Category: Short Stories

Anya was sitting at her desk in her cubicle, just a generic office desk situated in a nondescript cubicle in a sea of equally nondescript cubicles, when it happened. She felt the very floor rumble and watched as a couple of the particle board ceiling tiles fell to the ground, leaving powdery trails behind them and exposing the wiring and ventilation ducts. The coffee in her mug, cold by now anyway, sent out a cascade of ever expanding rings, as if someone had dropped a stone in it. Anya reflexively gripped the edge of her desk as her wheeled office chair began to drift towards the back corner of her cubicle with her still seated in it. Papers were drifting around the office, airborne despite the fact that there was no breeze, and Anya’s computer had turned off, as if someone had abruptly and unceremoniously pulled the plug. All of this happened in the span of two seconds.

“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!”, one of her co-workers shouted in stunned surprise. No one answered him because no one else knew any more than he did. A number of people ran over to the person-sized windows and peered out. They scanned the street first, then craned their necks to look both up and down the building before focusing their searching faces on something happening a little lower down the building and to the right. “Look!”, urged the new intern, pointlessly pointing a shaking finger. “There’s thick black smoke POURING out of the building! Looks like the ninetieth floor! I think the building is on fire!”

Anya had not released her grip from the edge of her desk yet. She slowly relaxed her fingers as she tried to do the same to her mind. Another person shrieked frantically, “But what made the building shake?! Fire doesn’t do that, not to a building this big!! It must have been a bomb!!!” Anya finally felt calm enough to attempt speech. “It doesn’t matter what it was; we need to evacuate right now.” No one moved. Anya cleared her throat and shouted, “RIGHT NOW!” The new intern finally pried his eyes away from the window and looked at her. “Shouldn’t we stay put, though? We don’t know the extent of the fire and we can’t use the elevators; 105 flights down is a long way to go…” Someone else piped up, “The firefighters are going to need to carry equipment up the stairs, what if we get in their way?” Someone else chimed in, “Yeah, we should stay here until we receive instructions…they’ll sound the all clear when the fire is out.”

Anya could not believe what she was hearing from people that she had, until that very moment, considered rational and intelligent. She was about to say something in retort when she stopped and scanned the faces of her colleagues. She saw mild alarm mixed with blind adherence to orthodoxy; she almost expected someone to go “Baaaa”, like a sheep would. Frustrated, she spun on her heels (thinking how fortunate it was that she was wearing flat soled shoes that day) and returned to her cubicle where she grabbed her jacket and purse. With these in hand she proceeded to make her way to the exit to the 105 flights of stairs that separated her from freedom.

When she opened the office doors, however, she was immediately overwhelmed by acrid black smoke. She put her jacket over her mouth and nose and tried to remember where the stairs were. Her eyes stung and her light jacket offered precious little protection. Despite all of this, she managed to grope her way down the corridor to the stairwell, its red EXIT sign a beacon in the smoky blackness. She pushed on the door and entered into one of Dante’s circles of Hell. The smoke, sucked upward by the void of the stairwell, was even worse than it had been in the corridor. Bits of flaming debris danced all around her and singed her hair, clothes, and skin. Still she pressed onward, downward. But she only made it down five flights before the stairs simply disappeared. Vanished. Gone.

Where the stairs used to be was now a burning and twisted maze of pulverized concrete, torn and glowing red hot steel supports, and the thick black smoke. Dejected and with her panic rising, she climbed back up to the corridor. Anya knew that there were other stairwells, so she carefully searched for them only to find each one impassible. She had no alternative but to go back to the office. This time, when she opened the doors, she was again met with the wall of acrid black smoke. So, it’s gotten in here, too, she thought. Most of her coworkers were huddled in a corner of the office under the main air vent, but a few were trying to break one of the massive windows, presumably in the hope of getting breathable air. Anya didn’t have the heart, or a clear enough respiratory system, to tell them that the windows were industrial grade reinforced glass and wouldn’t break even if a sledgehammer crashed into them. She went over to her huddled coworkers, her jacket now tied around the lower half of her face, and sat down.

“Wha…what happened? Why are you *cough* back?” someone asked her. Anya coughed a couple of times, trying to clear her vocal chords. She then sputtered, “Stairs….all gone. Smoke everywhere. Melting steel.” The final sentence, unsaid, hung over them like the smoke: No way out and no way in. There wasn’t going to be a rescue squad. None of them was going to leave the offices of Morgan and Morgan, Financial Consultants ever again. Anya looked at her sensible flat soled shoes and wryly thought, Should have worn heels. At least when they find my body they would have admired my sense of style. But the irony was lost, gone a moment later as a fit of coughing wracked Anya’s delicate frame. She could see that a couple of her coworkers were lying down, as if awaiting death. Wait. No. They were dead, their limbs limp and eyes glazed and rolled unnaturally high in their sockets.

That’s when pure, undiluted panic rose in Anya to such a degree that she felt herself dissociating. She was leaving her body, floating high above it, unbothered by the scene below. Oddly enough, a profound sense of release washed over her, much as the ocean tide washes over the beach. Anya was fortunate in this regard, for the next second the floor gave way and everyone plummeted along with the entire building: falling, burning and shrieking 105 floors to the ground below. Anya was right: no one left the office that day.

It wasn’t really the sort of thing that one could have prepared for, save for carrying an EpiPen, maybe. But, even then, they would have had to rush her all the way across the camp to the infirmary to get the injection and, chances are, it would have happened anyway. The camp is pretty big, and the soccer field is on one side and the infirmary is on the complete opposite side, with the massive lake in the middle. So I don’t think that anything would have happened differently, although, for her parents’ sake, and the sake of the counselors, some of whom seemed pretty traumatized, I wish that it had. I wish this for her sake, too, of course; although, where she is, she might be better off. Who can know?

