Down stares

A horror short story about walking down a set of stairs.

A bird pooped on my shoulder right at the same moment I punted a white, multitudinous dandelion head. The white and brown splatter of excrement mirrored the cloud of white seeds that floated in the air before plummeting to the ground like the rainfall that bleeds a cloud of its dark perimeter. Before the last seed hit the ground, I was taking my suit jacket off and scrubbing the white sludge from my shoulder with an old, balled-up napkin I’d had in my pocket for way too long. Unfurling it, I saw it was a Chipotle napkin. As I rubbed the brown, papery fabric back and forth, the bird poop melted deeper into the black threads, cementing itself as a part of its molecular makeup, perhaps one day made invisible, even forgotten, but never entirely gone. I’d feel its weight on my shoulder. It would be there.

I spotted a water fountain nearby and scooted to it. There was a doggy fountain that I pressed on and ran my napkin underneath before sitting back on my butt. The ground, hard and dry from the summer sun, hit my tailbone like a booster shot, making me straighten my back in reaction. I shook the sweat away from my drooping hair and started cleaning again, hoping the water would wash away the ghostly outline of the splatter mark. A memory from a long time ago, either some TV show or from a random adult droning in the back of my kid mind, surfaced, and the instinct to dab with water and press instead of scrubbing entered my mind. I began pressing one wet finger at a time into the thick, lightly padded shoulder. The water spread through the splotch, returning the thread to its intended blackness, void-like, immeasurable, and indiscernible. For a moment, through a trick of the eyes, it looked like a chasm had opened in the jacket, an entrance to a wormhole. Like a black hole, it absorbed light and destroyed it. It was an all-consumer like a dog going after a whole turkey when it’s knocked off the counter on Thanksgiving. It doesn’t know its appetite, only the opportunity. But the mirage passed, and I dabbed again.

My phone began to ring, buzzing in my back pocket. I struggled to get up with the jacket in my hand, relying solely on my legs, knees, and elbows. Once up, I got my phone out of my pocket and cursed, seeing the time and reading my sister’s name. I slid the gray answer button to the side and jammed the phone between my shoulder and cheek, speaker against my ear.

“What?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m uh. I’m on my way.”

“You texted me that an hour ago. Mom can track you. We see you’re on the greenway.”

I put my sister on speaker, navigated to settings, and turned my location off. “I wanted to take a walk and then a bird pooped on me, so I’m cleaning it off.”

“What?”

“Did you not hear me?”

“A bird pooped on you?”

“Yeah.”

I could almost hear her roll her eyes, “Okay. Well, you’re late. Surprising no one. And on today.”

I rounded one of the trail’s corners, letting the muted static respond on my behalf. Every step, I aggressively scuffed my heels against the ground, creating a thud with the impact, only allowing my anger to seep through in that one, small way. I pictured my sister’s thin bones under my feet for a moment. And I pictured them breaking. Then her imagined pain hurt my stomach, so I stopped scuffing my heels. A green railing separating me from the small, sandy creek below came into view. I passed it and jogged across the street. I breathed in audibly.

“So, when will you be here?”

“I’m walking back to my car now.”

The cement dipped down, and I shifted sideways, bracing myself against the decline.

“You’re going to miss everyone saying hi. The Brown’s already came. So fucking annoying. Getting her snot all over me. Their little kid was on his phone watching YouTube without his headphones on.”

“How does mom seem?”

“The same.”

“Shouldn’t you be in there?”

“She told me to come out and call you! What do you want me to tell her? Are you coming or not?”

I couldn’t respond because I hadn’t heard her. My thoughts blocked my ears. The scream I had heard moments before she started speaking had distracted me. As my feet hit the pavement of the parking lot, a distant, skin-peeling scream, the kind of which I had never heard before, old and deep, erupted from far away. It hit my ears like the echo of an echo of an echo, distant and muffled. It spun me around, and I saw a large, square hole in the ground. It was like someone had taken a ten-foot by ten-foot cookie cutter and smashed it into the grass and removed it, perfectly, leaving not a crumb of the sliced square behind.

