The Stairs, Chapter 37
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 62
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.
37.
"That wasn't helpful," Maxine said. We were sitting on some empty burlap sacks on the hard bottom of the cart, surrounded by a few baskets of potatoes, a row of cabbages, and three bags of apples.
Alvin turned his head a quarter-turn toward us. "Doc told me you could figure out what to do when you got there," Alvin said. "He had confidence in you. Easy there, Jasmine."
"Jasmine?" Maxine said. "We met a horse named Jasmine."
"Is that right," Alvin said. "Good name for a mare. This Jasmine pulled the cart for my pa before he turned it over to me. Before that, he had another horse on it, also by name of Jasmine. My grandpa's last horse was a Jasmine, too. One before that was Jasper, but he always said Jasper was too feisty for the job. 'Get a mare like Jasmine,' he said, so we did exactly that. I expect my son and grandson will have Jasmines when their turn comes. As long as the cart holds up, and as long as people still eat their fruits and vegetables."
This Jasmine was a grayish brown, flecked with white, and she moved briskly. The cart rode surprisingly smoothly behind her, block after block. We crossed Berry Avenue, and 43rd Street got more narrow and angled a bit to the right. The grid was bending out of shape on the way to Old Marble. The blocks grew shorter and more irregular. We passed a domed church I recognized from walking around the neighborhood, and a store saying GREENGROCER I had never seen before.
The cart turned left, up a back street so narrow that it was almost an alley. Brick outbuildings, like tiny garages, lined the sides. From one of them, the back end of a bright yellow automobile jutted, with sweeping fenders like pontoons and a long, low tail like a canoe. Alvin turned his head to look as we steered wide of it. "Funny horses they got stuck in these carriage houses now, right, Jasmine?"
Maxine craned to take it in. "A boattail Auburn Speedster," she breathed.
"Saw one of those running out on the Scooptoe Pike once," Alvin said. "Whew, goodness. I don't know why you'd keep one in town. No place to use all that motor." He gave the reins a slow flick, and Jasmine turned right onto 44th.
The houses here looked much the same as ever. On the cold air, I could smell wood smoke from a fireplace and someone's dinner cooking. "I'm starving," Theo said.
We swung around another right turn. The cart was driving down Willis Boulevard now. Up ahead I could see where Carter Street split off to the right. There was the prow of our own building at the split. The lights of Walt's Eats, white from the window and red from the sign, spilled out onto the sidewalk of Carter Street. "I'm really starving," Theo said.
"We've got a bigger problem than that," I snapped. I looked up above Walt's Eats, to the dark windows on the second floor. Our apartment. Or rather, Warren Hartstock's apartment. Our apartment was somewhere across a gap in space-time—a gap that would grow out of reach soon. It was 5:10 by my watch.
We rolled past Carter Street and pulled up to the curb alongside the building. "Your destination," Alvin said. There was the door to the stairs. To the left of it, a plate attached to the brick said 615, in white numerals on black. I stared. Maxine and Theo stared too.
The door was partway open.
We scrambled down from the cart. "Pleasure doing business with you cabbages," Alvin said. "Giddyup, Jasmine."
"Good night," we called back, as the cart rolled off. We stood there, unable to take our eyes off the strip of orange light coming through the edge of the doorway.
"We go in, right?" I said.
"We go in," Maxine said.
"OK, so let's go in," I said.
"Let's go," she agreed.
We stood there.
"I'm going in," Theo said, grabbing the edge of the door. Something fell out of the crack as he pulled it open. I picked it up. It was a crumpled plastic water bottle. A normal 21st century piece of trash someone had wedged in there. I wedged it back in place as we stepped into the stairwell.
"We go up, right?" I said.
Theo was already on the steps. Maxine and I trailed after him. We rounded the turn in the stairs and reached the landing. Now Theo stopped. The apartment door—Hartstock's, ours, whoever's it was—was ajar, like the one downstairs had been. Warm air was trickling out from it. It smelled like leaves and grass. Summer air.
I pushed it fully open. There was our room: our sleeping bags, Maxine's backpack, our summer clothes on the floor along with a few stray scarves and gloves where we'd rummaged through the winter things. We were back.
"Oh, good," a voice said from the stairwell behind us. "It did work."
Find previous chapters of The Stairs here.
WEATHER REVIEWS
Taipei, July 20, 2026
★ Sun came straight down through the roof glass of the car, making a greenhouse of the back seat. The car lurched and backtracked through narrow climbing lanes, past cars with nice paint tucked away in the shade of ramshackle sheds, up into the sunstruck heights of the tombs. Heavy breeze blew ash off the incense sticks. The tomb wall was hot to sit on, facing out down the valley as sun and cloud shadow touched the wide river and the hazy city. Smoke swirled out of the burning chamber in whatever direction people went to try to dodge it. Sweat ran down faces. The zenith went from blue to gray to blue again. Back in town, the gray came earlier than usual and stayed through showers that ate up the afternoon. As late sun, half-filtered, angled across the hotel bedclothes, the forecast said it was finally over. Everyone ventured out without rain jackets or waterproof shoes into a slowly strengthening shower—not a remnant, but a slowly strengthening revival. Two separate shopping missions failed to wait it out, even as the phone app insisted it was not happening. The planned stroll to look around for dinner turned into a dive into the nearest basement food court, where a bustling and excellent noodle shop happened to be.
