The best nights are those when the furnace goes quiet and you can hear the filing cabinet. It’s faint but if you control your breathing, you can make out words and sometimes melodies.
Most of it’s in Portuguese and often it’s just strings of numbers but it’s drenched with emotion. The other furniture says the filing cabinet is crazy, it’s just muttering. But sometimes I make out the name Lucia. I suspect he had a family, or at least a wife, and had to leave her to come to America to make a better life for them. Then after establishing himself, he sent for her only to learn of The Accident.
He would stand alone from then on, condemned to a solitary eternity holding old copies of Mad Magazine and bags of Canadian pennies.
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