The hole’s content, or lack thereof, came into view as I took tentative steps toward it. My sister’s voice prattled on, attempting to communicate with a language and tone indecipherable by my distracted mind. As the angle of my eyesight gained a higher point of view, I saw step after step leading down into the earth. They were steel steps with interlocking lines cut into them for shoes to grip, the kind of steps you’d find in a subway. Metal rails lined both walls. Further down, I saw a dim overhead light attached to the angled ceiling. The stairs went down so far that I couldn’t see the bottom floor. Even if there was a floor visible to me when I was on the grass, the darkness would have swallowed my vision long before due to the limited light. Something began to tug on my mind and body both, standing at the hole’s edge, urging me down, urging me to take that first step. Something undefinable.

“I think I just heard someone scream,” I said.

“There you are. You can’t stop responding to me. I thought you had died or something. Shit, sorry. Shouldn’t have said that.”

“I think there’s someone down there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a hole in the grass by the parking lot. Like, a square hole. It’s a staircase going down. I heard someone scream from the bottom.”

“Okay? It’s probably construction. Maybe someone hit their thumb with a hammer.”

“Hello?” I shouted down the stairs, “Is anyone there? Do you need help?”

“Dude, it’ll be fine. Get in your car.”

“I think I need to go down there and see if everything’s okay?”

A car sped by on the road next to the parking lot. Several dead leaves were thrown into the air.

“Are you serious?”

“I’ll call you back later.”

“And what am I supposed to tell Mo-”

I hit the red button on my screen and hung up. A strong gust pushed my back, causing me to tip forward, lose my balance, and almost tip me onto the first step. But it didn’t. It was I who took the first step. I put my right foot down, and then my left. Then I took another step, and another until I was eye level with the edge of the hole. I looked at the line where grass and dirt gave way to cement. I pushed my finger against it and felt the rigid difference between warm earth and cold stone. I looked down again into the swimming darkness and continued walking.

I began at a consistent, brisk pace, calling out now and then to whoever screamed at the bottom, asking them what was wrong and why they screamed. My momentum carried me at a hop and skip pace, descending in one straight line, step by step. Periodically, I looked back up the stairs at the shrinking square of light. When I first turned around, it looked like someone had used that same cookie-cutter, but on a blue sky with white, puffy clouds, and placed it on a mural of grey-ish green concrete as the one tile of brightness. Every time I looked back up, the tile shrank. It shrank until it was a dot of light, as if it were the sole star in a night sky, hanging on to life billions of years from now after all the other stars in the cosmos had collapsed. The shrinking square was the only thing I could use as a measurement of my descent. Despite the minutes ticking away and the slow burn in my thighs, the cloudy darkness in front of me never thinned, but thickened. I could see the next ten or so stairs in front of me, illuminated by the repeating overhead lights, dim and flickering, but past that was the void. The unknowable gloam.

I became conscious of my space within the earth. Descending now for some time, an unfathomable weight rested above me. Dirt, rocks, grass, sediment, fossils, and deposits of water, gas, and oil lay above me in my imagination’s eye, supported only by the cement ceiling, which, when I pressed my hand against it, almost felt like it could give way. I couldn’t tell if it was reality or a mental trick, but the stone seemed to warp when I touched it, bending ever so slightly under the pressure of my palm. I rubbed it, pressed it, took my hand away, and pressed it again, testing it with as much of the scientific method I could remember. The fear of a cave-in grew like a flame in the back of my mind until it came around the sides and rested in the front, burning the dry kindling of my brain matter, short-circuiting it, causing me to pause and sit down, clinging to the rail.

“Hey!” I shouted, “Did this cave in? What happened?”

My questions were reiterated back to me as they ricocheted off the square tunnel, hurtling themselves into my ear canals. I blocked my ears. Recovering, I took out my phone and looked at my messages. Two missed calls. Ten text messages. A growing thing in my stomach. I swiped away from them and turned on my flashlight. It illuminated the stairs better than the overhead lights, so much so that I could see the details of my corridor better. I bent down and looked at the railing, which was now covered in grime. I shone the light on my hand and saw that it was covered in brown filth. Several cuts lined my palm. I squeezed it.

Bringing the light down to the step I sat on, it was similarly rusted. A reflective residue coated the walls that I hadn’t noticed before. I ran a finger along it and rubbed it back and forth against my thumb. It was nearly frictionless, like oil. I brought it up to my nose and sniffed it, odorless, and I was about to stand up, but I heard a footstep behind me. One heavy thud from somewhere above me on the stairs, and a hot fear erupted from me, blinding me, telling me to run. My breath quickened as I got up and began running down the stairs, and I didn’t realize at first, but I was screaming, filling the tunnel, emptying my lungs until I had to heave in an inhale and scream again until I got lightheaded, lost my footing, slipped, and tumbled down the hard, steel stairs. I felt each impact hit my ribs, my face, my hips, my shins, and my hands as my speed increased. Before I hit terminal velocity, I reached up for the railing and grabbed it. I felt its cold, rough surface further scratch my hand, ripping skin from muscle, as it brought me to a stop, yanking my shoulder with a pop.

