didn't know what she looked like now, but she was sure it wasn't a pretty sight.
"What is it?" she asked in a low voice.
The man's mouth hung half-open, as if he were still processing something.
She could tell he didn't want her to be Mai Mingle, because he immediately asked again, enunciating slowly as if afraid she hadn't understood, "Mai. Mingle."
"That's me," Mai Mingle said, smiling again. "There's no one else."
The man stared at her.
After a few seconds, he asked, "Old lady, how old are you?"
How old was she? Mai Mingle had to think about that herself.
She wasn't sure what year it started, but she could never seem to remember her age anymore. Sometimes she even mistook herself for a young girl.
A year at a time doesn't sound like much, but it's made of countless tiny moments, like flakes in a blizzard, unknowingly piling up into a lifetime.
If you grab a handful of snow, you don't know when each flake fell. A piece of her life would surface, and she'd have forgotten how long ago it was from.
The social worker had said that for her age—eighty-six—Mai Mingle's mind was still quite clear, unlike some other elderly people...
"Eighty-six?" Mai Mingle asked the memory of the social worker. "You must have made a mistake, right? I can't be that old."