A man living in a large apartment building becomes obsessed with a family living nearby, at first wishing them ill and then wishing he could participate in their love and affection.
This is a very interior story; the narrator’s viewpoint gives unrelated events a feeling of causal determinism, and his feelings of loneliness and isolation color every encounter, no matter how mundane. It’s ultimately, I think, the saddest story in this collection, though it has absurdist humor running through it.