Lily Hoang

The woman down the hall received an oracle that told her that the fetus she was not yet carrying would one day grow to kill her husband and violently rape her. The oracle then said that she would bear another son—at once son and grandson—who would avenge his grandfather’s murder by slaying her husband-son during the act of fornication.

At this, the woman down the hall laughed and laughed until her teeth fell out one at a time. She looked at the fortuneteller, the oracle, and asked, Now who will love me? You fool!

The fortuneteller said nothing but closed her eyes. And the woman’s teeth grew back, each one as painful as the first emergence of bone drilling its way through all that fleshy, pink gum.

The woman down the hall is too much. She speaks and we laugh and we laugh until we have burned all the calories we’ve consumed that day. She tells a story, and we are hysterical. She signs a little jig and we vomit everywhere. She makes us sick she is so funny. She will be the death of us, this woman. Already, we are skeletons because of her, and there is nothing we can even do about it but laugh and laugh some more.

The woman down the hall does not have a name. We simply call her the woman down the hall. She is unlike all those other women who live down the hall, if only because we know their names, if only because we are those women, but this other woman, she is not one of us. She does not belong here. And it is obvious. It is apparent that she is not wanted, and yet she still does not leave. She stays and she stays. She sits in our common space; she eats beside us; she even attempts to engage us in conversation, but we pretend she is not there. We imagine she is a ghost of a woman, someone who simply won’t leave us alone.

When we are mean, we call her the clinger. We call her the leech.

But mostly, we are not mean people.

We just want her to understand that she isn’t wanted, that no one has even bothered to ask her name, and we won’t. None of us. We refuse. There is an order to things, and she neglected that. She did not follow the rules the way they were meant to be followed so we cannot respect her. Even if she was willing to erase everything and start over, we couldn’t. It doesn’t work that way here. Sometimes, we take pity on her, the way she talks to herself and only herself because no one else will open their canals to listen, and for a lonely moment, we allow ourselves to become immersed in her story, but just as quickly, we snap ourselves away. We cannot let ourselves be weak. There are rules, and once we break one, even if it is for this sad, pathetic woman, everything will be lost. So the woman down the hall does not have a name, and that is the way it must remain.

The woman down the hall dreams of Dora. Every night, when she closes her eyes, she imagines a frightened girl, lying on that infamous couch, which is really just a couch like any other couch. The woman down the hall dreams of Dora’s dreams. They’re nothing spectacular. In fact, she wouldn’t even know that they’re Dora’s dreams, except that they exactly like her own dreams, and when she wakes, she is the one who is on that couch and her hands are down her pants and she is moaning. She does not know what these dreams mean or if they are even dreams. She only knows that she has started to pretend that she is not who she is, that she is this girl, this Dora. She only knows that she would rather be Dora than herself, that notoriety by any name is not such a bad existence.

The woman down the hall believes in legacy. She tells us about her mother, who was a fine woman, and her grandmother, who was a complete tramp but lovely nonetheless. She tells us about her great-grandmother, who had broad shoulders, and her great-great-grandmother, who was practically a fairy tale princess.

So the woman down the hall tells us all this, and we’re interested. You see, we want to believe in happy endings, we want to believe in forever, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t. We don’t believe that just because her great-great-grandmother was practically a fairy tale princess that it means that she will have the same fate. We don’t believe in continuity. Instead, we believe she’ll die old and alone. That’s the fate we will all share.