~ The Craigslist Thriller ~
By Elda Oreto
“I have already waited half an hour, and nobody has come… I’m not going to wait another minute more!”
Edna was speaking to a glowing screen. She was complaining and almost in tears.
The room was a hot, dark hole. There were only two windows in the two-room apartment: one in the kitchen-cum-living room and one in the bedroom. The one in the kitchen-cum-living room was a sort of one-person balcony over a dirty backyard where the whores carried on their business wwith their clients and the drug dealers sold their treasures.
The apartment was completely empty, except for the furniture that was stuffed in a corner and piled up against a wall of the living roomThere were some boxes lying in a heap waiting to be thrown away.
Edna felt the desolation of those objects within her soul— desperate and lonely as they waited to be thrown away.
The apartment was part of a bleak building in one of the few bad areas of Berlin. It actually looked like a ruin.
Edna’s neighbors were pushers and hookers. She lived on the fifth floor. The elevator was perpetually broken. When it was working, it reeked of piss and cum. She took the stairs.
More than once, she had found dead junkies on the stairs.
She often had to call the police to report harassment by the perverts.
Every other day, someone got into a fight, sometimes for no reason at all, and when the police came, they would be in their riot gear and the people stood in the windows and on the balconies to watch the reality show.
“Don’t worry! He is going to come,” A warm and masculine voice emerged from the screen. “In just a few days, everything will be over. We’ll be there together.”
Of course, Edna was not talking to the screen, even if she sometimes thought that her relationship with her Mac was stronger than anything else.
She looked back at the screen and a handsome young man looked back at her, his face glowing with love.. He had a determined look on and she thought his smile was just amazing.
Henry, her fabulous husband. They had met and fallen in love, just a year before, in Berlin.
After that meeting, she was ready to be his wife forever. He worked for an international shipping company. One day, he was here, and the next day, on the opposite side of the world. So she quit her job just to follow him. And he told her how proud that made him feel.
Now the time had come for them to find a place to stay, to settle down and start a family.
They had been trying to have a baby for two years, without success, but they had not lost hope, and they wanted to be ready when the birth eventually happened; they wanted a big house and a perfect family: a huge TV monitor, a leather sofa, some contemporary art to decorate the walls.
They had found the perfect place for them in northern Norway, in Tromsø.
They bought a big house with a mortgage that would force them to work for life. But it was their dream house.
And now to make the big move out of the old, shitty, dirty two-room apartment in Berlin.
Most of the furniture had come from Ikea, or from street sales. The best solution to getting rid of it was to sell everything on Craigslist.
The internet platform was perfect for those who wanted to sell second-hand furniture and other stuff to people on a tight budget who would be happy with second-hand junk, without any guarantees. There were people who bought and sold on Craigslist as a business; it was almost a second job: they went around the streets and found trashed furniture, left there by other people, brought it home, cleaned it and sold it on Craigslist. They called it vintage.
Edna and Henry had put several objects on Craigslist, but nobody had responded to their ads in weeks. Henry had to travel for work. Edna had to stay home, because she had to wait for responses from people who read the Craigslist post.
Finally, someone—a man called Alex—answered. He was coming to pick up the Ikea table, the one she had bought second-hand on Craigslist one year earlier for ten euros. The original price had been twelve euros. Now she was selling it for five. A real deal.
Alex was an art student who had just moved to Berlin from the USA. He needed cheap furniture for his room in his WG in Prenzlauerberg. Nothing too extreme. You know, less is more! he told her in an email.
Edna told him that he could come to pick up the table on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Alex suggested an appointment time on Monday afternoon.
Edna accepted. She just wanted to get rid of that piece of shit—the table, of course. It was a matter of personal satisfaction at that point. In fact, it had been her idea to put the furniture up for sale. Henry had accepted the idea. But it had seemed, so far, like she had failed in her mission to earn some money for the move.
On Monday morning at twelve, she would have her personal moment of glory. She would sell her first piece on Craigslist. The rest would follow.
On Monday, she woke up early and cleaned the apartment. She may be moving, but she did not want to give the impression that she was messy or dirty.
So she cleaned and arranged the few things that still decorated the apartment. She took a shower, and she got dressed up. She also put on make-up and perfume. Then she wasted half an hour deciding if she should wear shoes or slippers. She decided on the shoes and spent another half hour deciding which pair to wear.
