I think i might start a book off this

I started writing one day and it all started to pour out.
I'm not sure what to do with it.

Claire lay in bed with a down-comforter pulled over her head, a mound of a person wrapped in cotton and blankets in a way that teenagers stuff their beds with life-size decoys of themselves when sneaking out of the house. In Paris they make beds the way a bed should feel. She lay on the left side to preserve the small crease that her sister Hannah had left behind on the right. "I think I've earned this," she said out loud. She poked an arm out from under the covers to grab a pack of Delium cigarettes on the nightstand, knocking over a glass. She waited to light up and eventually fell back asleep. The concierge awoke her from her sleep.
"Ms. Claire, you have a phone call."
"No calls, Dante, let me sleep. And find my cigarettes."
"They're lying right beside you, Ms. Claire."
He walked into the back room where the phone sat off the hook.
"I'm sorry Ms. Ira, but Ms. Claire isn't able to talk at the moment."
"Dante, you give her the phone, even if you have to tape it around that thick head of hers."
Dante returned to the bedroom, phone in hand, stretching the cord all the way.
"Ms. Claire, it's your sister. She insists you answer her."
Dante placed the phone by her head.
"Iva."
"Claire, I'm standing outside the building. Let me in."
"I'll have Dante fill out the correspondance and then you can -"
"Claire, have him buzz me in, goddamnit."

Iva walked down the hallway in a fevered hurry, begast to a conversation that would stretch on for hours and required not an ounce of haste to marathon herself down the hallway like a police officer. The doors of the Bellvue Apartment complex were faded baige decorated in nothing more than room numbers and peep-holes. Except for the one at the end - The door had been hand-painted lavender some years ago and laminated on the front was a Gregor Namsoinski line - "Liking people and liking life. Riverbends lit up by light. Dancing flurry, laughing sigh. Let's be humans for awhile."
Iva let herself in.
Iva was upright in bed smoking her black Delium as Dante cleaned up the wine stain on the side of the bed.
"There was a lost passage in the New Testament," said Iva. "Archeologists discovered it."
"And what did it say?"
"The Lord said unto thee 'Black chemically enhanced clove cigarettes are not thy work of my father thy Lord, bur rather the work of Paris, it's ne'er do-wells and faded, crusty hipsters."
"Spare me this please."
Claire hopped out of bed and paced to the bathroom completely nude.
Dante nervously coughed and averted his eyes.
"I've come to tell you that it's incredibly unhealthy that you've been living in Hannah's room for the last two months, wearing her clothes, using her bathtub. Mom has sent me as dispatch to bring you back to Manhattan."
"Stuffy old Manhattan. You can't climb trees in Manhattan. Here I can pick any old tree from my balcony window and say 'I'll climb you today, fellow.' And I do it. Often."
Iva took a seat on the bed, careful to avoid Hannah's imprint.
"How do you see trees from 34 stories up?"
"It's a special telepathy. Me and the trees. Great minds think alike."
Claire returned from the bathroom wearing a pink low-rise spaghetti strapped dress that had come right out of a Lotus Vintage catalog.
"I like Paris, Iva."
"Are you still in mourning?"
"Hardly."
Claire sat next to Iva and passed her a cigarette.
"Poor Hannah."
"Poor Hannah..."
"How many guys did you fuck in High School, you think?" asked Claire.
"You're devious...Not as many as Hannah."
"Poor Hannah...she got the worst end of it I do believe, wouldn't you say? Raped by the Science Club."
"And by that loathsome Phys. Ed. teacher."
"Snnnagggle Toooooth Smile."
The girl burst into uproarious laughter, falling over each other and the floor.
Dante poked his head around the corner with a grin.
Iva was rolling around on the floor holding her stomach.
"Jesus shit."
She stood up and walked to Claire, brushing the brown hair out of her face and pulling her straps back around her shoulders. Iva walked to the balcony window. In the right hand corner on the glass was another Namsoinski line - "Dilly dally, shilly shally." Iva opened the sliding glass door and threw the cigarette butt over the railing from the inside carpet. She turned to Claire.
"Show me where she jumped."

