Thump

I walked in the backdoor tired from another tough day at work. I enjoy teaching—sometimes—but often it just exhausts me. I’m too introverted for the job; speaking for hours on end makes me want to crawl into my bed, get into the fetal position, pull the covers over my body, and shut off from the world.

That’s how I feel most Mondays.

I walked through the living room to the kitchen, turning on the coffee machine for my much needed late-afternoon cup, and before walking upstairs noticed through the glass of the front door a delivery-drone dropping a box on the front porch. Pushing open the storm-door, I looked at it, vexed. I had ordered nothing. It could be something for my wife, though—she had recently become obsessed with building her perfume collection, insisting on purchasing each of the Thin Wild Mercury and Replica fragrances, her favorites.

I picked up the cardboard box and brought it inside.

I set it on the dining room table, glancing from the box to the wall, from where our print-portrait of Dostoevsky hung, glaring at me as if in timeless judgement. I snickered at him and looked back to the tightly sealed box.

Grabbing a knife from the block in the kitchen, I sliced through the tape and yanked it open. There was nothing inside. Nothing at all. Reclosing the box, I looked for a return address. Nothing.

“Postal Service is getting shittier every year,” I thought to myself, “The government needs to reinvest in one of its essential institutions.”

Grabbing the box, I took it out of the dining room and through the kitchen, wrenching open the door to the dark, dusty basement. I could have turned on the light, but I didn’t need to—I had mentally mapped every inch of the room perfectly. The stairs creaked under my weight, though more heavily than normal, and the creak was somehow exponential, each step groaning more and more.

“I’ve been putting on too much weight lately,” I thought to myself, “I need to start running again. Why did I ever stop? I’ve become so lazy…”

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I tossed the box, spinning it counterclockwise to the dirty concrete ground.

It landed with a loud thud.

“The fuck?” I thought, walking over to look inside the box.

Nothing was there.

Confused, I walked out of the basement, back up the stairs, and up the subsequent staircase to my bedroom. I lay there for a while, staring at the dusty, spinning ceiling fan, thinking about what had just happened. I grabbed my book, Winter’s Heart, by Robert Jordan, but couldn’t focus enough to read. I stared outside. Kids were walking home on their way back from school. I felt suddenly tried. I closed my eyes.

* * *

“What are you talking about?” said Mary, setting her purse on her vanity stool. She had just returned from work.

“I’m telling you,” I responded, rubbing my still heavy eyes, “The box somehow gained weight. It wasn’t even weight I could really feel; it happened so gradually that I didn’t notice, but the stairs groaned! And the box landed hard, with a thump!”

“It just seemed heavy,” she said, “It’s Monday. You’re tired. You’re not back in the groove of work yet.”

“Probably,” I said, forming a pillow with my palms behind my head.

I didn’t make it very long that evening. After preparing and greedily inhaling dinner—chicken tetrazzini—I went back upstairs, again trying unsuccessfully to read, and then passed out. In the background of my hazy psyche, which was shifting in that place between wakefulness and sleep, I could hear the television; Mary was watching the new season of The Crown. Flashing light from the show alit the otherwise blackness of my closed eyelids.

I woke up in the middle of the night. Mary was sleeping soundly but the TV was still on. Queen Elizabeth was trying to bully Boris Yeltsin into unearthing the Romanov remains. I walked to the bathroom and took a piss, staring like a startled zombie into the chasm of the mirror. Washing my hands and splashing water across my face, I toweled dry and limped down the stairs. My pet rabbit, Achilles, stared at me inquisitively from the bedroom doorway. I petted him. He grunted at me, annoyed. He thumped his oversized feet against the carpet and darted back into his burrow under the bed.

It was only four in the morning, but I couldn’t sleep.

I pressed on the coffee machine, a blue light signaling its wakefulness, and opened my library app, turning on my audiobook. I was listening to The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. It was such an intense book, and so well narrated; it had me hooked. Opening the fridge, I examined what I had available for preparing breakfast. Eggs, bacon, onions, garlic, serrano peppers—I would make an omelet. While pulling open the squeaky plastic, nearly broken bottom drawer of the fridge, I heard over the narration of the book a thumping sound coming from the basement. As I listened more closely, I noticed it was building slowly, becoming gradually louder with each bang and thud.

Anxiety crawled like a frantic insect up my spine. I suddenly again felt tired—completely exhausted, but I knew it wasn’t my body that was fatigued—my psyche was retreating from the situation.

I opened the basement door—blackness; the only thing visible particulate matter floating obliviously in the thick, stagnant underground air.

I grabbed my phone and turned on the flashlight. I stepped cautiously down the stairs, which groaned considerably less than they had the previous day. I shined the light quickly—almost frantically—to that empty space where I knew the box lay. It still sat there innocently. The room was now quiet. I stepped carefully over to the box. It was mostly closed—its lids had somehow flapped shut. I thought that was weird, but I knew also that occasionally a draft from the garage sometimes blew into the basement, which could possibly have closed the box. The weather was getting cold; it could also have been a rat seeking shelter from the biting wind.

Reaching—my body calm but my mind in a near panic—I lifted open the box.

Nothing!

And I mean truly nothing. The bottom of the box had given out; its inside now filled with nothingness—a black void which sat somehow swirling; boring a spacetime-bending, ancient though simultaneously perfectly new hole into the crater of God alone knew where. The spinning drill wasn’t tunneling into the earth—it was creating a gateway to somewhere otherly.

I stood wide-eyed, blinking in confused terror. The audiobook continued playing; a priest was quizzing a demon about its knowledge of the languages of antiquity.

Terrified but still curious, I reached toward that cardboard cube. My arm apparently passed the box’s event horizon, as I was sucked forward while being simultaneously deconstructed. My fingers twisted unnaturally, like long, stretchy pieces of taffy before disappearing into the void. The rest of my entirety was being pulled along as well.

The basement door suddenly flung ajar—I heard the thump of the doorknob against the wall. Frantic steps: Mary was rushing down the stairs:

“Hey!” she said, terrified, “Where are you?”

I shouted, but no sound emerged from within my now misshapen throat.

My eyes were the last to go. I saw from within those resilient spheres of evolutionary success my wife come into view. She was holding Achilles, who was sniffing at the air, unfamiliar with the stagnant thickness of the basement. She gazed with terror upon my floating eyes and the swirling biological dust encircling them.

“I know where the box came from!” She said, crying, “It was delivered because of that survey you filled out! The one we did online—as a joke—the one from that culty church down the street!”

At that moment, I for the last time felt emotion. Fear and anxiety were present—that’s certain—but mostly I felt regret. I was being sucked into the box—I would not be able to come back; I knew that. Would my wife be okay? Would Achilles be okay? I would likely never know.

When it was finished with me, the box closed itself. It had completed its task. The basement was again still.

The sun rose; it was only Tuesday.

End