When she was ready, she went to the computer and checked the time. He was thirty minutes late!
What? Fear exploded in her stomach and then in her lungs; for some moments, she could not breathe, and a terrible doubt overcame her: maybe he was not coming at all!She panicked. Edna checked her email, but there was no news from Alex. She noticed that she had forgotten to get Alex’s cell phone number and thought that maybe he was not able to check his emails right then. Edna started sobbing and sent an SMS to Henry, looking for consolation.
One minute later, Henry was on Skype, speaking with her.
Now Alex was forty-five minutes late. Maybe something had happened to him. Maybe he could not find her number. Maybe he had fallen asleep in the U-Bahn.
“Henry, he’s forty-five minutes late! I will not answer the door if he comes now!”
she said, upset. She was anxious, and the anxiety made her sweat excessively. Her make-up was melting, and the sweat stains were becoming visible under her armpits. The fucking apartment was so humid.
“Honey, be patient and relax. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We are going to solve this problem when I get back.”
But Henry was not to know that was real humiliation for Edna. She started to sweat even more. The apartment was like a sauna. She could feel the moisture running down her neck and her hair getting dump.
She got a glass of water and drank it all at once.
After an hour, the doorbell rang unexpectedly.
Edna was sitting in front of the computer screen and shaking her leg nervously.
“I am not going to open it,” she said and lit a cigarette.
“What? Why?” Henry asked.
“No, I won’t.”
“Well, you don’t even know if that is him or someone else…”
But at that moment, an idea sparked in her head: she could finally get rid of the table. She decided that would be her goal. She had to respect it.
“Ok. I’ll go and see…”
After a minute, she was back. Her attitude had changed completely, and talking to the monitor, she said,
“All right. He is coming up…but he sounded a little bit weird… Can you wait on Skype and check who he is with me? I am a little bit scared!”
She took the computer and put it in a corner, almost hidden behind the door from the living room into the corridor. From the monitor, Henry could see the room.
Edna went back to the entrance and opened the door, waiting for Alex. When she saw his shadow moving warily in the darkness, she reached over to the shelf next to the entrance and picked up the pepper spray. Better to take precautions.
The corridor was completely dark; only one dim bulb was blinking on and off, on and off. The shadow came closer and finally came close enough. He popped up from the darkness like a ghost in a horror movie. He was horrified and horrific at the same time!
Edna thought that he was scared because of the building. “Don’t worry. It is a strange place, I know, but…please come in.”
He slid inside and in a low voice said, voice, “Thanks.”
When they were in the other room, he turned and saw her face.
She looked like a cadaver in decomposition. She was probably a whore or the worst of the junkies. Most probably both..
Edna smiled. “Would you like to have something…?”
Before she could finish the sentence, he said nervously, “No, no, no… So where is the table…?”
She thought, ‘How rude!’ and finished her sentence anyway. “…to drink…water, tea, coffee?”
Then she added, “The table is in here” and moved in front of him, across the room.
Alex felt his nostrils assaulted by the thick stench of body odor mixed with a strong fragrance that accentuated the stink, and exclaimed, “OMG!”
Edna turned around. “What did you say?”
“Oh, no. N-n-n-nothing. Just give me the table, and that’s it.”
Now she was very upset. “Hey! By the way, you are one hour late! I have been waiting for you all this time, and you treat me like this?!”
She moved towards him as she talked, and Alex could see the crazed face of the dirty, stinky hallucinating woman so closely that their noses were almost touching. He moved backwards jerkily and found himself in a corner of the room.
Edna sprang to the other side, moving the door so that it would not hit the computer, but Alex did not notice the computer and thought she was going to grab something like a hammer or, perhaps, a pointed object or even a gun.
He jumped from his corner and reached the front door and ran as fast as he could—down the stairs, into the street and away—leaving that crazy woman behind forever. What a stroke of luck he had not given her his cell phone number!
“Edna, Edna? What happened?” Henry was calling from the monitor.
In all that mess, she had left him on the shelf and ran to the door to see what was going on.
She went back to the computer, disappointed and sweating. “He left,” she said, sobbing. “He left. He ran out the door and he left, without saying a word.”
“Did he take the table?”
“No.”
“Ah, Edna. Don’t worry. He was probably wacky... The world is full of lunatics.”
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