As my movement ceased, I heard the continuing tick tack clug thid of something falling. I opened my eyes, reoriented myself, and saw my phone—flashlight still on—jumping down the stairs, shrinking in the darkness. I whipped my head back up the stairs, still fearful, still gripping the railing, and listened for footsteps. I held a hand to my mouth and nose, slowing my breath, not making a sound to hear better. I kept my eyes wide, unblinking, trying to absorb whatever photons there were bouncing around.

Nothing.

After an extended pause, I stood. Fear italicized my body, making my lean in an unnatural arch towards the railing, though I looked down at my phone, I favored my peripheral, looking for anything trying to creep up on me.

Above me and below me lay two, hardly visible sources of light. Above, the final strained blip of the hole’s top. The sky. The exit. Below me, my phone. I wasn’t sure how far it had fallen, but in the exhaustive darkness, I thought I could see a fleck of light. And since I couldn’t hear it falling anymore, it must have stopped. I looked up and down at my two options, felt afraid of whatever could be above me, and took a slow step down.

At the first step, I felt my fall. The new pain in my side, back, and legs slowed my descent, causing me to lean more on the rail than I had before. Each step down now felt more like a limp. Every two or three steps, I looked behind me, searching for any movement, still wary of whatever made that sound. Though doubt now tinged my fear. What had I heard? Was it an echo of something I had done? Was there any noise at all? Did my mind play a trick on me? Anxiety made me chew my lip.

The distance between overhead light fixtures grew. Now it took forty or fifty steps after passing one before I reached another. I mainly walked in almost utter darkness. I could only see one ahead of me at a time. And, I couldn’t tell if it was my faulty memory, but it seemed to me that they were getting dimmer. I thought that I would start to see better in the dark as my eyes adjusted, but the depth of the darkness grew until it seemed like the light was almost being absorbed by the shadows.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. The effort of walking down the stairs in a suit was catching up to me. I took off my jacket, careful not to touch the shoulder with bird poop, and draped it over my arm. Then I loosened my tie and undid the top two buttons of my shirt. I did so while still walking down, trying to keep a steady pace, keeping one ear focused on the area behind me.

The light stopped reaching my feet, only shifting outlines told me that they were still there, doing what my brain commanded. The overhead lights were too dim, and looking down with no concrete anchor point started to make me nauseous, so I looked ahead at my phone’s flashlight. It looked like a pinpoint in the distance. I focused on breathing in and out, ignoring the pain in my side, and, randomly, the scene from Finding Nemo popped into my head of Dory and Marlin descending into the darkness in order to get the mask with that address on it. 42 Wallaby Way Sydney. I still remembered it. I thought about that scene and their quick cutoff from the light, like someone flicking a switch. Marlin’s apprehension seemed so reasonable to me when I saw it. Dory’s nonchalance frustrated me. It made me angry, but her chanting ran through my head. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.

The animated fish swam inside my mind as their chant surfed on the air coming in and out of my mouth. The words were there on the inhale and the exhale. Just keep swimming, I took a step, just keep swimming, I took another step, I looked behind myself, just keep swimming, I took a step, I looked back at the light. Even the flashlight, sitting an indiscernible distance away, reminded me of the movie. The floating, glowing light. Dory’s squishy. Their hope in the darkness. I thought about how their fears and doubts melted at the sight of light. The anxiety and trials of their journey fell away from their metaphorical fish shoulders at the glimpse of bioluminescent bacteria. The anglerfish’s bait. A chill ran through me as I remembered the jutting, jagged teeth and the cold, green, bulbous eyes of the angler. I remembered how my smile fell, how my face went slack as, in a moment of dramatic irony, the anglerfish’s face emerged from the inky black waters behind Dory and Marlin, a prehistoric nightmare from the depths, never meant to be seen or known by creatures of the light. A tremble hit my lips staring up at the theatre screen and my Dad put his arm around me and asked me if I was okay. I didn’t respond at the time, so he asked me again and said we could go home if I wanted.

