What She Left Behind
by Ameer Khan
Some things never get easier.
The dreary weather of mid-winter New York was anything but kind to Clara as she fiddled with her keys, thumbing through them for the rustiest one on the ring. Before her loomed an old, run-down tenement building with an all too familiar eeriness to it. Clara didn’t mind, though. She’d stood on this doorstep every weekend for the past three years, braving heavy snow and rain for her visits with Petra.
But today was different. Her fingers felt numb and clumsy in the biting winter air. There was no sense of urgency as she rhythmically flipped through the keys in her hands. Any desire she’d had to get out of the cold and into Petra’s warm apartment was snuffed out by the fact that there was no warm apartment. Petra was long gone. She’d been gone for two weeks, to be exact. To Clara, it felt like two decades. She’d been keeping count of the days since she reported Petra missing on the back of an old grocery list.