The Stairs, Chapter 23
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 35
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.
23.
After the sunlight, it was so dim inside I couldn't see anything but blackish green, or greenish black. "Well, hello, Rollo, Maxine, Theo—so nice to see you back." My eyes focused where the familiar voice was coming from: Mr. Vincent, at the front desk. His hairless head and broad smile resolved out of the dimness. He was there in the lobby every day of the school year, and apparently he was there the rest of the year, too. A thick book lay open on the high counter in front of him, as if we'd interrupted him reading.
He didn't sound at all surprised that we were showing up in July. "Hi, Mr. Vincent," we all said. Down on the floor, out of his line of sight, the squirrels had crept in behind us.
"We're here to pick up some supplies for Summer Learning," Maxine added.
"Be my guests, young scholars," Mr. Vincent said. He waved a hand toward the corridor behind him, adjusted his reading glasses, and picked up the book.
"Thanks, Mr. Vincent," we said. We crossed the lobby and entered the corridor. Our sneakers squeaked on the floor in the quiet. Everything looked and sounded different. The walls, usually covered in students' paintings and poems and collages, were stripped bare.
"Which way?" I asked the squirrels.
Pythia nudged Milton. "Well?" she said. "Your workplace."
"This way," he said, scooting over to put a little distance between them and leading us left into a side corridor, then right. This was where we usually took English Language Arts. We kept going, past the numbered classroom doors, till we reached an unmarked one.
"That's the storeroom, isn't it?" I asked Maxine. She nodded. I opened the door and stepped in. It was too dark to tell where the edges of the room were.
I felt for the light switch and flipped it. The fluorescent lights hesitated for a fraction of a second, hummed, and flickered on. I still couldn't really tell where the edges of the room were. Milton led us through a maze of clutter, past stacked flowerpots, a lion's head from a Lunar New Year costume, four-wheeled scooter boards from gym, a big plastic bucket full of erasers, coils of rubber tubing, woven baskets, construction-paper turkeys, boxes of thumbtacks, a plastic model of an eyeball, cardboard file boxes, hard-plastic filmstrip-projector cases...
We came around a barrier of shelves and Milton skidded to a halt, so sharply I almost tripped over him. There was a cleared space in the clutter here, better lit than the rest of the room. A workbench stood against the wall, with a couple of clamp lights shining onto it.
Milton sniffed the air. We sniffed along with him. "Cigarette smoke," Maxine said. "It smells like my great-aunt's porch, where she keeps her ashtray."
"I smell oil and rubber, too," I said.
"I smell slot cars," Theo said. He was right: a sharp ozone odor was in there with the others.
"What are we smelling for?" I said.
"It's not here," Milton said.
"What's not here?" I said.
"The thing," Pythia said. "This temporal resonator. Is gone, he says."
"You said it's in between," I told Milton.
"It was in between—here," he said. "Now it's not. It's not gone in time, it's gone in space. Someone took it."
The lamps shone on a few stray pieces of wire and curls of metal shavings on the work table. Otherwise it was bare.
"That's where it was?" I said. "Where is it now? Who took it?"
Pythia's nose twitched. "Horse," she said.
"A horse took it?" I said.
"The people. Who took it away. Had a horse." She sniffed again. "That way," she said, nodding toward a side door.
We went out. Maxine took a dusty geode off a shelf and set it down to prop the door open behind us. The hallway was warmer than the main hall had been, and there was a piney disinfectant aroma, as if someone had mopped it not long ago.
I looked around. This was where the kindergarten classrooms should be—or would be—but the walls were some sort of beige, rather than the stimulating colors of the College Community School. Nobody else was in sight.
"Wait here," Pythia said, and went bounding off down the hallway, jogging around the corner and out of sight, toward the front of the building.
My eye drifted up to the clock mounted on the wall, a round one with hands. It might have been the same clock as the one we had in the school hallway. "Hey," Maxine said, following my gaze. "That says it's 12:16 here. What does your watch say?"
I checked. "11:18," I said.
"So it's about 13 hours ahead now. Or 11 hours behind. Whatever 'ahead' or 'behind' mean, in this case."
A minute or two later, Pythia was back. Little beads of water were on her fur, and she was slightly out of breath. She shook off the water, then shook her head. "Clean getaway," she said. "Wagon tracks and hoofprints in the snow."
"Maybe we can catch up with them," Maxine said.
"Do you have a coat? Or a horse?" Pythia said. "You're not going to chase them down in the middle of the night like that."
"Where would we get a horse in Marble City?" Theo said.
"Besides buying a pony at Shinter's," I said.
"Wait," Maxine said.
"What?" I said.
She looked at Theo and me. "There's really only one other place a horse would go," she said. "The Municipal Stables."
Find previous chapters of The Stairs here.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, April 15, 2026
★★★★ Now it was just hot—sticky, heavy, slow—from the sweaty night on into the morning. Soggy clumps of tree sex parts lay smeared and trampled on the pavement, looking like, and possibly mixing in with, fragmented dog turds. Enough clouds had gathered to hold off the noon sun and to let a wandering breeze deliver real if intermittent comfort on the walk for errand-running and iced coffee. An orange tabby tomcat zipped into the combined smoke shop and shipping center as soon as the door opened. A glimpse of blue approaching from the west was not good news but a warning: within the hour the shadows were emerging and darkening and the heat was pressing anew. Big hymenoptera, one shaped like a bean and one like a bullet, hovered and darted off the balcony. Different kinds of cloud and spells of no cloud at all kept replacing one another between one glance skyward and the next, matted clusters supplanted by blurred-together wisps supplanted by plain blue supplanted by denser bright white shapes. For staying in the shade, with a breeze curling in, the afternoon developed into something near-intoxicating, until the ninth-grader came home asking pointed questions about whether the air conditioning was on. Above the cross street on the way to the Park, a crow called from the rooftop frame of an unfinished solar array. The little red buds on the crabapple tree had burst open into creamy white flowers. A dragonfly flew over the water of the uptown end of the Pool, where the surface was so thick with weeds and dark waterlogged tree debris and still-tan less-waterlogged tree debris that it looked like a mud flat scattered with sand. Brief contact with the handrail of the rustic bridge brought the tickle of an ant crawling up the arm.
New York City, April 16, 2026
★★★ Light and heat came down harshly together. There was still something superficial about it all, though; the earth and the buildings and the pavement were not radiating the heat back yet, and people were not disheveled or undone by being outside. Haze filled the street, desaturated the distant colors of New Jersey, and dulled the glinting of the spire of the Empire State Building. In lieu of a cigarette habit, an iced coffee supplied a good enough occasion to get down the elevator and out of the office air conditioning into gently warming shade.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of the final sandwich selection from Choice Recipes, by Order of Eastern Star, published circa 192o and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CLUB CHEESE SANDWICH FILLING
One pound Eastern cream cheese
Four tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
Three tablespoons dry mustard
Three tablespoons vinegar
A piece of butter size of an egg
A dash of red pepper
Salt to taste.
Cream together well. Especially good on rye bread. Sufficient for one loaf of bread.
If you are inspired to prepare a sandwich inspired by these offerings, be sure to send your experience and a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
