Page 1 of The Staircase in the Woods

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The Heart of It

“Friendship is like a house,” she said to him, his head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”

1

Owen

May 30

Pittsburgh, PA

Owen slept in the midst of mess and wreckage, as he did most nights.

Sometimes it was the tangle of a forever unmade bed, other times pages torn from notebooks out of frustration, pages scrawled with erratic, mutant half-formed almost-ideas. But last night, as with many, it was computer parts—parts old and new: a vintage Sound Blaster sound card rescued from a first-gen Pentium; a baggie of RAM chips like loose teeth; a snarl of cables; a PowerColor Red Dragon AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU that he’d managed to buy off Craigslist, of all places, since the guy who’d had it didn’t know what he had, meaning Owen got it for a song.

His body slept, bent into shape around the chaos, careful even in the night not to kick anything off the bed. He didn’t writhe. He slept like the dead. Even when the dreams came—the same dreams that were just another kind of mess and wreckage, dreams of a set of stairs, sometimes in the middle of the street, sometimes descending down into the forest floor, sometimes in the middle of his high school gym, sometimes floating there in the big black nothing. Stairs that in the dream he never walked up or down, even though he knew he was supposed to. Stairs he was too scared to touch with even the front of his foot. Stairs that shuddered and whispered words he couldn’t understand, in a voice he recognized, a voice of a friend long gone, a friend abandoned.

Then—

Bvvt, bvvt. Bvvt, bvvt.

The sound from an older-model iPhone as it vibrated. It slowly scurried its way across a crowded nightstand, its suicide blocked by the obstacle of mess on the floor: to-be-read books, a coffee mug, a blister pack of melatonin, a half-empty bottle of trazodone.

The sound dragged Owen out of the depths of that dark dream. The sour feeling of it remained, stuck to him like tree sap. He pawed at the nightstand, extracting himself from the chaos of computer parts and tangled sheets. Wincing in the harsh platinum light of late morning, he looked at the phone, then sat up.

The caller:

Lore.

Panic laced through his chest, tightening it. Not just panic. Anger, too.

He cleared his throat, went to answer, then paused. Should he? Could he?

Owen denied the call, kept the phone face down against his chest. He looked around his apartment—a spare, bland, chaotic space, because he did little to organize it, little to decorate it, little of anything. It was just the bleak place in which he existed, the place he slept in and showered in and ate gussied-up instant ramen in.

…because you don’t deserve anything better. The thought circled his brain again and again like an EDM loop.

He thought about burying his head under the pillow again, but he checked the phone for a voicemail—

But instead, it rang again. Lore.

Shit.

If she’s calling, it’s important.

Biting his teeth, he answered it.

“Lore,” he said, his throat still full of morning gravel.

“Can you believe it?” she asked.

“What?”

“What what?”

“Okay, let’s start over. Oh, hello, Lore,” Owen said, moresmart-assedly than he meant it to be. “It’s nice to talk to you. It’s been a long time. May I ask what this is in reference to—”

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