Then the fish sprang into action, fighting, swimming, outmaneuvering each other, and I kicked my feet at the felt theatre seats. In a moment, I was smiling and having fun again, but on the ride home, it was the anglerfish’s teeth that I saw in the darkness, behind every tree we passed. They were there, poking out from behind my closet door as I peeked out from my covers. Every light. Every hope from then on, even now as an almost man, how could I know that it wasn’t the angler’s trap?

Remembering this fear overtook my mind. Time passed. Step. Step. Step. The pain in my side grew. My legs burned. My shoulder and hand ached from my sudden stop. My eyes grew weary, and I felt afraid. And hot.

“Hey!”

I screamed and jumped to the right, backing away from the noise. I shrank into a ball on the opposite side of the tunnel. My eyes shut as my mouth gaped, terror fueling my shrieks. I felt no attacks, so I opened my eyes.

There was a small room cut into the wall of the stairwell. Its floor lay flush to the step I sat on. Its space broke the railing. A single, fluorescent lightbulb shone from a socket on the ceiling, illuminating a shockingly small man sitting behind a wooden desk. He wore a headband with a little magnifying glass attached to it that looked like it could swing in and out of his eyesight. On his desk sat several pairs of leather dress shoes. Behind his desk was a gigantic pile of even more shoes that towered high above his head.

“You need a shoe repair?”

I was holding onto myself as tightly as possible. Fear remained in my mind, rendering me unable to respond.

“Answer!” He threw a shoe at me, which hit my arm and bounced down the stairs.

I looked up and looked down and shuffled across the step on my knees and stood up in his corner, knocking a pair of shoes down from the top of the pile. As soon as I was standing straight, I felt a hand at my elbow yanking me out of the room. The little man had turned around and grabbed my sleeve.

“No customers behind the desk!”

“What?”

The man, unable to pull me out, leaned over the back of his seat and jabbed me in the balls. I doubled over and clutched my crotch. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled me out from behind the desk. I tumbled over and fell out onto the steps, luckily bracing myself from falling further down. After the deep ache in my gut faded, I turned and shuffled back on my butt to the edge of his little nook, keeping an eye on him.

“What is this?”

“Shoe shop, dickhead. Dickhead! You need a repair?”

“What?”

“Do you not understand or did you not hear me?”

“I- don’t. Uh.”

“No need? Get out. Next!”

I struggled to a standing position, “No. No, wait. What is this?”

He picked up a sharp-looking tool and held it out at me, “You make me repeat myself and this is going up your tight little asshole. Not in a sexy way, sweetheart.”

“What are you doing down here?”

He spread his hands down at the shoe in front of him, and then he gestured to the shoes behind him, “Working. Repairing shoes. Make sense? I swear.”

“In this little nook?”

“How about this, you little shitmouth, you let me work on your shoes, or you stop holding up the line, capiche?”

“But my shoes are fine.”

I looked down at my shoes and gasped. I sat down on my butt and picked up my right foot. It doesn’t- it can’t be. It doesn’t make any sense. It looked like my shoes had been worn for years, but I rented them yesterday. I carefully took it off and held it up. The leather was dull, faded. They were covered in filth. The seams were ripping apart from each other. The laces were totally rotted through. I poked one and it crumbled. The sole, thin, almost transparent, hung away from the body, only held together by a small section at the heel, giving the impression of a dead animal’s slack, open jaw. I shut the heel quickly. My other shoe was in a similar condition. I took it off, too, and held them together.

“How did this happen?”

“Walking. Running. I don’t know! Give ‘em here.”

He took both shoes, picked up a small toolkit from the ground beside him, and opened it. He took out a white brush and sprayed a foam-like substance onto it. Then he scoured them.

“These are in pretty bad condition. How long you had ‘em?”

“I rented them this morning. They were fine.”

“Sole reflects a soul.”

“Huh?”

“You fucked up, kid?”

“No.”

“Well, know what they say about a man’s sole and his soul.”

I rubbed my stomach, right above my groin, still feeling the aching pain from his jab. “I guess.”

