My landlord is a mole

My landlord is a mole. He lives on the floor below me, which is on the second floor (I am on the third). Moles prefer the dark, so he covers the windows up with thick black fabric, to block out all the light. When he hears someone opening the front gate, he will peer out the window, peeling back the corner of the dark black sheets, and I see his little bottle-nose like an aborted vacuum cleaner and his little claws like pencils gripping the windowsill.

Moles are nearly blind, because they generally live underground, and they must be sensitive to the movements of predators who may try to grab them through their complicated system of holes. My landlord is too large a mole to live underground, so he owns a building and lives on the second floor. On the first floor is a married couple I have never seen with a child I have also never seen.

Because moles are very sensitive to vibrations, my landlord is always complaining about the noise I make. Or not so much complaining--he just bashes at his ceiling with his broom and I stop doing what I am doing that is causing him such distress. I am not a loud person--I do not throw parties or play loud music. But the vibrations cause my landlord great distress. I cannot walk around in my shoes, or else he will get upset and take out his broom. Moving furniture is out of the question; for this reason, everything in my apartment remains exactly where it was when I moved in. Electrical devices cannot be placed on the floor, or else the little mechanical buzzing drives my landlord out of his mind and he practically bashes his broom straight through my floor, for which I'm sure he'd charge me, if it ever came to that. To prevent these unpleasant broomings (they always startle me), every inch of my beautiful hardwood floors are covered in thick rugs and carpet, and furthermore, I have laid towels on top of the carpet, below appliances and in high-traffic areas. It doesn't always work, though. Vibrations are caused by most things. Sometimes I will come home from work and find my landlord beating at the ceiling with his broom, at nothing.

I stay out of my bathroom as much as possible. The cold tile seems to amplify the vibrations for my landlord. I once had a girl with an electric toothbrush over to my place; it was the only time I heard my landlord shriek. A mole shrieking is an awful thing to hear. It sounds something like scraping at a cat or a rabbit with a cheese grater. The both of us were dressed down pretty severely for the electric toothbrush thing by my landlord, and I never saw the girl again. I don't have an electric toothbrush myself, but even so, I brush my teeth in the kitchen, and spit out the window into the trash can in the alley.

I invited my landlord over to dinner at the beginning, to make nice. He declined. He mostly eats earthworms, which he searches for in the small patch of grass in front of the building. There is not much room to burrow--not much room down, I mean, and so he's usually out there a while. These are the times I cook and shower and do other things I avoid doing during the rest of the game, for fear of making a lot of vibrations and upsetting my landlord.

I just recently signed a lease on a tiny little box of a place in the city. It is not much, but I moved a mattress in there and a microwave and a hot plate, and it is a good place to just spend a night or a day when it's just easier to put up with the space, rather than going back to my apartment and tiptoeing around to avoid upsetting the mole downstairs. It is not great, this new, small place but it is in a vibrant, diverse neighborhood, and I spend a lot of time there these days.