The Room by Donald Ranard
When he found what he thought he wanted—a large, airy room with bay windows that looked out on shade trees—he realized it wasn’t what he wanted at all. He continued to look for another month, without success, until he happened upon a small room in the basement of an old rowhouse in a gentrifying low-income neighborhood. The room had one narrow slider window, barricaded on the inside by vertical metal bars. It was nothing like the room he had imagined, but somehow it felt right.
The bars on the window were left over from when the neighborhood was unsafe, the landlady told him. “Things are a lot better now,” she said. “I can have them removed if you want.”
He thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “Let’s keep them for now.”
He furnished the room with thrift store furniture: a steel frame bed, a desk and chair, a bureau, and a bookcase. He filled the bookcase with second-hand books he had bought: a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, Webster’s New World College Dictionary (Eleventh Edition), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, and Robert E. Buswell’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. He bought a small fridge and a double burner hot plate. The only thing he hung on the walls was a poster of a Tibetan mandala he had brought with him. He made his bed every morning and kept the room spotlessly clean.
When he wasn’t working—as a janitor at a community college—or sleeping, he was reading, at home or at the library. He read widely, but he was especially interested in philosophy—in particular, Kierkegaard and Heidegger—and Buddhism.
The first time his best friend—his only friend, really—came over, he took one look at the place and laughed. “Are you shitting me?”
“What?”
“This room!”
He looked around the room. “What about it?”
His old cell mate shook his head in disbelief. “Duuude! Don’t you see what you’ve done?”
Donald A. Ranard’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New World Writing Quarterly, 100 Word Story, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Washington Post, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The Best Travel Writing, and his flash fiction story “5/25/22” was longlisted by Wigleaf as one of 2022’s top 50 Very Short Fictions. His prize-winning play, ELBOW. APPLE. CARPET. SADDLE. BUBBLE., was recently performed at Veterans Repertory Theater in Cornwall, New York. Currently residing in Arlington, VA, he has lived in 10 countries in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. @DonaldRanard
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Sometimes I have a fantasy that I will start over again anonymously…get a room and a hotplate like that.
I do, too.
Don’t tell Corey.