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. 3."I'm going to have to go to the office today," Mom told us. "Emily said she can come over and watch you. She's bringing Maxine." She was telling us this as we sat on the living-room floor, right outside the kitchen, eating cereal out of coffee mugs. We still had a few coffee mugs around. Instead of a table, we'd spread out the newspaper, the home section. The daily paper in Turfburg had comics in the home section, but the Marble City paper is too serious for that. Maxine Zhou is my age. She had been in my class, fifth grade, at the College Community School. We were the Z's. At Grady Elementary School, in Turfburg, having a name that began with Z meant I got called last for everything, behind Danny Yarrow. At the College Community School, it meant that sometimes Maxine and I got called last, and sometimes we got called first, and sometimes they split the alphabet between Dylan Mason and Gwendolyn Naczynski and Maxine and I went in the middle. Emily is Maxine's big sister. She goes to Marble College. Mom got to talking with her at the fifth-grade pickup, and she started hiring Emily to mind us some days after school, or when Mom had to go do something at night or on a weekend when Dad wasn't up. The College Community School is a very engaging learning environment. That is how they describe it. It's in an old science building that the college moved out of, so there are these indestructible black counter tables in it and unconnected gas-burner taps, but the walls have been painted bright colors, and there are whiteboards everywhere for you to write down your thoughts, and the students sort of flow from room to room. At Grady Elementary School, we just sat at desks. I was still trying to figure out where to flow to, my first day, when I bumped into Maxine. She was using one of the whiteboards to draw an elaborately fanged rat. When the fangs were done, she added bat wings. That had seemed like a thought I might also have had. Maxine turned out, in fact, to have a lot of worthy ideas. We read Beowulf in Language Arts—it's an old poem about a hero, Beowulf, who beats up a monster and rips the monster's arm off, then beats up the monster's mother. Maxine and I both thought it seemed unfair to the monsters, so we wrote and put on a puppet show where the monsters won and threw Beowulf's arms and legs around the classroom. This was not a thing anyone could have gotten away with back in Grady Elementary School. It was good news that Maxine was coming. I was counting on her to help us figure out what to do about the stairs. Theo and I got dressed, and I washed out my cereal mug and made myself a cup of peppermint tea with the electric kettle, which we also still had. I don't want to mess around with caffeine, but I like a warm beverage. At 10 o'clock, just as I was finishing my tea, the buzzer rang—two short buzzes and one long. That's Maxine's signal. I buzzed back one good long one, to make sure they got through the vestibule. Theo ran over to open the apartment door. "Good morning, Theo, Rollo," Emily said. "Hello, Professor." We said good morning back and I gave Maxine our fist bump: top, bottom, straight-on, twist. Theo did the fist bump too. Mom was stuffing some papers and her keys in her bag and putting on her shoes. "Hi, Emily," she said. "Sorry about the furniture. You might want to take the kids to the library or the park this morning, since there's nothing really to sit on or to do here." "We'll be OK here till lunchtime," I said, maybe too quickly. Mom looked a little surprised. She shrugged. "Whatever works for Emily," she said. "That's fine," Emily said. "I can spread out my notes on the floor." She pulled a book out of her tote bag, along with a handful of pens and a stack of index cards. The cover of the book said LOCALITY WITHOUT LOCALITY, over a picture of a green-lined grid warping in on itself. Emily is friendly enough but she generally sticks to her own business. Sometimes she'll do arts and crafts or something—if she's trying to procrastinate, Maxine says—but mostly her job is to make sure nothing goes too wrong. "Spooky action, huh?" Mom said. "What?" I said. Did she know about the stairs? "I was talking to Emily," she said. "That book is for Concepts in Spacetime, isn't it, Emily? You're taking it for summer session?" "That's it," Emily said. "Spooky action at a distance—two particles in totally different locations, but entangled. You change one, and the other changes instantaneously, wherever it is." "Isn't that impossible, if they're far apart?" I asked. "The connection can't be faster than the speed of light." We'd read up on light speed in the school library for one of our science reports—according to the books we saw, that was the ultimate speed limit. All that warp-drive stuff in the movies was impossible, the books said. Pretty disappointing, we'd thought. "That depends," Mom said. "It might be that what we think of as two separate places in space are just one, as far as the particle is concerned. Underneath space and time, who knows? Bye, kids!" She shook her bag one last time to make sure the keys were jingling in there. I stuck my hand in my pocket to check my own key. It was in there. So was something round and smooth. The acorn. Find other chapters of The Stairs here. 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 by Cassell and Company, London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all. AMERICAN SANDWICHES. Get half a pound of cold boiled ham or tongue, chop it fine, and put it into a basin, with a tablespoonful of chopped pickles, a teaspoonful of mustard, and a little pepper. Put about six ounces of butter in a basin, and stir it quickly with a spoon till it forms a kind of cream; add the chopped meat and seasoning, and mix all thoroughly. Cut some bread into thin slices, and some very thin slices of veal, fowl, or game; spread a slice of the bread with the above mixture, then a slice of the meat; lay on another slice of bread, and so on, till the quantity required is prepared. If cut into small shapes, these sandwiches prove very acceptable for breakfast or for evening parties. The above quantities will make as many sandwiches as will fill a moderate-sized dish. Probable cost, 2s. 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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