The Stairs, Chapter 39
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 66
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.
39.
I woke up to bright sunlight and a thumping sound. Theo and Maxine were squinting and crawling out of their sleeping bags. The sound was coming from the door to the stairs.
I surveyed the room. Our winter clothes were stuffed back into the closet and the suitcases. The box of acorns was partway open on the floor below the window. Everything looked normal. I got up and opened the door.
"DADDY!" Theo shouted. Dad stood on the landing, grinning, in a wilted-looking T-shirt and a pair of shorts with grimy streaks on the legs. Theo pushed past me and jumped up to hug him, and I hugged both of them at once. My dad's stubble scratched my forehead as he stooped and hugged us back.
Finally, we all let go. "Good morning, fellas," he said. "You must be Maxine," he added, reaching over my head to shake her hand. "Good to meet you. Good to be here. Woof, what a drive."
"It's July 3?" I said.
He wrinkled his nose at me. "What else would it be?" he said. "It only felt as if we were on the road for days. We loaded up day before yesterday, then hit the highway yesterday morning, right on schedule." He frowned in mild puzzlement. "Yep, we made it as far as Apfelville, got the hotel there, stayed over, and then—huh. No, that's right. Two nights in the empty house—no, one night—right, no, sorry. It all runs together. Not enough sleep."
He looked at the rumpled sleeping bags. "Maybe not enough sleep for you, either, by Mommy's suspicions," he said. "I wanted to let you keep snoozing, to see how long it took you to notice the movers were here. But they were having so much trouble with the couch clogging up the regular stairway, we told them to bring your stuff up the back stair."
Behind him, two guys in bright blue moving company T-shirts were wrestling something wrapped in a heavy blanket up onto the landing. "Make way for the bottom half of your bunk bed," Dad said.
The stairwell was still gloomy brown wood, but the daylight coming down into it matched the daylight in our room. I stole a glance at the doorframe. There was a round lumpy spot where the doorbell had been, and two painted-over dimples that must have been screw holes.
I stepped back into the room and started shoving the sleeping bags and backpacks into a corner, to clear the floor for the movers. "Brush your teeth while you can," Mom said, sticking her head through the doorway from the hall. "And then come get some bagels. It's about to get very disorderly in here."
"I'm sure we've seen worse chaos," Maxine said, ducking into the bathroom.
We ate at the counter one last time, as the movers finally, triumphantly carried in the couch after working it up the main stairs. The bagels were what the bakery called everything-plus; they had corn nuts and hot pepper flakes stuck on them along with the usual salt and sesame seeds and poppy seeds and onion and garlic. I ate mine with plain cream cheese, to set off the individual flavors. Maxine and Theo had theirs with whitefish, to taste as many things as possible at once. Mom and Dad had half one way and half the other.
"Sorry, Maxine," Mom said. "I don't know what we were thinking, having a sleepover in the middle of a move."
"I don't mind," Maxine said. "It's fun to watch progress unfold."
"Just think of it as a spectacular pageant," I said. Theo giggled.
"Do they teach you that positive outlook at the College Community School?" Dad asked.
"Well, they keep telling us education does extend beyond the classroom," I said. "Maybe we learned it all over Marble City."
One of the movers poked his head into the kitchen. "Is that where you wanted the bunk bed?" he said.
Theo and Dad and I followed him down the hall to the bedroom. Our old bed from Turfburg was standing by the wall opposite the door to the stairs, complete with our familiar striped mattresses and the Turfburg Bus Museum stickers I'd put on the rungs of the ladder when I was Theo's age.
"Look OK to you?" Dad said.
Seeing the bed in its place there, I felt as if I was standing in our old room in Turfburg again. But I still felt Marble City all around us too. I could feel Carter Street out the window, and Willis Boulevard coming to meet it, and the bus line up to old Emanuel Shroe's fishing town. I could feel the woods of Turfburg and the centuries-old growth of the City Forest. Somewhere behind the lingering flavor of browned onion and corn nuts, I could recall the taste of Walt's apple pie.
"It looks great, Dad," I said. Out there were the squirrels, and Professor Melk, and my grandparents, and the Turfburg comics pages, and the Marble City Trotters. The old memories and the new ones were tangled up together, in a single sense of place. Dad was here; Mom was here; Theo and I were here. We were where we belonged.
THE END
Find previous chapters of The Stairs here.
BUSINESS DEP'T.
Hello! This is Tom, your Editor Emeritus and author of The Stairs. That was the final chapter of the novel.
I hope you've enjoyed going along with Rollo, Theo, and Maxine on their adventure. To celebrate the conclusion, we present a full map of the Marble Municipal Allied Transit rail system, rendered by Mack Scocca-Ho.
