Fiction | May 02, 2025

La Coruña 

Mark Labowskie 

When you’re young, all you do is worry about the future; when you’re old, all you do is think about the past. In 1964, when I was twenty-five, I moved to Georgetown to attend medical school. I answered an ad for a third-story room in a red-brick Colonial on O Street. The room smelled of stale coffee, and the bed groaned when I sat on it. The landlady, in a shell-colored robe and holding a glass of some golden-malty beverage, watched as I examined everything, wobbling the wooden desk with its bum leg, flicking a switch and waiting a second for light to awaken within the scalloped dome on the ceiling. I had no intention of declining; the room was all I could afford. It was more than I could afford. 

“A doctor,” she breathed at last. “So young.” 

I reminded her that I wasn’t a doctor yet. She smiled, revealing a black tooth, and I looked away. A watercolor hummingbird hung trapped inside a frame on the wall. 

“This room will do fine, Mrs. Evans.”