Sweet Suite Expansion

First, many thanks to the lovely audience that attended my reading last Monday at the Coventry Library.  I shared the Poetweet Project with the assembled throng and have gotten several tweets as a result.  The topic for September is For Renters Only and this
provocative tweet:

Renter friend stole room from vacant apt. adjoining his, broke through wall into bedroom, sealed up door: Scot free. #htspoetweet

inspired the following - not exactly a poem, more like flash fiction.  And if it gives you a chuckle, that's cool.

Out of the Nutshell: A Minor Drama in Three Scenes

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii

He peered in at the dismal one room apartment, shrugged and said, “OK. I’ll take it.” The building was almost empty; only two other tenants in the ten-suite building which slumped like a fallen soufflé on the corner of Here and Nowhere. Although they came with the high ceilings and crown moldings of a bygone age of grace, none of the apartments were large; mostly one bedroom, with decades of paint slapped over wallpaper, encasing bobby pins, nails and the odd insect. Still, they were more than he could afford. This one sad room would have to do. Unfortunately, it faced east. Even a blanket over the window didn’t block the sun as he tried to fall sleep after coming home from his night job sweeping ashes at the animal crematorium.

 Weeks, months, a year passed with no new tenants, no sign of the landlord or even a maintenance crew. The building was as quiet as the crematorium after the burners shut down.  Night after night in his restless sun-soaked sleep, a voice whispered and wheedled with growing insistence: “There’s no one in the apartment next door, and just a thin wall between you and a real bedroom – one that faces west.”

 Weeks, months, a year passed. He slept quite soundly, now.