Closed Door

It was he finally closed the door. It had been his habit, these last fifteen years, to wedge a little wood under his door so that it would stay open while he worked. Now and again, people had stopped to come in, though most merely walked past the open portal hurriedly on their way. This was a place of business, after all.

He would, at his typewriter, cease to clack at the keys and longingly gaze out at the people beyond his room, or happily, on a rare occasion, receive a guest. His door was always open; he was always ready to talk. But then one early morning, turning the lock, the man went into his office and let gravity sever his connection to the world outside.

No one really paid much mind, and though one young woman happened that day to knock upon an errand of signing papers, she was repulsed by an inscrutable silence. Thereafter, silence was all that people knew of him, and not even the clack of his typewriter was ever heard again.

There were three more years upon his lease, and it was at the end of these that an interested party finally intruded upon the silence of the man’s office. A sheet, still in his typewriter, read:

Every day the weight in my chest grows heavier. I know no one and no one knows me. I cannot bring myself to hope.

No hope.

The coroners could find no cause of death, but thought the body remarkably well preserved. He could not have been dead more than three days much less the three years which the more imaginative denizens of the building speculated. The fact that no odor had been noted by anyone seemed to settle the matter, yet a sort of urban legend persisted, spreading to many a diverse office building around the area.

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