Eggshell
The work order says MAKE IT ALL EGGSHELL in a font that doesn’t blink. He signs in at 8:02 and rolls his tray to the kitchen, where the doorway is a museum of pencil: dates stacked like vertebrae, marks with nicknames—Bubbles at 4′2″, Finally taller than Mom at 5′7″—arrows, exclamation points, a crooked heart that only brackets the height, not a couple.
Someone taped a Post-it beside the highest notch. The glue is tired; the corner curls like a question. DON’T PAINT THIS. Underlined twice, the second line softer, as if the request had to ask permission from itself.
He’s not new to this. Apartments are palimpsests he’s paid to wipe clean. He pops the outlet covers into a plastic bag, lays drop cloth over tile, stirs the paint until the skin disappears. The room acquires that wet-bread smell that makes walls feel like creatures. He looks at the pencil story again, then at the bold, unblinking order. He breaks out his roll of blue tape.
Masking tape kiss by kiss, he presses a strip over every mark. He runs a thumbnail along the groove so the graphite prints. He writes the dates on the tape as he goes so he won’t lose the map: 2016: 4′2″; 2018: 4′11″; 2020: the summer of mismatched socks. He copies Dad 5′10″ (still taller) grudgingly, because accuracy is a kind of respect. The Post-it comes last. He smooths it into the tape like a leaf in a book.
He paints. Eggshell erases with cheerfulness. The doorway becomes neutral, bigger, brand-new enough to make someone else imagine a beginning. The brush picks up one stubborn ridge of pencil under where the tape missed, and for a second he thinks: let it show, a faint fossil you can find if you know where to touch. He doesn’t. He’s not paid to leave ghosts.
At lunch he sits on the step outside and eats the apple he forgot to put in the fridge. Across the courtyard, a dad folds a stroller with the choreography of a person who will, in a month, do it better. A kid names a pigeon teacher and is correct for a reason the world can’t argue.
Back inside, the doorway is dry, perfect, innocent. It looks like it never admitted a single centimeter. He peels the tape strip he made and holds it up. The graphite has kissed off onto the adhesive—a poor man’s carbon copy. The heights hover there, reversed, a family made of negative space.
The landlord will tell him to trash it. Inventory has no bin for what used to be here. He doesn’t have a bin, either, but he has a small piece of cardboard from the box of rollers. He lays the tape down on it and writes KITCHEN / RIGHT DOORJAMB / BEFORE YOU in block letters. The Post-it sits in the corner like a flag of a small country that refuses to be annexed.
He looks for a place no checklist thinks to check. Behind the fridge, there’s only dust. Behind the stove, heat. Above the cabinets, a fat finger of space. The breaker box; the air return; the panel under the sink where pipes go tight-lipped. He chooses the narrow void between the cabinet and the wall where a broom will live. He slides the cardboard in and feels it stop against a stud—hidden, reachable, waiting.
On his way out he takes a last photo of the doorway because he needs to remember how forgetting looks. He signs out at 4:41, eggshell under his nails, the smell clinging to his sleeves like a task that overachieved.
Months from now, maybe nobody will find the cardboard. The family might already be a different shape on a different wall. Or maybe a Saturday will arrive when someone drops a spoon that vanishes behind the cabinet. They’ll pull the unit forward and see the flattened artifact, tape gone cloudy, the reversed pencil like letters in a mirror. They’ll press it to the light. They’ll line it up to the new jamb and measure what got kept.
He’ll never know. He paints the next apartment, and the next. But every time he cleans his tray he looks at his stained hands and thinks of the Post-it’s second underline—the softer one—and feels the little break in the world where a doorway stopped being a calendar. That’s the part eggshell can’t touch.
