from a few months after i was born until just before i turned five, my parents and i lived in an apartment in a pretty nice suburb in california. the landlords were an elderly chinese couple who i remember liking, and i always accompanied my dad when he went to drop off rent.

it was a pretty small apartment complex but a couple other families lived there at the time, and some had young kids as well. none of them, as far as i know, ever had any problem with the place.

i was too young to have any vivid memories of the place, but when i was ten i heard my mom telling my aunt about some weird shit that happened in that apartment and i think it awoke some feelings about that place that i’d forgotten i had.

some of the stories are more convincing than others — my mom hearing a couple fighting and their kid crying directly outside before realising that was impossible because we lived on the second floor, smells of rotting meat that didn’t drift past my bedroom (which i never slept in; now i see why), and the fact that no tenants of that unit, both before and after us, stayed more than a couple months.

my mom says that the landlord was sad to see us leave not only because he’d become friends with my parents in the four years they’d lived there, but also because he knew it would be hard to find another long-term tenant.

i think she always got the vibe that something bad had happened because she’d been in some creepy places when she’d worked as a missionary in her twenties, but when she first noticed the smell she went to the landlord about it anyway. he apologised for not being able to do anything about it and he never seemed confused about the source of it, but he never explained further. not long before we left, he revealed to my mom that despite the building being pretty new, he wasn’t the original owner of the place. a couple with a kid had had it built before suddenly selling it not long after moving in. according to him, they’d lived in the unit that we were in. it made sense — i remember we dropped by around christmas once, and i was confused about why the landlord’s apartment was smaller than ours.

my mom suspects that the original owners were some terrifying case of domestic abuse, and that one parent eventually murdered the other in that apartment and fled with the kid.

i remember never feeling alone in that place, never in a good way. a couple times, i came running to my mom saying, “mama, mama, there’s someone there.”