{weekend words}

Faintly, a woman’s voice drifts in. He clenches his eyelids tighter, as if to drive up the volume, but makes out only murmurs, a breakfast exchange between the woman and the man in the apartment across the hall. Until, abruptly, their door opens: her voice grows louder, the hallway floorboards creak – she is approaching. Lloyd hustles back, unlatches the window above the courtyard, and takes up a position there, gazing out over his corner of Paris. She taps on his front door. ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘No need to knock.’ And his wife enters their apartment for the first time since the night before.

Tom Rachman (2010)

The Imperfectionists