Disasterpiece

In a haunted, shifting tower, grief lingers.. until one cleansing act ends the cycle.

Every thirtieth night, the building sighed itself apart. Walls bled into mist. Stairs unraveled like old film. We woke in different rooms, on different floors, strangers to our own shadows.

I was on 14 when the man below sang to his soup. “Potato, leek, you humble things…” His voice floated up through the vents—thin, off-key, unbearably tender. By dawn, he’d forgotten the words. Memory drips down. What’s lost above pools below.

On 91, a woman pressed her palms to damp plaster. “She breathes,” she whispered to no one. “Can’t you feel it?” She meant the building. She meant her mother. When the floors shifted, she left me a moth in a matchbox. I still felt its wings flutter against my ribs like a second heartbeat.

Now I was on 3.
Warmth here. Thick. Cloying.
Like breath trapped in a coffin.

Floor 3 was where grief came to rot.

Midnight. The dumbwaiter shuddered open.
It always brought relics:

A wedding ring fused to a charred photograph.
A child’s shoe, its sole split like a scream.
A porcelain doll’s arm, cool and fingerless.

A note curled around its wrist:
She drowned in the bathtub. Forgot to scream.

I lifted it. Cold seeped into my palm.
Carry what drops. Carry it until you sink.
The rules were simple:
Pass it down. Keep it. Break it.

Marie found me at twilight.
Not a ghost—a stain. A watermark on reality.

She drifted through my room trailing funeral lilies and wet chalk. Her arms overflowed with other people’s sorrows: a pocket watch leaking black sand, lavender bound with nerve-endings, a teacup haunted by bergamot.

“They forget upstairs,” she murmured, placing the teacup in my hands. “So we hold.”

It weighed far more than porcelain should.
The ghost of Earl Grey clung to it—Sunday mornings, steam rising, laughter now silenced. A man’s hands, steady as he poured. A tremor before the fall.

“This one’s light,” Marie lied.
My wrists ached.

I could’ve passed it down.
Let the stain spread to hands below.

I could’ve kept it.
Added its weight to the doll’s arm, the moth, the songless soup. Become a monument to inherited pain.

Instead, I scrubbed.

Scraped bergamot ghosts from ceramic curves. Boiled water. Scoured until my fingers blistered and the cup gleamed bone-white—empty. Clean.

Marie watched from the corner.
“Kindness costs extra here,” she whispered, cradling her pocket watch. “They’ll make you pay.”

The building held its breath.

At the witching hour, the walls dissolved.
Floors liquefied. The great shift began.

I placed the clean cup in the dumbwaiter.
No note. No stain. Just hollow white space.

Marie hummed as the chains groaned—Moon River, or maybe a dirge. The cup descended into the maw of Level 2.

For one fractured second, the building’s hum stuttered.

Above me, Marie touched the weeping plaster.
“Feel that?” Her voice frayed at the edges. “You made the Beast flinch.”

On the sill, the porcelain doll’s arm gleamed.
Waiting.

The moth stirred in its matchbox coffin.

And the walls began to harden again—
curating us all into our next disasterpiece.