My attention was taken by the little man’s fingers. They glided gracefully from tool to tool, spot to spot, seam to seam. Light and beautiful like a team of ice skaters. The sounds of scrubbing, scraping, lathering, sewing, and repairing lulled me into a stupor, and I relaxed against the wall of his little shop. The wall and floor cooled my hot body. I craned my head into the stairwell and looked at the flashlight of my phone, still somehow impossibly far away, and that little, twinkling light merged with a memory from my freshman year of high school when my dad took me to a gym. He put me on the bench press, and I felt so insecure in my shorts and the old, stretched, sweat-stained wife-beater he gave me to wear. He had made me watch him lie down on the bench and go through the proper form of pressing, pushing my feet into the ground, finding the right grip width, and arching my back. He gripped the bar with no weights on it and pressed it up and down, making an obnoxious pssh sound with every press until he was red, and then he put it back on the rack, sitting up and slapping his flabby muscles. I sat down, and I already felt like melting because a woman had looked at us, and she probably didn’t, but I thought she looked at him and laughed because of his shorts and hat and wife wife-beater and whistle. I had lain down and tried to do everything like he told me. I pushed the bar off the rack, and it felt way too heavy in my hands, but he had said, “Down.” And I had basically dropped it onto my chest. I barely kept it off. And he said, “Up.” And I tried to push air out like he did, but all my air was gone, and the bar was still on my chest, and he said, “push.” And I pushed and the bar slowly lifted up, but I didn’t have any air, and I didn’t think to breathe in, so I kept pushing, and a splatter of stars like my flashlight down at the bottom of the stairs appeared along my vision and I couldn’t see the drop ceiling above me, only an encroaching field of stars. Eventually, the bar was back at the height of the rack. I locked my arms and sucked in as much air as I could. I leaned the bar back to its rack, but my dad pushed the bar back over me with a finger and said, “Down.” “Dad, I-” “Down.” So I gulped in a breath of air and unlocked my arms, which had no strength left in them, so the bar plummeted to my neck, landing like a guillotine too dull to sever my head. It lay on me, divorcing me from the world of the breathing, and that’s when the stars showed up in full force. They lit up so bright that everything else got dark, and I felt like I was in space. I began hearing a vrrr sound and thought that I was watching the opening sequence of Star Trek. Turning my head to the left, I expected the USS Enterprise to fly across the screen and for the into monologue to begin, but then my dad lifted the bar off my neck and put it on its rack. The stars faded. The drop ceiling killed the dark. I gasped for air and coughed so hard that I threw up my Pop-Tarts from earlier onto the ground in a pink and tan pile. I spit and felt tears come running down my face, and I heard my dad go and tell the manager that I had thrown up. And I remember looking around the gym at everyone looking at me. And I remember looking at my dad and hating him. I remember hating him from down in my gut. I hated him from somewhere deep inside me, from a place so true and perfect that no good I could ever do could compare to the wicked, pure feeling of hatred I had for him and I had slammed my fist into the pile of throw up on the ground and my Dad yelled at me for it but I didn’t care. And I-

“Stop crying, kid.”

I jolted my head forward at a start, opening my eyes, which I don’t remember closing. I wiped my eyes and fought down the sobs I felt bubbling in my throat. I pushed my snotty nose against my sleeve and apologized quietly.

“Apologies ain’t shit. Only shit you should worry about is the kind that comes out of your asshole, sunshine. If it’s red, got hemorrhoids. If it’s green, take it to the bank!” At that, he began laughing so hard that his face turned bright red. He slapped the table multiple times and started spinning around in his chair.

“Yeah. How are my shoes?”

He became serious again, “Getting there. Can’t rush me. It takes time.”

I watched his fingers work. The shoes looked much better. They’d regained their sheen, and the soles had been sewn back to the body. He’d put new laces on them and was in the process of rubbing them down with shoe polish. He would spit on his little can of shoe shine, rub his rag in it, then rub the shoes, and over and over. He turned an eye up at me. I looked away.

“You like working down here?”

“Sure I do, kid. Could be a whole lot worse. I could have your ugly mug of a face.”

I looked past him to the gigantic pile of falling-apart shoes.

“Do you ever wish you didn’t have to do all of that?”

“All of what? Work? Sure. Sure I do! Sometimes I think about what it would be like if the elves, the little tiny Keebler elves came into my shop and cleaned all my shoes for me. Ohh, wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be a peach on a summer day? Oh it would. But then I get to dreaming, well, what if the elves didn’t just fix all these shoes with their little elf hammers and their little elf needles, but they fixed up all the holes in my shirt, too? What if they picked up my toothbrush and brushed my pearly whites for me? What if they came into my bed and formed one giant mass of a woman and rubbed my big, fat, swollen pecker up and down and kissed me soulfully while I came and made me feel loved, truly loved for the first time in my life? And what if they sat me down and told me about all that I’ve done wrong in this world and told me that if I didn’t make it right, then they’d send me to hell? What if they climbed into my ear canal and right up into my brain and controlled my body with gears and cogs and levers and pulleys so that I never needed to do a single thing, never make another decision, ever again? What then, kid? We’d be left with nothing. No way to work. No way to do something for ourselves. No accomplishment or pride. No way to make anything better. And I ain’t gonna live like that. I’ll work on my shoes. I’ll make them right.”