The girls headed out onto the balcony. A small fenced area that could fit a chair, a small in-table and nothing else.
"She wrote out here, I believe."
Three feet above their heads was a cement ledge that protruded from the top of the door frame. An easy climb for someone nimble enough to climb even the dankiest tree. Iva pulled the in-table close enough and both girls climbed the ledge. They stood on top of it looking out across the city. Three inches of their shoes stuck out and keep a solid footing proved difficult.
"She was a true blue. I applaud her. In a sense, she overcame her fear of heights."
The girls leaned against the back of the wall.
"What were in her pockets again?"
"She was completely nude. I can't believe you failed to remember that. They say as she passed the floor windows, every tenant on every floor popped their head out to watch her fall, like a dominoe reaction almost."
The girls climbed back down to the balcony and Iva re-arranged the in-table back against the railing.
They headed inside and closed the glass door.

"This isn't healthy Claire, and it's not going to get any better."
Claire curled back up into bed and pulled the comforter to her chin. She placed her Delium pack back on the nightstand.
"Just give me one more week. Can you stay that long?"
"Here?"
"No, not here. Somewhere else. I can't stand for anyone to be here right now."
Iva slowly walked to the lavender Namsoinski riddled door and cracked it open.
She ran her hands up and down the frame.
"I won't tell you that you have a chance to save your marriage, because you don't. When you up and left, Shane disappeared. I can't say if he'll return."
"Shane can stay gone. Everything now is bigger than my relationship to him."
Iva walked out into the hallway.
"I'll see you tomorrow. One more week, okay?"
She shut the door.
Claire sat back up in bed and lit another clove cigarette. She got back up and headed towards the kitchen to pour a glass of wine. A Coudeux for a reason. Unopened for a reason. Centered to the left of the china cabinet for a reason. The apartment had been blueprinted on perfect reasoning and perfect occurances that matched Hannah's scheme of things. The telephone rang.
"Dante, could you please get that?"
Another ring.
"Dante?"
Yet another.
Claire hurried to the living area and took the call herself, invigorated in some strange form of ghost control and haunted balconies.
"Hello?"
Heavy breathing filled through the wiretaps and a woman's raspy voice came out the other end -
"You'll die alone up there if you're not careful."
The phone clicked.
Claire crawled back into bed with her glass, sat it on the table, threw the rest of her pack of Delium's in the waste basket by her bedside, pulled the comforter over her head and cried and cried and cried for the remainder of her last week in Paris ghosthunting.

 

In the first paragraph, Dante and the concierge appear to be the same person. I don't think that's your intent, though.

She "marathons herself down the hallway"? As a former marathon runner, I'm well aware that the term "marathon" now refers to any activity done for more than three hours, from dancing to picking tomatoes. However, it's the first time I've seen "marathon" used as a verb.

The style is very good. Develop some sort of story line and you'll have a good short story.

 

I liked it too. I don't know how you would stretch it into a novel exactly, but it's a nice little slice of life made more exciting by the cryptic nature of the dialogue-- I'm never quite sure if what these people are saying is supposed to make sense or not, or if it's all an elaborate in-joke of stoned imagination, improvised by them on the spot.

I think it's fine as a short story-- your lead character is interesting, and really, short stories don't need plots and work best when they leave things open, which you have definitely done here. But if you're going to expand it into a novel you need to state your direction early so the reader is carried along... continuing the whole stream-of-consciousness thing without developing a coherent direction is really tough to pull off... you need to make appointments, load guns, generate mysteries, create suspense, pull your lead into some sort of underworld... whatever your device, you need to set up some sort of cause and effect so that even if you don't follow through on it at least the reader feels like a change is going to come...

 

I think the dialogue is great, really funny in a non-sequitor dark humor kind of way. The new testament line was hilarious.

However the narration seems aimless, probly because "it just poured out," as you described. If you turn this into a full book, which this reads like the first chapter of, it would probly be easy to rewrite the narration of this first part to indicate what direction the story is going in.

All in all I really enjoyed reading it, and I hope you write more.