The Forgotten Staircase by Willow Zane

Author:Willow Zane [Zane, Willow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2023-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

21

Parasite

Around ten a.m., Jade was back in her room, lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t thinking about her mother or anything else. She was so burned out that her thoughts were like an absence of thought, just the sizzling sound of TV static. She always struggled to sleep at night when she was a little girl. Everything was so much scarier at night. In the daytime, a pile of dirty clothes might be just that or a burrow for her stuffed animals to dive and hide within. But at night, that pile became a monster that crept and crawled closer every time she looked.

TV had been her escape from the horror. She would sneak out of bed and tip-toe downstairs to the living room. Before turning on the set, she would turn the volume knob all the way down. Then, after pushing the power button, she could ease the sound up with tiny increments until, straining her ears, she could make out the dialogue. After the regular late-night programming had ended, she would watch the infomercials.

There was no clock in the living room, but she had to run back to bed before the station went off the air. She was terribly frightened of the tone that would play if she had mistimed her exit and the infomercial ended suddenly. As the time approached for her to go back to bed, her heart rate would get faster but she wouldn’t stop watching the TV until the last possible second. She didn’t know what compelled her to race against the clock, squeezing as much time as she could watching a man sop up large bottles of spilled soda using just one towel. She felt like that now about her own life. She had tried to squeeze out a few more minutes of existing, but now she had stayed too long, long enough to see her life’s programming code out. Her ears rang with the knowledge that her show was now over, and she could only ignore it for so long.

A nurse wheeled a cart into her room, and an orderly followed behind her, his own cart in tow. Jade sat up but didn’t speak, and soon, the nurse explained that she would perform an EEG. She didn’t say what the test was, but Jade already knew. She had spent part of her childhood in and out of hospitals, getting tests to see what was wrong with her. When Jade was eight years old, she had been allowed to stay overnight with a friend. This was a rare treat that her parents almost always said no to. She and her friend had stayed up all night, telling each other scary stories and watching movies until dawn. The following day at home, Jade dozed off while watching Saturday morning cartoons on the living room floor.

When she regained consciousness, her mother was screaming at her. “STOP THAT RIGHT NOW! IT’S NOT FUNNY! JADE! STOP IT!” then, men came in with a board and placed Jade on it, taking her body away.

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