“Sure would be easier to do nothing, though.”

“So would killing myself, but you don’t see me suckin’ off the barrel of a shotgun, do you?”

“Guess not.”

He rubbed his rag one final time against the shoes, slapped their tops, and tossed them to me. I dropped them. They clattered to the ground, and the little man exhaled through his pressed-together little lips, calming himself. I knelt down and put them on. The leather felt soft against my skin. Threads stitched the gashes together, keeping the shoes’ now supple flesh from splitting further. The gashes and deep scuffs were now blended into the shining color, faded but still present. I slipped them on and stood up, feeling the new support. I bounced a little bit.

“They’re great. I didn’t realize how much they were hurting me before. You’re really good at this. Thanks. How much do I owe you?”

“Just get out.”

“You don’t want me to pay?”

“Even if I did, could you?”

I felt my pockets and realized I had left my wallet in my car. I shook my head.

“Exactly. Now get.”

I leaned out of the nook—careful not to step over because somehow I knew that as soon as I left it wouldn’t be there anymore—and looked down at my flashlight. Then I looked at the darkness above.

“I don’t know where to go.”

“Only two options, pussylips, up or down.”

“My phone is at the bottom. But I also eventually have to leave.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I heard someone yell down there.”

“Did you?”

“I- I think so.”

He pulled out another pair of shoes from the pile and began working on them.

“What should I do? I don’t- I don’t know if I can walk up all those stairs. I don’t think my legs can take it. If I go down, I can get my phone, and surely someone will help me. I’ve been down here so long. My sister’ll know I’m in trouble and send someone to help. But then I may be so far down that I’ll never leave. Both feel like traps.”

He lifted an eye to me, “I know shoes, boss man. Feet, and their shoes. Further down you go the harder it’ll be on those soles. I brought ‘em back from the brink once. Don’t think I’ll do it again.”

I leaned out and sensed the gravitational pull of the bottom. I turned to the ascent and shifted toward it. Then my phone rang. Its bright, tinkling melody reverberated from the depths. The distance and the echo muted the tiny speaker’s usual cheeriness, turning it false like the visage of a rotting vase of flowers, an imitation of their former beauty in sight and smell. An imitation. A mockery. But still, it was my phone ringing. And I needed it. It could be my sister asking me how far away I was, or it could be my mom, currently in the anger phase, calling to yell at me. I could go down and get it and then come right back up. It couldn’t be that much further down. And the thought of working my way back up the stairs seemed impossible to me and my tired body. I shook my head and turned to the little man.

“I’ve gotta go down.”

“Your funeral.”

I stepped out of the nook and started back down the stairs. I didn’t even look back to see if the man was still there, because I knew he wouldn’t be. And like that, I was back in the descent, back in the waters of the anglerfish. His hunting ground. His territory. The darkness felt boundless upon my reentry after taking a break in the little repairer’s light. My eyes still held the effulgent, neon afterimage of his illuminating fluorescent. Oddly, the ghost comforted me; it felt like the warm hand of an adult helping me down the stairs, confirming what I had seen, what I had experienced was real. As long as it was there, the light had been real, his impact was felt, his memory was true, his words and his actions remained.

But it faded. The little man’s light was consumed as I adjusted to the typical darkness. Its luminescent glow slowly gave way to the anglerfish’s jaws, his teeth stabbed through, popping the ghost’s glow like the membrane of a single cell organism, letting its contents spill out and away, deforming it, deflating it. And then I was back in the dark, walking down steps, gripping the jagged railing, fighting down the rumbling dread in my diaphragm.

My initial descent felt like an accident, something I could reason away from myself. It was a quest, and I was a hero. I was noble. I was a martyr. I was the Redcrosse Knight delving into the horrible monster Errour’s cavern for the sake of Lady Una, squelching my fear as he crushed the serpent woman’s head beneath his iron-clad heel. Though absurd, my quest had an accidental, happenstance character to it. Now, though, after I’d witnessed the damage it caused to me, after I’d fought and almost lost, I decided to continue my plunge. It was my decision. It was a choice I had made. And I couldn’t discern a reason.

