Jake could smell a dyke from a mile away. He had extrasensory perception, but he was
also seeing more of them crowding the credit union where he worked, as well as cruising
Halligan Park where he went to sit and smoke in the evenings.
       There was also a pair of lesbians who lived in the downstairs apartment. In fact, one of
them stomped up the stairs on the morning of their move-in, knocked on his door, and asked if he
could help them with their garbage disposal. Jake hadn’t made a single noise as he sat by his
window and peered down at them through the curtains: the landlady must have told them he was
the only tenant left in the building. Nobody lived in the other apartment downstairs, and Mrs. Greisch, who lived across the landing from him, had died two months ago.
       And asking the man upstairs for help with the plumbing? They probably wanted to pass
and not raise any suspicions. Two women living together already looked devious enough, and
despite the fact that they were multiplying at an alarming rate and flaunting themselves in public
wherever they could find the space, they still needed to look good and civil in front of their
neighbors, in order to avoid any complaints. But, as previously stated, Jake had that sixth sense:
he caught both of them leaning against their moving truck with a bone-sore, rough-rider
nonchalance that would have impressed even John Wayne.
       One was the long-haired femme to the other’s short-haired butch: Jake knew this much
terminology when it came to lesbians. And other warning signs filed in one after the other. They
had too many plants, and all of them were overgrown and trailed along the ground like uncoiling
serpents. There were also dozens of crystals glittering in the sunlight and a Japanese woodblock
print of a skeleton. Both lesbians were dark-skinned with kinky hair, and Jake could already
smell something spicy circling in the atrium downstairs. It was the kind of heat that didn’t come
in a small glass bottle with a cowboy printed on the label.
       And nobody ever came to help them move in; they were all alone as Jake watched and
waited for the inevitable day when paramedics’ boots would echo throughout the building. He
pictured a murder-suicide: that’s how queer stuff usually ended. Either rat poison in the reeking
stir-fry for them both, or a shiny ax while one of them laid in bed wearing some soft silky thing,
followed by a bottle of pills.
       And if they were quiet about it, they wouldn’t be discovered for at least a couple weeks,
or until the smell grew unbearable and Jake would have to be a good neighbor and phone in a
wellness check. Or, he could complain to the landlady and let her take care of it, which had
worked for Mrs. Greisch across the landing. It had taken them three weeks to discover her
withered corpse with scowling yellow eyes, and Jake knew with certainty, in this grand
hypothetical he had conjured up, that they would find his body sooner than the remains of these
two random lesbians, or some old widowed bitch.
       And pacified by these visions, Jake sat and watched the new tenants move in for the rest
of the afternoon; the cries of furniture being dragged across hardwood floors didn’t stop until just
before midnight. And even when this cacophony ceased, Jake stayed up and listened for the
creaking of bedsprings, or the soft humming of a vibrator: they had to christen their new nest at
some point, but they were especially circumspect about it because he couldn’t hear anything,
even with his cheek pressed against the floor of his bedroom. They must have been extra crafty,
he thought. Or maybe they had chosen the other room for their bedroom.
       Then, just as he predicted, the lesbians started cooking the following evening. Something
musty crawled up the staircase and slipped under his door as yellowish smoke arose from in
between Jake’s floorboards. And even with him smoking indoors rather than down at Halligan
Park, this miasma persisted and seeped into his drywall in rough, sweat-stained splotches.
        He later learned that the short-haired butch lesbian was a nurse and worked nights. The
long-haired femme was a teacher, or still in school. She was first to leave in the morning and
often came home after Jake did, stumbling inside with a huge bookbag and several reams of
paper cradled in her arms.
        One time, she spotted Jake standing on the stairs above her, and he could see her pupils
dilate ever so slightly. She didn’t nod at him either; instead, she quickly slipped inside her
apartment, and he heard the lock turn in between them before the chain rasped into its track ever
so carefully.
       And right after this encounter, those odors from downstairs worsened in both frequency
and intensity. They were also accompanied by clouds of hair and Chinese food that didn’t smell
like proper Chinese food. Cats weren’t allowed in the building, but Jake knew there was
something lurking in the downstairs apartment. Several times, watching television late at night,
he glanced out his window and saw a pair of tawny eyes flashing back at him through the warped
glass.
       Jake knew the rules for the building, and he abhorred cats anyway: he was mildly allergic
to them and never trusted things that moved so stealthily. The only thing they were good for was
keeping mice off the farm.
       Meanwhile, those piss stains from all that curry and chutney and five-spice, or whatever
it was, since Jake’s spice lexicon only covered salt, pepper, and cinnamon, continued to ascend
his apartment walls. Jake regretted not having more things to hang up to cover them, but there
was no way he was going to relent and go shopping, nor let a pair of dykes smoke him out like
this. But rather than descending and complaining about the damages, he kept his ear pressed to
the floor of his bedroom every night before going to bed, hoping to catch them doing something
extra-perverted.
       In fact, he had been keeping a switchblade in his jacket pocket for a couple months now,
for protection. And now, after especially hard shifts at work, he walked home with one hand
tucked out of sight, clutching his weapon even tighter whenever he saw a cat slink across his
path or watch him from atop a fencepost. He then wondered what would happen if he grabbed
one of those strays lurking around Halligan Park, punched it full of holes, and left it inside the
bandstand where he saw those gay couples cackling like peacocks. Or, if he left the corpse
sluggishly bleeding on the hood of the lezzies’ car parked outside the building.
       And one night around this time, the short-haired butch left for work and saw Jake
standing at the top of the stairs with a laundry basket resting on his hip. Jake wasn’t sure if she
could see the knife handle jutting from his waistband, but he tried making his eyes burn even
brighter to compensate. In response, her pupils dilated just like the long-haired femme’s, and her
exit through the front door was a half-step faster than her usual saunter.
       And when Jake died two months later, having stayed home from work on Monday
because of a stomachache, which turned out to be his appendix, which ruptured and engulfed his
heart on that same Friday, he was found three days later when his manager phoned in a wellness
check.
       And that evening, the lesbians came back with take-out, neither one hungry or up for
cooking after seeing Jake get carried away, and they both saw him standing at the top of the
stairs in the shadows. His eyes shined like two jaundiced spotlights. He didn’t have his
switchblade on him, but he was happy to see terror carved into both of their faces.
       And when they moved out six months later, Jake wished the splotches on his walls had
packed up and left with them. He could still see lopsided bullseyes bleeding through the fresh
white paint that came with the new tenants, even though nobody in the building cooked curry
anymore. Everybody owned at least one cat though, and the straight couple in his (former)
apartment had a little boy that Jake thoroughly disliked as well. He wanted to give the little shit
nightmares, but it was ultimately pointless.
       He was six. Where would he run away to?
       So Jake stuck to leaving mysterious stains on the staircase and prowling the dimly-lit
basement. People who loitered there for too long had the honor of seeing him as a dark shape
peeking around the banister, or as a pair of glinting yellow eyes, too big to be a housecat’s,
squatting in the corner opposite the washing machines.