Rafferty in Hopperton

Rafferty lives in a mostly single room in Hopperton, upstairs in the Flynn building, above a small general store. The stairs to Rafferty's apartment, and other people's apartments, are to the left of the general store, and are hidden behind an unassuming door painted blue gray, a color that blends into the building itself. Passerbys would naturally think that the door merely leads to storage access for the general store, or a utility area that services the Flynn building somehow. 

Rafferty rarely sees any of his fellow renters on the second floor. He guesses that many of these other apartments are empty, or used for storage. There have been other people, renters he assumes, that he has seen in the hallway, but none longer than four months in a row. The longest residents appear to be sad, older men, past the age of usefulness, shuffling on to obscurity and irrelevance to life. Silent and alone, they slip by at odd hours of early morning or late night, ghosts of mundane despair.

Rafferty's apartment is comfortable to him. Hopperton, a rather large city on the coast, does not seem to have many places for a young creative like himself to live, which makes his place and his discovery of it special. His place, with rent dutifully paid to an agency by mail, and the tucked-in feeling of it gives him the strange mixture of solitude and a sense of closeness to the city. He is a bug in a rug here. It is as if his apartment had been forgotten and frozen in a time when rent was cheap, artists were many, and youthful ambitions grew like many little valley flowers. 

His door, the first one a person encounters turning right just after their leaving the stairs in the hallway, is heavy and made of a thick wood that insulates any noise from inside the building. One could be forgiven in thinking that his apartment was normally reserved for live-in building supervisor types. The layout, if one were to ever see it from inside, would reinforce that impression.

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Rafferty's Apartment

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