Yet, I continued to climb down. My thighs, hamstrings, and glutes began to burn from the effort. My knees sent signals of sharp pain to my head at every step, aching from the harsh impact of cement pushing up against the force of my leg slamming down into it. My breath quickened and my heart rate rose. I also began to feel increasingly hot. Sweat started dripping down my hair and into my eyes and mouth. I was constantly sweating. At different intervals, I stopped to take my clothes off. First, I took off my tie, then my shirt. Then I took off my undershirt. I held all my discarded clothes balled up under my arm, but then that spot where I was pressing it to my side became the hottest spot on my body, so I left them on the stairs. Then I stopped and took my pants off, and then my underwear. All I had on were my dress socks and shoes, and even then, I stopped to think about taking them off, as my feet felt like they were smouldering in a furnace.

Sweat poured off my body. My riddance of attire provided a brief respite from the heat, but it didn’t last. The air was thick with humidity. It drew out the moisture from my body in droves and made me feel as if I was treading in water rather than moving through air. I kept swiping at my torso and legs, and arms when I felt a thick dribble of sweat rolling down them. My mind was insistent on tricking my body into thinking that my rolling sweat was, in reality, and cavalcade of blood running from a wound inflicted upon me by the unknown assailant behind me, or from my fall, or from the jagged railing. I would swipe at my body and smell my hand, swipe my body and smell my hand. Every time I thought it was blood. Every time, it was sweat. My motivational chant came back into my mind and I began mouthing the words through my desperate inhales and exhales, “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.”

The heat and exhaustion gave me the sense that there truly was an intense pressure weighing me down. I felt the entire weight of the earth above me pressing my body at each step, making me want to succumb and tumble forward, letting its force bring me to whatever depth it desired. The pressure encompassed my body, my thighs, my feet, each finger gripping the bar. It was an all-surrounding weight that reminded me of the weighted blanket I wore when I was once sick with a fever. I was sick in my college dorm room with a fever higher than I’d ever had before. Sitting on a red couch that had been passed down to me my freshman year by a graduating senior who’d had it passed down to him from a graduating senior who’d had it passed down to him by a graduating senior, and, for all I knew, the lineage went on like that in an almost biblical record. I felt the dent of every person who had ever sat on that couch, as the cushion was almost flat and provided no support to my lower back, which radiated a deep, fever-fueled ache. I had wrapped myself in my roommate’s twenty-pound weighted blanket when I sat down, and became too weak to move it off me when my body heat turned the inside of the blanket into a sauna. My fever turned my miserable mind delirious, and I became stuck in abstract thought loops and visions that tormented me. Blurring reality of the present with reality of the past, I saw my friends on the TV screen, which played an old sitcom, people appeared to me and talked to me in my half-asleep state, and I groaned nonsensical wails that they attempted to appease with their gibberish talk. And eventually, I collapsed into my wretched, sickness-ridden state and began tearfulling whimpering for the comforting hand of my father who, in my childhood, had lain next to me in bed and rubbed my back with his callused hand as I leaned my head over the bed and threw up into a tiny, plastic, skin colored trash bin. He’d read me a book I no longer recalled. He’d said comforting words I didn’t remember. He’d made a joke to my mother, the humor of which I didn’t understand. On that red couch, I longed to connect with him and the love he’d shown me, and in this stairwell, naked and bleeding from phantom wounds, I longed once more and I groaned pitifully once more, lost and confused and, though I had no moisture for tears, my face contorted as if I was and I wailed for what was lost.

I looked down when I felt a crunch beneath my left foot. I was so delirious from exhaustion and the heat that I had lost sight of my phone’s flashlight. I hadn’t even registered that it’d been getting closer. I would have passed it if not for this accidental step. I tumbled backwards onto my naked butt and felt rough stone beneath me. In the bleeding light from my flashlight, I saw that the stairs were no longer made of steel and concrete, but earthy stone, loose rocks, and dirt. I looked at the wall and scraped my finger against it. Brown earth filled the space beneath my fingernail. Too exhausted to panic from my confusion, I exhaled in defeat, waving the white flag to the tunnel.

I reached between my legs and picked up my phone. It was covered in crud that I used my palm to wipe off. My phone screen was cracked. I pressed the flashlight button to turn it off and looked at the battery percentage, amazed that it hadn’t died, and saw that it was at 0%. I unlocked my phone and went to my messages. I only had time to read the newest message from my sister, who had accidentally texted in the family group chat that included dad.