Back in November, we started publishing The Stairs in serial form at Indignity because I'd taken a new job at CNN, which prevented me from writing journalism for other outlets, including my own. At the time, Paramount Skydance was bidding to purchase CNN's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
The original manuscript of The Stairs was 46 chapters. At a chapter a week, this coincided nicely, I thought, with the timetable for resolving my employer's ownership, which had the deal closing sometime around the third quarter of 2026.
After I consolidated some self-indulgently short chapters into longer ones along the way, the serial ended up being 39 chapters, which still carried us into Q3.
However, while Warner Bros. Discovery did agree to be purchased by Paramount, the closing of the deal is currently paused, pending the result of an antitrust trial. That trial is now scheduled to take place in March of 2027. (All of this is publicly reported information and does not constitute me reporting about or opining on the merger.)
Because I don't have a second novel manuscript waiting in my drawer, this means I need to figure out something else to start sending you in Indignity. I know how the sequel to The Stairs would begin; whether I could start publishing some early chapters and keep the rest of it reliably unfolding in the true old-fashioned write-as-you-go serial-novel manner is something I'm much less sure of.
I'll be pausing my contributions to Indignity for a few weeks while we come up with the next phase of the plan, whether it's that sequel or something else entirely. MR WRONG will, as MR WRONG does, keep columning throughout.
We expect to make The Stairs available for sale as an actual book, as we did with 19 Folktales. If you are a book publisher or a literary agent and you would like to preempt those efforts by arranging to get The Stairs professionally published instead, please let us know!
Also: owing to a relatively straightforward but easy to overlook operational gap between different layers of our subscription and billing systems, all through the run of The Stairs we have been failing to collect money from people who previously held Indignity subscriptions. If you tried to follow our request to re-subscribe to this version of Indignity, and our platform told you that you already had an active paid subscription, we apologize for the confusion.
We have now worked out how to make it possible for our longtime Indignity subscribers to actually subscribe to Indignity. Once we've figured out what the next thing we send you is going to be, we'll also let you know how to send us money for it.
Meanwhile, you may also, if you want, send us money through this button:
Thank you for reading! It is a pleasure to write for you.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, August 5, 2026
★★★ The numbers said the day would be just slightly worse than yesterday, but the early sky was gray instead of blue. The humidity was high enough to call for air conditioning. But then the clouds whitened and blue faults appeared in them, and the natural air dried out again; the Zoom meetings out on the balcony played on under a gently shifting balance of clouds and sun. By late afternoon the sky was all the way back to gray again, and just enough of a shower was falling to speckle the pavement.
New York City, August 6, 2026
★★ A man mopped his brow with the back of his hand as he entered the crosswalk. Central Park Tower was so heavily faded by haze that it looked at first as if it were being engulfed by the clouds far behind it. It was a challenge not to sweat onto the light jacket being carried along to protect against the office air conditioning. The river wind, what there was if it, only showed up for the last few yards of the walk from Penn Station to Hudson Yards. The ID badge on its retractable cord made a tiny but serviceable fan until the sweat on the face had had a chance to dry. A gray cloud claimed enough of the afternoon sky to send water streaking diagonally across the glass walls for a while. Afterward, the haze had diminished a little. The cooled station at Hudson Yards was no preparation for the sour, close air in the transfer passageway at Bryant Park, or for the block of heat pushing in the open train doors from each platform.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of sandwiches selected from Daily Bread: Tested Recipes of the Ladies of Fergus County, Montana, by the The "Home Workers" Society of the First Presbyterian Church Lewistown, Montana, published in 1907 and now available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
MUSTARD SANDWICHES.
Rub mustard with butter before spreading the bread. You can use more or less according to taste and it is surprising to see how excellent plain bread and butter is made by this simple addition.
OLIVE SANDWICHES.
Spread thin squares of brown bread with a mixture made by mincing 5 large olives, a stalk of celery, and a cucumber pickle; mix to a paste with a very little made mustard, salt, cayenne and a teaspoon of catsup. Press 2 slices together and serve in small squares.
EGG SANDWICHES.
Remove the yolks of 6 hard boiled eggs and rub them smooth, add 1 teaspoon of mustard, half teaspoon salt, a dash of pepper, and enough vinegar to moisten the mixture. To this add the thinly sliced whites of the eggs and spread between thin slices of slightly stale bread. — Mrs. J. M. Vrooman.
Boil 1 egg twenty minutes, shell, remove yolk and run the white through a sieve, add a teaspoon of salad dressing, a pinch of cayenne and mustard, a bit of minced onion, and a teaspoon of lemon juice. If not moist enough add a teaspoon of melted butter, cut bread in thin slices, butter and spread a layer of the egg butter on the bread, press together and cut in triangles. — Mrs. Brassey.
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
S_BST_CK IS BAD YOU SHOULD QUIT DEP'T.
