Fiction | January 17, 2025

Once, up on the roof, the doorman told the boy, he’d spied Mrs. Foxfur sunbathing in the altogether. 

In her birthday suit, he said, when the boy didn’t capeesh.  

Naked? the boy goggled. 

Oh, she’s a bold one, said the doorman. 

The boy, Harry, lived in 12A. He was eight years old when the doorman told him this shocking fact about Mrs. Foxfur, the red-haired old lady in 12B. The building gossiped about Mrs. Foxfur all the time, but Harry had never actually seen her. He pictured a weird doll splayed on the roof, limbs stiff, chin jutting skyward. He imagined parchment skin stretched over sharp bones—the remains of a bird long extinct.  

Harry’s father and stepmother yearned to buy Mrs. Foxfur’s apartment so they could double the size of their own. But these rich widows, the stepmother griped, they live forever. 

Mrs. Foxfur and her husband had been famous for their raucous parties. Their soigné soirees shook the walls of the solid prewar building, sent vibrations juddering through the parquet floors. The music! The famous faces! The interminable comings and goings! You never knew what you’d find in the hall the next morning: a gold purse, a trail of cocaine. A passed-out princess with legs akimbo. A leopard kit tricked out in a diamond collar, curled sleeping on a doormat.