That Thursday was a fairly typical day at the camp: hot, humid, and bathed in sunshine. Why they made us do our swimming lessons first thing in the morning and not in the afternoon, when the temperature was at its highest, always mystified me. It still does, actually, even all of these years later. Maybe if we had been swimming that afternoon instead of playing soccer it wouldn’t have happened. But, again, who can possibly know? There are things that are known and things that are unknown and the ‘should have, would have, could have’ of that day fall into the latter category.

So, there we were, running around the field after lunch in the blazing sun, sweating and shrieking with the abandoned joy of blameless youth. There must have been at least twenty kids on that field, maybe more. It could have happened to any one of them, and then I wouldn’t be telling you all of this. But it happened to her, to Leigh, of all people. Leigh, who was only just spending her first summer at camp, because her parents were overly protective and had been reluctant to let her out of their sight until she was ten years old. Leigh, whose family had just moved to the area from some tiny town in the Midwest, hoping for better jobs and more opportunity. Leigh, who happened to be severely allergic to bee stings, though she didn’t know it yet, as she had never had one before.

I remember hearing a girl cry out, as if in pain, and I saw Leigh stop where she was. Kids went zooming past her, but she just stood there, frozen and looking at her arm with a face that was a mix of surprise and burgeoning tears. It seems like she stood this way for hours, but I know that it couldn’t have been more than three seconds. What happened next is burned into my brain forever: her lips, and then her entire face turned puffy and she toppled to the ground like a house of cards someone had blown on. A deep scarlet flush crept up her neck and over her forehead as she lay on the ground. By this point campers had crowded around her and a few counselors were running over, their clipboards flung to the earth and their mouths open. Someone shouted “Give her space! Give her space!”, as if backing up would magically open up her airways, which were quickly closing, suffocating her, strangling her. Leigh’s whole face was red by this point and she desperately wheezed and clawed at her throat. The counselors tried to perform CPR when they reached her and someone took off for the infirmary and the camp doctor. We all just stood there, watching as her clawing slackened and her eyes rolled upwards. Then she was still, forever still.

I’m going to tell you a story; it’s a true story, and I tell it so that the world will know what kind of woman my mother was. I say “was” because she died in 1987, just eight days shy of her thirty fifth birthday, of a brain tumor. I was four years old. I’m not overstating things or being dramatic when I say that her death absolutely broke me. That’s because I have one bad memory with her that led my four year old mind to think that I made mommy die, that I am the reason she never came back. But that’s a story for another time, probably in therapy.

My mother was born in 1952 to Ukrainian immigrants who came through Ellis Island after WWII had left them with no homes to go back to. My grandmother, Babi, and my fuck wad of a grandfather, Dymitro, met in a Displaced Persons Camp. My grandmother had sponsorship to come to America; Dymitro (may he burn in hell) didn’t. So he romanced my four foot eleven inch tall (she was a dietary dwarf as a result of growing up starving during the Holodomor) thirty year old grandmother and convinced her to marry him. Thus, he got to come to America, too.

They settled in a Ukrainian community in Syracuse, New York and had two daughters: Mary and Terry. Terry was my mother. She had a very unhappy childhood: Babi had figured out that Dymitro (that bastard) had used her and he would regularly have extra-martial affairs and be violent. He once pulled a gun on the family and threatened to shoot them all. My mother’s school told her parents that she was most likely “retarded” (I think she had a learning disability or autism), and she struggled with making friends as her peers would make fun of her weight. Dymitro (I hope he chokes on a dick), learned English while Babi never did. One day he sued for divorce on the grounds that she was “unfaithful” (oh, the irony) and she, not knowing English, couldn’t defend herself. He abandoned the family completely.

Despite all of this, my mother went to college with the goal of going to medical school. When it came time to apply, she only had enough money to apply to two schools: both rejected her. She became so despondent that she dropped out of college a month before graduation. She got a job cashiering in a restaurant, the same restaurant where my father worked as a waiter. They eventually went on a date (picnic in the park complete with shots of vodka and a viewing of Young Frankenstein after), and they went on another date, and another, until they decided to move in together. He proposed one dinner over dessert (my mom had a notorious sweet tooth) and she said yes, on one condition: that he return the diamond ring and that they would get matching gold chains instead. Her reasoning? “I’m not getting married, we are getting married.”

So they were married and bought a 1916 house in Binghamton, New York. They had an extensive garden, a gray and white cat named “Sam”, and two daughters, of which I am the younger. Everything was good, until the town did something that smashed the sidewalk right in front of the house. I don’t know if they were removing a tree, or digging up pipelines, or whatever, but they caused damage to the property. This is where you will learn everything you will ever need to know about my mother.

She called the town and explained what had happened and asked that they send someone out to repair the damage. A date and time were set, and she stayed home from work to meet the man who would re-pour the concrete. The man shows up late, and he starts giving my mother a hard time: “the damage isn’t that extensive” or “I can just fill in some of the cracks and it’ll be good as new”, that kind of thing. He was just being lazy; he didn’t want to execute a proper job and certainly not at the behest of a woman, to boot. My mother stood her ground; the two of them went back and forth for a while, voices getting louder and gestures more animated, until the man finally agreed to fix the fucking sidewalk the right way: from scratch. As he turned to get to work, he said over his shoulder, “Are you happy, lady? You’re getting what you want!”

My mother paused and looked in squarely in his eyes. She said, “No. I gave you my name. And I’m not getting what I want. I’m getting what I deserve.”

Then she slammed the door in his face.