THE STAIRS © Tom Scocca, 2025 This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, and events is entirely coincidental, with the exception of the events in Chapters One and Two, which happened more or less as written, on the line between Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, on Memorial Day weekend in 1999. 2. Before I keep going, I just want to say this right now. Too much of the time, in my opinion, the people in stories I read keep stopping and telling you the thing they just told you, all over again. The idea is they immediately need to turn around and go back and describe how they felt about it: I was so surprised, I couldn't believe it. Not only was there this door I had never noticed before, but the door was working! I was overwhelmed with curiosity. What could be behind it? Maybe it's so if you're reading it one chapter at a time, to a class at school or as a bedtime story, everyone gets reminded exactly where the story left off. Honestly, to me? It feels like those people are getting in the way a little, when they do that. It feels like they're making the story longer than it needs to be. So: a lot of things went on to happen after we opened the door. I was surprised by most of them, and pretty frequently alarmed, or honestly even afraid, while they were happening. If ordinary and unexciting things happened, there wouldn't be much point in telling you about them, right? I'm going to talk about how we felt when that seems important, but I'm not planning to go back and forth dwelling on it. Anyway, I don't know what I had been expecting to see behind the door—a storage closet, maybe? A water heater?—but it wasn't what we got. The door swung in, and we were looking out of our bedroom into an entire stairwell. It was nothing like the stairwell we were used to coming in and out through, nothing at all. The regular stairwell of the apartment building had windows on each floor to let in sunlight, and the walls were light yellow, and the floors and stair treads were pale gray speckled linoleum—ugly, but bright. This stairwell was dark. It's not that it was unlit. There were light fixtures set in the walls, with bulbs giving off a low but steady orange glow. But it was still thoroughly dark: dark brown wood paneling, heavy dark wooden banisters, a dark gray stone tile floor. It looked like part of some other building entirely. It looked like nighttime. Now that I thought about it, I realized that there had been something weird about the regular stairway all along. The stairs made long, boxy turns, and the movers had nearly gotten stuck trying to bring the couch around them. "These must be wrapped inside the other stairs," I said. "Must be," Theo said. We were standing in the doorway, looking around, with our toes on the doorsill. We could feel it was cold stone through our socks. I looked down, and there was a package sitting there. It was a cardboard mailing box from the postal service, the kind printed in red, white, and blue, medium-sized. It had been set down right outside our door. To our right, the stairs bent around and went on up; to the left, they bent around and went on down. There wasn't anywhere else the box could have belonged to. I stooped down and picked it up. It was heavy, but not as heavy as if it were full of rocks or paper. Whatever was in it shifted around when I moved it, with a soft rattling sound. "Open it up," Theo said. "Hang on," I said. "Open it up!" he said. "Rollo!" His jaw was set. "Not out here," I said. I stepped backward into the room, away from the dark stairs, holding the box in one hand and pulling Theo back with the other. I pushed the door almost all the way closed again. We were back in the regular, if empty, bedroom, with the late sun coming through the leaves. There was no address on the box, just the printed lines where the address sticker would go. It was taped shut with brown paper tape on the seams. I got out my pocketknife, a Swiss army one, and opened out the flathead screwdriver. If you use one of the sharp knife blades to cut tape, the sticky stuff always clings to it. Theo already had his own knife out. It's not really a knife, because Mom and Dad didn't trust him with a blade, but he had to get something, so he got one with just tools on it. He started in on one side of the box with a can opener, while I dug into the tape on my side with the screwdriver. The top flap came free, and we lifted it. The box was full of acorns. Just a solid surface of acorns, smooth and dry and golden brown, almost shiny. Some of them still had caps on them, some didn't. No twigs or scraps of leaves. They had been cleanly packed. Someone had packed them. Theo jammed his hand into the box and grabbed a couple of the acorns. "Here," he said. "You have one." I wasn't sure I wanted one, but it was already in my hand. It felt like an ordinary acorn, like the ones I used to fire with my slingshot back in Turfburg, out by the creek behind the apartment building, in the fall. The long, heavy oval kind, not the stubby ones. I held it in my palm and closed the flap of the box. "I'm putting this back out there," I said. I thought Theo might complain, but he didn't. It was unsettling. It was probably more unsettling than a sinister letter or mysterious book would have been, because people send each other letters or leave each other books all the time. Who sends anyone acorns? I opened the door wide again. This time, I let go of our inner knob and tried the outside one—it was brass, unpainted—and it didn't turn. The door was set to be locked from that side. I set the box down on what I thought, or hoped, was the exact spot where it had been, and I smoothed down the scraps of tape sticking up. I'd considered going and finding some of the tape that the movers had left lying around the apartment, but decided against it. Nobody could really object if you checked a package that was on your own doorstep. Admittedly, I hadn't known we had that doorstep before, but it still was ours. Wasn't it? I backed away, into the bedroom, and pushed the door shut till it clicked. Find other chapters of The Stairs here. VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS DEP'T.Jury Duty at the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse, Baltimore, MDMore consciousness at Instagram. EASY LISTENING DEP'T.Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive! SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of a sandwich selected from Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, published in 1912 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all. Adelaide Sandwiches Cut up cold chicken and ham in small squares, in the proportion of two-thirds of chicken to one-third of ham. Next place two large tablespoonfuls of Worcester sauce and one of curry paste in a stewpan, and when they boil add the chicken and ham, mixing all well together. Prepare thin slices of stale bread, cut in small circles, by frying them in clarified butter. Spread the prepared chicken and ham lightly between two slices of the bread. Upon the top of each sandwich place a ball, about the size of a walnut, composed of grated Parmesan cheese and butter in equal parts, kneaded into a paste. Place the sandwiches on a baking cloth, bake for five minutes in a brisk oven, dish up on a napkin, and serve as a second-course savoury dish. If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net . SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T. Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
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