“Where did you go?”

And my phone died. I was beyond the point of emotion, only an echo of a cry that had no origin sounded off within the emptiness inside me. I stood and turned upwards. I threw my phone as hard as I could into the hallucinated face of the anglerfish smiling at me. I yelled as loud as I could.

Step by step, I continued down. Down by down. Descent by descent. Drop by drop. Increment by increment. Release by release by giving up by giving up by defeat by defeat by acceptance by acceptance by complacent step by complacent step. The rough stone eventually smoothed to pure dirt, which my shoes slipped upon, so I knelt and even took them off, imagining the relentless rant that the little shoe man probably would have had, and I took my socks off too, so I could grip the earth and its stones better. The cavern, no longer providing me with overhead lights, was pure darkness, heat, earth, and me. I felt primordial, covered in wetness and filth. I brushed my head against the roof, which I pressed my hand against. It was low, much lower than it had been. I touched the walls, which were now only a few feet away from me on either side. The cavern was narrowing. I continued down in a half squat, surely, at this point, nearing the center of the earth in my exhausted, reduced to naked, essential state. I stepped into water.

Water? Water. I knelt and touched it. Water. Hot water. I sat on the little hump of a step and reached my hand down into it. There was the step I sat on, the step my foot was on, but below that there was nothing. Only water. A black nothingness. A grave. A statement of intent. Of never turning around. Of descending forever, never even knowing death, but returning to a state of floating unchange like the particles in space before the universe exploded into existence. It drew me in. This was it, I knew it. This was the anglerfish’s maw. This was what his rod held before me, the lure that drew me. The promise of weight and heat and nakedness and nonexistence. I felt Dory’s words on my lips, and they lulled me into the water. They urged me to swim. To continue on in the comfort of my spiral, to bring an end to the doubt in my mind that compelled me to turn around. Those words grew louder and louder, and it felt like a rope was pulling me by the waist into the murky waters, but I felt afraid. For a moment, my survival instincts flared and I grabbed hold of it and I began yelling and shaking and crying for help as it sucked me down. The earth began to crumble around me. I pushed through it, my arms and legs screaming from the effort, but eventually I turned myself around and began to move my leg to take a step back, up the stairs, away from the lure, from the water, from the angler. As I moved to step, I heard the original scream that compelled me into the stairwell again, but now I was hear, at its source, in its throat. The volume of the shriek disoriented me and broke my eardrums, overwhelming their limit. But I screamed back, deaf now to my desires, moving on instinct. I pumped my leg up and brought it down on the step above, and all of a sudden, in a moment briefer than a blink, I was back outside, breathing heavy, eyes wild, heart racing. It was nighttime now, and I looked down and saw that I had one foot in the grass and one still in the stairwell. I yelled and jumped away from the hole, falling to the ground and scrambling away from it.

I lay on my back, propped up on my elbows, looking at the gaping, black eyeball staring back at me. I heard the dull roar of the earth’s center shrieking in anger at its lost meal. My clothes were back on my body. I felt the lump of my phone in my pocket. My shoes were untouched.

I got to my knees and hugged myself as I began weeping. I rolled over onto my front and shoved my face in the grass, trying to muffle my lament, even in my pure sadness, still embarrassed. I hit a hand into the ground and then flattened it, brushing my palm against the cool grass, savoring its realness. I brought both palms to my face and wrapped them over my eyes.

Feeling sickened by the darkness of my closed eyes, I opened them as wide as they could go so I could absorb the nighttime’s limited light. Though the light hurt, it was my comforter. The moon and the stars and the street lamp over the parking lot were smiling faces and joyful tears. They were applauding audiences and beckoning hands. I crawled on hands and knees, face turned up, over the grass, across the parking lot, and into the middle of the cross section connecting the lot and the street. My tearful jolts turned into a fit of laughter. I squatted on my haunches and stared up at the LCD glow of the stoplight, which bathed me in red, then green, then yellow, then red, then green. Cars stopped, and I lifted my arms at their headlights’ shine. Refusing to blink, I stared at the lights around me and thanked them. I whispered my thanks, and I assured them that I’d never ignore them again. I’d never ignore the light. Never take them for granted because they were all I had. I would wake up every day and tell them I loved them. I promised. I pinky swore.

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