People of the Neighbourhood : The hoarder
For years, it was the neighborhood’s dark curiosity. We all knew the house, infamous for its stubborn decay. The front window was choked by a high rack of dusty beer glasses, wrapped in layers of decades-old cobwebs. You couldn’t see inside. On the rare occasions the front door swung open, it revealed a hallway packed to the ceiling with banana boxes. Even when shut, the house breathed: the small transom window in the middle the door remained permanently ajar, winter and summer, exhaling a heavy, musky scent of mold and forgotten decades onto the pavement. Every now and then, we saw him—the collector of this chaos. A silent man, endlessly rearranging cardboard boxes balanced precariously on the two or three old bicycles that cluttered the sidewalk. Then, in September 2023, the authorities stepped in. A black official notice was slapped onto the brickwork: Uninhabitable . To be honest, the inspection shouldn’t have come as a surprise; a small sapling had literally taken root in the mort...
