Homebody

The force of it made him lose his balance. He fell. He tried to scramble out of the way. More of the ceiling was collapsing. His legs were covered with dirt. For a moment he couldn't move them. Then he pulled hard with his arms and his legs came free. Another section of roof sagged, right where he had cut it. Wish I hadn't cut so far, he thought. He scrambled up the tu

He could hardly breathe in the thick wet dust. He still had the sledgehammer. And the skillsaw had to be around here, lying on the floor.

He felt the cord under his foot, followed it back. It disappeared into a pile of earth. Had he really left the saw so far down the tu

No, don't be stupid, he told himself. The part of the ceiling you cut has all collapsed. The saw must be just a few feet under the shallowest part of this earthfall.

He probed with the handle of the sledgehammer. Right. The saw was right there. He reached in, felt through the dirt till he got it by the handle and pulled it out.

Only now he was turned around. He swung with the sledgehammer until it rang against stone. Here's the wall. The left wall, as he headed up the tu

He finally saw the light at the top of the tu

The coal furnace. He was out of the tu

"Don!" She was calling his name. She sounded so far away.

"I can't see," he said. "I've got dirt in my eyes."

"I'll lead you." He felt her gentle touch, tugging at his arm. She kept letting go. No. Not letting go. Her hand was sliding free. She was getting less substantial all the time. Less real.

He couldn't think of it that way. She wasn't getting less real, she was getting more free. She would let go of this house that had trapped her for so long. That was a good thing for her. It's not as if he was losing her, because he never really had her. Just the dream of her, the idea of her. It felt so real to hold her in his arms, but in the end she was always a ghost. And here, now, with his eyes closed, surrounded by darkness, he could believe that. This was reality, this choking blindness. What Sylvie was, what she meant to him, was a moment of clarity in the dark. She would be his memory of light. He could live with that.

Barely.

At last they were up the basement stairs. She led him into the bathroom. "I can't turn on the faucets anymore," she said.

"Can't you get the house to do it for you?" he said.

"Oh," she said. Then laughed. "I was getting used to being real."

He was still fumbling with the faucet when he felt it move on its own, and the water gushed out. He filled his hands again and again, splashing it on his face. Finally he could blink his eyes open without pain. His hands were filthy. He soaped them up to his elbows, then washed his face with soap. After he rinsed, as he toweled himself dry, he looked in the bathroom mirror. His hair was caked with mud. His clothing was completely covered.

"I thought you were dead down there," she said. "What was exploding?"

"No explosion," he said. "That tu

"Well," she said. "I guess I finally got a decent burial."

He shuddered. He thought of her body lying on that mattress, now covered with broken, rotted timbers and tons of earth. Buried was buried, with or without a box. With or without a marker.

"What I need," he said, "is a shower." But when he left the bathroom, he didn't go out to the ballroom to head up the stairs to the shower. Instead he went down the basement stairs. The dirt had settled on everything. A thin skiff of it covering the whole basement, even clinging to the beams overhead. The light was dim because of moist earth spotting the bulb. He walked over to the coal furnace. Dirt spilled out from both sides like the fan at the mouth of a canyon. Behind the furnace, it was piled up as tall as he was. And daylight was visible above. The tu

The plugged-in end of the extension cord still emerged from the tu

The rest of the cord came out easily. He found what had given way. The second extension cord had come free. All he had pulled out was the first one. Well, that was fine. No part of the buried cord was sticking out. Nothing was left dangling.

He coiled the cord and walked up the stairs as he finished. She wasn't waiting for him at the top of the stairs. But he heard water ru

In the back yard, the sag of the collapsed tu

He looked around. Could anybody see him from the nearby houses? Screw 'em if they could. He stripped off his shirt and pants and chucked them in the garbage can. There wasn't a coin laundry in America that could cope with this dirt without breaking down. His shoes, though, he could clean. He got them off and beat them against the wall of the house until they merely looked dirty instead of encrusted. His socks went into the garbage with his pants and shirt.