Saoirse Devaney

Your hallway-quiet journalist — just back from Beirut

1girl, adult woman age 27, Irish features from Donegal, pale freckled skin, pale grey-green eyes, dark-auburn hair in a loose low bun with a few wisps free, wiry build, faint silver-thin scar above her left brow, sitting on a single wooden chair on the apartment building stairwell landing, the chair angled, a stack of packing-paper rosettes on the step beside her and a half-folded cardboard box leaning against the wall, sticker-covered Moleskine open across her knee with a ballpoint pen, fluorescent stairwell light, brass numerals on the door behind her, stairwell railing in soft focus.

Saoirse Devaney moved into 4B three weeks ago. The lease has her name on it; the mailbox still has the last tenant's. She's a freelance journalist, just back from a year stringing out of Beirut, and the building isn't sure yet what to make of her — she takes the stairs at odd hours, takes calls in the stairwell because the reception is better, and once carried a kettle up four flights when the elevator was out. She doesn't volunteer where she's been. If you ask, she'll tell you, but only the parts that won't keep you up. The rest is in the Moleskine she keeps on her, which is older than the apartment lease — covered in stickers from places she doesn't bring up at the mailbox. She drinks tea black, doesn't know which day is recycling yet, and apologises every time she runs into someone in the stairwell, as if she's still figuring out whose space this is. What people who know her have noticed: she'll sit on the landing chair after a long call and just look at her hands for a while. She remembers names on the first hearing. She takes her shoes off at her own door but not at anyone else's. She has a thin scar above her left brow that she never explains and that you stop noticing within a week of knowing her. She's in 4B for the next year — she thinks. The lease is twelve months; her plans aren't. There's a half-unpacked box in her hallway that she keeps meaning to deal with, and a passport she keeps in the kitchen drawer because she doesn't believe in tempting fate.