Taipei, July 21, 2026
★★ Campus insects buzzed with the exact clacking, accelerating rhythm of a rotating sprinkler head. The appetizing effects of wandering from block to block thinking about where best to get lunch were offset by the unappetizing effects of accumulated sun. An Oriental magpie, wings shining deep blue, went running and bouncing through the shade of the grounds of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Dangling aerial roots stirred ever so slightly. An interceding cloud made the walk across bare open pavement to the reflecting pool survivable. From inside the design museum complex, the air conditioning and the splashing of a fountain beyond the open doors combined to create the illusion that the courtyard would be cool. In a short while, the sound of the fountain was drowned out by the pelting of rain. It poured over the square doorways at either end of the passageway through the converted tobacco factory, backed by thunder that announced that today's rains had come not only early but with extra force. The sky kept grumbling and each time the rain decreased it would increase again. There was just enough of a break to walk out to call a car that would let passengers back out into the rain again. A grey-haired white man with a beard, wearing nothing but what were either boxer briefs or too-tight sweat shorts, blew at a saxophone under the shelter of an overhang outside a Starbucks. Again the afternoon wrapped up in a flood of lemony light, followed by a half-moon in a sky striped with pale cloud on the darkness.
Taipei, July 22, 2026
★★★ One section of mountain, framed between buildings, had vanished entirely in the hanging haze and the clouds clinging to the upper slopes. A butterfly darted among the treetops. The sun was sharp and getting heavier by the minute. At 3 p.m., it was still casting shadows outside the National Theater. Koi spun in the water by the footbridge in the park flanking Liberty Square, shining like burnished copper. Black-crowned night herons patrolled the pool's edge. The trills of black-collared starlings were dense and omnipresent. The interplay of sun and cloud seemed like a minor back-and-forth until the sun broke through in earnest, bringing sweat flooding out to meet it. In late afternoon, even the cloudy spells felt hotter than before, and the sun was worse than that. The younger boy tried to go play basketball after class and got caught in late-arriving rain. This time, the late wash of color on the sky was pink.
Taipei to New York City via Seattle, July 23, 2026
★★★ The light was low and cloud-filtered; the mountains marched away in mist with a few high-rise shapes standing up against the rising ridgeline. The sun cleared the first bank of clouds and brought out the full roundness of the vegetation, making every burgeoning clump of leaves distinct. Out toward the airport the clouds took up more of the sky and a dull tan haze lay on the scene, a haze the color of an airplane's smell. Dim glory rays hung down, the darker spaces between them looking like the teeth on a comb. The shape of the engine out the cabin window flashed yellow, white, black, and reddish as it passed through the whipping shreds of clouds. From above, the clouds looked as solid as badlands. Hours later, the windowshade came up to reveal tendrils reaching up from the cloud-tops and then firmer-seeming pillars and hillocks poking up individually in the pink light of the returning dawn. An orange mesa stood in the distance. All that topographic majesty became a smooth gray lid above the points of the evergreens as the plane descended. Those clouds were separating by the time baggage and customs had been cleared and the broken connection had been rebooked. The air outside JFK was cool and dry enough that there was no need to wrestle out of the layered jackets that had served as protection against frigid terminals and plane interiors. The sky was a smooth gradient from pink-touched gold to clear blue, with tiny loose clouds widely dispersed on it. The cross streets of Manhattan had a pewter finish on them.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of sandwiches selected from Cookery: Choice Recipes Collected by the Woman's Club of Palo Alto, published in 1903 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Cheese Fondu or English Monkey.
Melt one tablespoonful of butter in chafing dish, or pan, add one cup of rich milk or cream, one cup of fine bread crumbs, two cups of grated cheese, a pinch of mustard, and a speck cayenne. Stir well until it thickens, add a well beaten egg and serve hot on crackers or slices of fresh bread. This will serve six people. Excellent for sandwiches.
—Mrs. G. B. Little.
Pastry Sandwiches.
Roll good pastry very thin, put one-half on a baking pan, spread with raspberry or strawberry jam, cover with remaining pastry, and cut into squares. Bake in a quick oven about twenty minutes. Brush over with a little yolk of egg and powdered sugar and brown in oven.
—Mrs. J. J. Morris.
If you are inspired to prepare a sandwich inspired by our continued offerings, be sure to send along a description of your experience and a photo or three to us here: indignity@indignity.net.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
