The landing
The landing was wide enough for a chair, but nobody had put a chair there. Each afternoon a square of light moved across the boards, stopping at the second door before disappearing beneath it. Mara began to notice the square only after she stopped carrying boxes upstairs.
On the first day, the landing had been a pause in a difficult journey. On the second, it was a place to leave a bag while looking for a key. By the end of the week she knew which board would answer her step. A space that had seemed to belong to no one had acquired a small vocabulary.
She brought a cup of tea to the top stair. From there the street was invisible; its sounds arrived without their pictures. A bicycle bell. A delivery van reversing. The door below closing carefully, then opening again for someone who had forgotten something.
The chair never arrived. It turned out that a place did not need to hold you for very long to become part of the way you lived. Sometimes a threshold was simply a moment you had learned not to hurry through.