2031 Apartment Diagram

✿ This article was featured in Issue #1 of the Atlantic Bulletin

Baron had inherited the apartment from his uncle, who passed in the year following his parents. It was in a mixed residential-industrial neighbourhood, adjacent to a canvas factory. Out back was a rivulet, which roared in the long rainstorms of early April.

Each January, the Colour Bureau of the Architecture Assembly announces the year’s colours, and tradition in mainstream architecture and interior design is to incorporate the announced palettes, which usually contain a hundred or so colours. His uncle’s apartment had been built and furnished in 2031, and so it had a #2031 Colour Profile.

In some ways, it was a very conventional apartment in the Vekllei tradition. It had a sauna and bath in the wetroom, a bidet, a sunken living room and a bread oven. In others, it was more peculiar. The apartment was bizarrely allocated across three levels. You alighted the entrance light well into a sunken living space, then climbed back up into the kitchen. The main living room and master bedroom were another step above the kitchen. Adjacent to the main living area was a closet and study, which overlooked the entrance from a half-meter mezzanine.

It was in this study that Tzipora set up shop when she arrived in March 2063. Baron had been reluctant to take her even provisionally, not least because it would mean searching for a new apartment in his busy return period after being abroad for ten years. Tzipora, however, had lived in a dormitory for much of her life and had settled in the alcove once she acquired a dresser screen. She refused outright the master bedroom, which sparked a sleepy agoraphobia. By the time Baron had made other accomodations, Tzipora had entrenched herself in the neighbourhood and had developed a severe sentimentality about the apartment and its rivulet, and so that was where he lived for the rest of his life.

In this sense, Tzipora had a strange kinship with the apartment. Baron sealed himself off in the master bedroom each night, but she never left the main living space. It was warm in there, especially in the flickering light of the enormous oven and fireplace, and when she moved the screen aside in the morning her little corner became part of the living area.

She had a lot of good memories of that apartment.