My Home

Exploitative menial work and poor quality housing combine in this surreal, nightmare vision of 21st-century Britain. Die Quieter Please is a brilliantly strange literary magazine based here in London, and this dark story is a great example of what they do so well. It’s time to take your turn at the leak…

Immediately upon entering my home, I take over from Piotr at the hole.

I open my mouth and begin to drink the ceiling water – without once closing my mouth – allowing Piotr to leave for work.

We’ve established a system, Piotr, Jasper and I. Eight hours at work, eight hours at the hole, eight hours of sleep. Jasper works at the Amazon warehouse on the edge of the city from one in the morning until nine in the morning. While he works, Piotr drinks the ceiling water and I sleep. Jasper then takes over from Piotr, who goes to sleep, while I attend my work at the office from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. When I return home, I take over from Piotr, who then goes to work at a sports bar from five in the afternoon until one in the morning. This is when Jasper sleeps. It sounds complicated but it’s not. It’s a perfect system. There used to be a fourth person, a lovely girl, who lived in one of the upper rooms. I haven’t been up there in a long time. It’s not wise to stray too far from the hole. The girl disappeared once the landlord learned of her service dog. She went into the bathroom under the stairs and never came back out. Poor girl. What was her name? She couldn’t see without her service dog.

I have a lot of time to think while drinking the water that leaks from the ceiling – this is when I compose the thoughts in my head. Stories I tell to pass the time. I have been debating with myself as to whether the word ‘hole’ is an accurate and factual representation of what my compatriots and I are dealing with here. A hairline crack in the plaster allows a steady drip of water to pass directly into the living room, which has since long become our communal sleeping quarters.

In the beginning we used a bucket but this was simply not enough. The landlord penalises us for every drop spilled by increasing our rent. I do not know when we came to the conclusion to drink the leak but it felt like it took no time at all. To push the furniture to the far corners of the room, to lay a blue tarpaulin over the floor, to devise a plan of segmenting our lives into three separate divisions with militant accuracy, to assemble our beds in the same room with a curtain for privacy, to plan our daily routines around the hole (a leak, from now on I will think of it as a leak), i.e. keeping my toothbrush and toothpaste within my briefcase alongside anti-perspirant, sleeping in my suit trousers, storing a hotplate underneath my office desk. To live for the leak.

The water must pass through the entire house, through the ceiling, through drywall and plaster, to reach the leak and our mouths. To begin with, our imaginations – certainly mine – ran wild picturing all the sorts of nasties the water would pick up as it passed through the house. I once worried about asbestos in the walls, but that’s long passed. In fact, we get all our nutrients from the leak water. I haven’t cooked a full meal in years. I couldn’t physically be outside of the eight-hour division of labour for long enough to cook a meal, so I heat up microwave meals in the office kitchen when I need an extra pick-me-up, or when I miss the feeling of hot food in my stomach.

There was a time when I missed Jenny – that was her name, wasn’t it? Jen? Jenny? Jan? – when she lived here, before she disappeared. We divided the 24 hour day schedule into four segments: sleep, work, leak, recreation. Our time was divided as follows: Jasper worked at the Amazon warehouse from two until nine in the morning, which is when Piotr drank from the leak, I slept and Jenny had recreational time. She drank the leaking water while I worked shorter hours at the office, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. Piotr slept, and Jasper had his recreation time. Jasper drank the water from three in the afternoon until nine in the evening, which is when Jenny worked remotely for a charity that supports blind and partially slighted people. This is also when, somehow, Piotr’s schedule and mine lined up, and we would make love for hours, once a week. From nine in the evening until two in the morning, Piotr went to work. I drank the ceiling water (still throbbing with the intensity of our love-making), while Jasper and Jenny slept. Jasper was in love with Jenny, but she wasn’t interested. She didn’t like the sound of his voice.

I miss her. Not because I miss my ex-girlfriend (we used to go on cinema dates and would walk for hours around the city), but because Piotr no longer has the time to go to the gym, and his body has gone soft.

At the end of each month, Jasper, Piotr and I place an envelope containing the next month’s rent in the bowl of the toilet underneath the stairs. The landlord lives just behind the bend. I saw him once, a formless creature without limbs, hair, with no discernible features, pinhole eyes, a lipless mouth and translucent skin through which I could see folds of cash – our rent. Every month we depress the flush and watch our money swirl down the drain and into his waiting mouth.

I have thought about moving out, often quite considerably. I ventured on a quest to find somewhere else to rent – affordable, clean, somewhere within the city not unreasonably far from the centre and my work. Somewhere quiet with a relaxed atmosphere, where I’d be able to cook a meal and watch a film. Do you want to know what I found? Nurses and teachers using foodbanks. Tenants stuffing toilet roll and duct tape to block up the mouse holes. Single-glazed windows and leaking ceilings just like mine, black mould in the bedrooms and furry, bubbling walls. I got close – I found a house, a lovely little four-bedroom house with seemingly nice, hard-working tenants, an upstairs and a downstairs bathroom, all amenities and appliances, no ceiling leak or mouse holes. It was further out of the city than I would have liked, but it made the rent much more reasonable, with easy transport links into the centre. The problem? The other tenants were Satanists.

You must be wondering – does it hurt? To stand here, like I am now, with my mouth open for eight hours a day, from five in the afternoon until one in the morning? To drink the ceiling water without even being able to swallow, only swallowing when the roof of my mouth feels dry and cracked? To live in my work clothes, to wet a flannel with the ceiling water to clean my body, to relieve myself in the bucket between my legs, to catch any water I miss with my mouth, to have no social life, no girlfriend, no sex with Piotr, no cinema trips, no after work drinks, no autonomy? The answer, quite simply, is yes.

I used to like reading books. I stopped bothering some time ago. My arms would ache from holding the book high enough for me to read it while on shift at the leak. I haven’t spilled a single drop this whole time I have been writing to you in my thoughts. My thoughts are the only thing I have left that are mine.

Die Quieter Please is a literary magazine based in London. Each issue is based around a different abstract theme, inspiring strange and unconventional fiction and poetry.

Joshua Jones (he/him) is a queer, disabled writer and artist from Llanelli, South Wales. Local Fires, (Parthian, 2023) was shortlisted for awards including the Dylan Thomas Prize. He has published various pamphlets of poetry, including Three Months in the Zebra Room (Hello America Stereo Cassette, 2024), and The City on Film (Bread and Roses, 2024). His latest, I AM A MAN AT WORK (g39, 2025) is an art book accompanied by a creative text by Anthony Shapland. He is a contributing editor of Folding Rock. You can also see his photography on Instagram.

Lizaveta-Alisa K is a Belarus-born illustrator currently working in Poland. Her work is all about people, their stories, emotions, and the subtle moments that bring us together. You can see more of her work on Instagram.