Leak

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I felt it right between my eyes, a slow repetitive tap that couldn’t be ignored.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Groggily I looked up and saw the tiniest wet spot on the ceiling of my room. Slow, steady, and not stopping. Another thing that was falling apart in this slum, I thought as I got up and found a small bucket to catch the droplets.

Then I grabbed my cell phone and texted my landlord.

>hey, there’s a leaky pipe above me. Can you send someone to get it fixed?

Then I left for work.

I didn’t think about it much til I got home and figured it would be all done by then. The maintenance guy has a key to all the doors so he can let himself in and my dog Boli doesn’t bother him because he gives her treats.

Instead when I got to the bedroom I immediately felt my shoe squish on the carpet. The bucket had overturned from the excessive dripping and my sheets were also sopping wet, and the little drops were still pouring down.

I told myself to not get upset. The landlord lives in our building a few flights up so I figured maybe they didn’t get the text and I could resolve this problem by going there face to face.

Before I left, I set up towels and started thinking of ways to plug the leak myself in case maintenance was tied up all night. Maybe some putty or something? Google or YouTube DIY would have an answer.

The elevator has been out for a while, so I took the stairs and met my upstairs neighbor Gloria along the way. She’s a younger woman that has a smile that could make any man weak at the knees. Unfortunately for me, she was recently engaged so all I could hope for now was an occasional flirt while smelling her alluring perfume. I asked her if she had been having any water issues in her apartment but she was busy on her phone and seemed distracted. She promised she would talk later, and then disappeared around the steps to keep chatting away to someone in Spanish.

Getting to the landlord’s door, I knocked on it and stood back, waiting for a response. When no one answered I knocked a little louder and called out to him, again with no response. I shot him another text and sighed in frustration. Sometimes he would just step out for business or whatever for a few days and now I was thinking I was going to have to solve this dripping mess with my own wallet.

I resolved to keep receipts and then checked the local home improvement stores to see if anyone had any good roofing sealant or packing that could keep the drip out for at least the night. I found a good one at Walmart for 16.99 and took pics of the cost while texting the landlord again about all of my frustrations. Usually this sort of thing didn’t bother me, but I don’t have any renter insurance so the stuff that was getting wet and ruined wouldn’t be covered.

I decided to find my lease when I got home and see if maybe there was a clause about damages. I really didn’t want to have confrontations about this but I knew that my mattress alone was literally beyond repair just from a day’s worth of leakage. If he took too long to resolve this issue, who knew what would be lost?

I set up the sealant and tried to sleep.

It seemed to work but in the morning the problem was persistent again.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Now I was irritated. I stormed up there and banged on the door, hoping the landlord was home.

One of the nearby neighbors stepped out and told me that he hadn’t seen our landlord since a few days ago and that confirmed to me he must be overnight somewhere. Meaning the leak was only going to get worse.

I saw Gloria again in the lobby that afternoon after I had bought some huge beach towels and air fresheners. The wetness of the carpet was starting to upset me and I knew it wasn’t going to get better. Survival until the landlord returned was the only option.

Gloria then told me that she had been staying over at her fiancé’s house for the past few days and didn’t know anything about the leak, but promised she would give me an update if there was a problem in her apartment. I was beginning to think I was the only one suffering from this inconvenience until I saw the landlord’s nephew in the laundry down in the basement. They had a whole basket full of clothes from their Uncle that looked like it was soaking wet.

He immediately started complaining about how rude it was for his uncle to leave town and make him deal with things while they were gone and said that he was trying to handle the leak as quickly as possible. It was a welcome relief to hear that someone was finally addressing the problem, even if it was slowly and I kindly but firmly told the nephew to stay on top of it. If the landlord was leaving him in charge, being honest I was tempted to file a complaint to the housing authority if it wasn’t fixed by the next day. But I didn’t tell him that. I just smiled and went back to what I was doing, focused on finishing up some last minute reports for work and trying to get a good look at Gloria’s fine ass in the elevator. I was almost positive she caught me staring and smirked at me.

That little bit of flirtation was enough to push past all the bad thoughts I had about the leak, but it didn't last very long because when I got into my apartment the smell of the wet carpet made me want to vomit. The leak was so much worse now dripping constantly on the floor ruining the papers that I had sat down and making my entire place feel like it was a pigsty. I considered calling a friend up and asking if I could sleep at their house but realized that they would force me to pay an Uber fee and decided instead to face the music. placing the beach towels down to catch more of the dripping water I've tried my best to get some sleep that night but all I could think about was how in the morning it was going to get worse and if it didn't get fixed then the floor above me would collapse and destroy my apartment, went to find the landlord's nephew as soon as possible before I went to work. in the elevator Gloria met me with an icy glare pointing a finger at my face and asking why I hadn't told her about the smell before hand. Mixing Spanish and English together she tore me up verbally in both languages, telling me that her fiancé had come to take her to a sweet dinner and instead discovered that her apartment was almost completely beyond repair due to the amount of water that it's soaked into the floor.

