Quiet: A Short Story

By Shane Eide

A young, quiet couple who keep to themselves are thrilled to find a new apartment which matches their temperaments. But when they start to get complaints from the neighbors about noise and when their things begin to move around when they're away, they begin to wonder who's been in their home. But how did the intruder get in with the door still locked?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shane Eide
• Release date: Jul 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310824913

Shane Eide

Shane Eide is a part-time hermit, part-time flaneur, which means that he is either spending time on literary pursuits or taking walks and thinking about literary pursuits​. He lives in a little room walled with books and sleeps near a big desk, on which he doesn't write since all the quiet is too distracting. He usually goes someplace noisy in order to write as much about fiction as he writes fiction. He's been writing fiction since he was about 11, in which time he's written several novels that he never intends to publish and which no one will ever see, and several others that he wants to publish that he's read out loud to his gold fish. He's been writing what he supposes would be called non-fiction ever since he wrote "Shane was here," in easily erasable pencil on a desk in junior high. You can read his essays and occasional fiction at his blog, www.emergenthermit.com

Book preview

Quiet

By

Shane Eide

Copyright

©Quiet: A Short Story by Shane Eide

All rights reserved

Published by Shane Eide

Cover design by Shane Eide

Edition 1, July 2015

Portland Oregon

It never made a difference to them whether the place was big or small, an apartment or a house, or whether it was furnished or bare; they just wanted to live somewhere quiet. But as it often happens in situations where people place themselves upon the rock of a sole variable by which all others must break, they compromised, but precisely in those moments when others would have turned and fled. They remained seated in chewed up chairs with wounds of yellow-stuffing, inhaling the moldy musk of the small, pale leasing office as a stout landlord came from the back with his hair disheveled like a bird nest made messy with the demands of a highly-trafficked domestic life, dressed in a tank-top and bearing a post-prandial, marinara-scented shape between the middle-aged, sagging mouse-noses that were his breasts. He seemed confused about their arrival despite their having called ahead to confirm a meeting time. He went through his usual list of setbacks, not without a sense of glee, coupled with great emphasis as though they were meant to be deterrents to all but the few and desperate. These deterrents included: no washer or dryer, no smoking, no dishwasher, and incongruously, no wine bottles or glass in the dumpster.

‘Is it quiet?’ Collette asked.

Her husband, Martin, could tell by the small, refractory syllable which then cracked from the back of her throat that she had kept herself from telling the landlord, as she had often told others in the past to ‘be honest.’

‘Yeah,’ the landlord conceded, nodding and looking away as though he had given it serious thought before. ‘It’s really quiet, as a matter of fact. You guys got pets?’

‘One Jack Russell,’ Martin said, instantly regretting his specificity for some reason he couldn’t place.

The landlord leaned in a little so that they could smell the redolence of that cheap, pasta dinner decorating his shirt, fragrancing his breath and leaking from his pores. ‘Is your dog a quiet dog?’

‘Yeah, he’s quiet,’ Collette said, quickly, as if to keep Martin from accidentally telling him the opposite.

‘Great,’ the landlord said. ‘That’s great because we really do value quiet around here. The freeway’s just a few