Sealand

Sand. There was sand in the stairwell again.

Nathan Carmi stood still and lifted his head, trying to catch sounds from the upper floor. Maybe they were renovating one of the apartments, he thought. The renovators were going up and down in the building and their shoes were leaving the sand between the floors too. That was a logical scenario. But there was no noise coming from the top floor. Everything, as usual, was quiet. And the sand too, he thought now, was not the sand of construction work. He looked down at the floor. There were crumbs of dry mud scattered over it. Someone had walked here in shoes with muddy soles. Nathan Carmi took a step forwards and one of the crumbs was crushed and disintegrated into numberless grains of rustling sand.

He closed the door to his apartment and hung the key on the hook on the wall. He took off his shoes so that the sand clinging to his soles would not spread through the house. From the shopping basket he put down on the table he took out a little bag of peanuts. He intended eating only two or three peanuts, but from the moment he began he found it hard to stop. He went on standing there for a few minutes, and a pleasant feeling filled his mouth. There was a kind of sweetness, and a pleasant kind of crunch to the peanut between his teeth, neither hard not soft. Carmi thought that now perhaps he would go to...