I tried to tell her that I had explained there was a bad leak but she hadn't been at home and instead pointed the blame at the landlord and his neglectful nephew, they were the ones that deserved her wrath; not me! in fact when the elevator door opened and we spotted the nephew I pointed him out to her and she Immediately swiveled her hips d marched straight up to his face. as the tube began to yell back-and-forth and bicker I couldn't help but notice that the landlord's door was open and wondered if he's come back.

with the nephew distracted I knocked on the door and pushed it open calling out the landlord's name and noticing that the smell was much worse here than anywhere else in the apartment. Was the leak coming from above here and the nephew couldn't find the source?

I stepped into the apartment holding my hand over my mouth trying to hold back vomit as the smell grew worse and worse. then I saw long streaks of water pouring out from under the bathroom door my eyes whining and surprise as I realized but there must be an overflow in the tub. How could the nephew not have noticed this I wondered as I immediately push the door open. I got my answer when I saw the uncle in the tub dead completely drowned by the water, his eyes bulged open his body naked and bruised, and the entire bathroom smelling of death and rot.

instinctively I called out and ran from the room into the hallway, alerting both Gloria and the nephew to what I had discovered. His face told me everything, he could not hide the fact that this was no mere accident and when Gloria saw the body she just about fainted.

I asked the nephew when did it happen and he didn't make a sound. For a moment I thought maybe he might attack me the same way he attacked his uncle, slamming my head against the bathroom wall in the same exact spot. Gloria was fumbling with words asking why the police hadn't been alerted and trying to get out her cell phone in order to call 911. the nephew was a mixture of frantic disbelief and desperation as he grabbed a hold of the phone and chunk it into the water insisting that no one could know this had occurred. he told us both there had been an argument a few nights ago between him and his uncle and he told the old man he wished he was dead then the next day he found it like this and insisted that he did not kill him but it was all a complete show to make it look like he had committed the deed.

The nephew showed us suicide note which revealed the uncle had been considering taking his life for quite some time the recent loss of his wife and his family had pushed him over the edge the act of hitting himself in the wall and then plunging his body into the water with all of his clothes on had been designed to look like a murder.

Gloria didn't know what to say, she still felt that we needed to reach out to the authorities but I had another opinion, I suddenly realized that with the landlord now dead all of us here living in the apartment could live rent free or at least three people in this room who knew that the landlord was not alive. If we came to an agreement we could profit off of his suicide and no one would be the wiser to the fact that we were living there rent free.

Eventually the body would decay and become sludge and then we could just make it all drain down the pipe I told them both. It was almost poetically simple how easy we became co-conspirators.

I told the nephew to destroy the suicide note and then make sure to keep the bathroom door closed. Then I told Gloria she could stay with me in my apartment until the leak was fixed, which I insisted should be done by the next day or we would go to the police.

Of course Gloria and I had no intentions of actually doing that, she was fully onboard with the plan for living here rent free especially now that her fiance had called things off.

When we got to my apartment that night, I knew she was feeling frisky and turned on by my bold actions that afternoon. She threw me on the bed and started talking dirty. Above her head the drip of the water made her laugh as she said that she had always fantasized about taking a shower with me and now it was coming true.

As things got heated up between us, the leak got worse faster but I didn’t give a damn. All I could focus on was the girl of my dreams. But that dream ended less than four seconds later.

A loud crack shook the ceiling above us, and before I could even open my mouth to scream, a torrential wave of water and sludge and furniture crashed on top of Gloria. Splinters of wood and debris and guck from the body flowed right up against my exposed chest as I was pushed away from her, gasping for air as I tried to keep my head above the surface of the mud. Then the tub filled with the landlord’s remains came tumbling down the slide of debris right into Gloria, impaling her to my sopping wet bed.

I pushed the muck and mattress aside to get to her trying to move the bathtub from her chest as I saw the half rotting corpse of the landlord collapse against her body and her eyes rolled back for a moment and then I was alone with two corpses amid a pile of filth and water.

________

The noise of the collapsed roof and cascade of debris and trash had been enough to alert other tenants and the police were there in half an hour. About two hours after that they notified us that the entire building would be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, and the nephew was hauled off.

I gathered what little I could from the apartment but kept my mouth shut about knowing of the body beforehand or how the entire destruction could have been prevented. I’m staying over with a friend downtown now, trying to forget the whole thing.

But I close my eyes and see Gloria’s beautiful body being impaled or the dead naked man in the tub, his skin rolling off and flooding my mouth as sludge. His blood and guts spilling amid the refuse until all of it was just one endless pile of muck.

And just when I think I’ve shaken off every last nightmare, I feel it. Right above my head.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

I snap open my eyes.

There is no leak here. Only my imagination. But I still feel the incessant droplets against my head…

And their pounding only grows louder inside my mind.