Basement

By Richard I. Gargus

               It was her 11th birthday and Joan had been asked over for the weekend by her grandmother.  She loved her grandmother dearly and loved to visit.  The house was an old house sitting on a few acres out away from town.  The nights here were very dark and Joan loved the night sky.  She could trace the milky way from horizon to horizon.  She had spent many summers here learning the constellations.  Being an old house, it was heated by coal in the winter, and all the hot water was heated by a coal burning heater.  Her grandmother only kept coal enough for a day or two at a time upstairs and when Joan would visit, it was her job to bring more up from the basement.

                Joan had always hated the dark sour smelling basement.  It gave her chills and caused her to feel queasy when her grandmother would send her downstairs for a bucket of coal.  But it was that or take a cold sponge bath, and Joan loved to soak in a warm bath.  So torn between her loathing of the basement, and her love for a hot bath, she opened the doorway and stared into the black abyss.  The light switch was at the bottom of the staircase and she would have to descend the steep stairs by feel.  She had done this many times before and had on more than one occasion nearly fallen, catching herself only at the last second.  She had admonished herself each time that it was her clumsiness and that no one had pushed her as she had initially believed in each of those instances.

                Carrying the bucket with her, she slowly sank into the dark, feeling her way with each step.  As soon as she had gone three or four steps, a draft slammed the door above closed.  Now she found herself in total darkness.  At first she was inclined to turn around and go back, but after scolding herself for being such a scardy cat, she again proceeded blindly down with great caution.

                While she had never actually counted the stairs before, someplace she had read that a proper staircase had around 13 stairs.  Surely she had stepped down at least this many times.  She tried to remember each stair step but realized that she couldn’t.  "Nothing to do but continue.  I just lost count.  It's only one or two more steps," she said aloud and started forward and down again.

                After several more steps, she was sure she should have come to the floor by now.  She was beginning to let her fear rise again, and she felt it grow like a cancer in her heart.  She stopped where she was and stood thinking briefly.  She set the bucket down now, and kicked it over the edge of the stairs.  She counted the bounces.  Three.. three more stairs.  Feeling her way slowly, she stepped down the last three stairs and finally felt the floor.  The growing fear began to evaporate and she began to feel for the light switch.  The darkness seemed so thick as to have viscosity.  She felt as though she were swimming in it.  Finally she found the switch but as she flipped it, nothing happened.  "Damn!" she exclaimed.

                She started to turn and re-ascend the stairs but tripped over the bucket.  As she fell, she hit something in the dark and it caused her to roll a couple of times.  "Double damn!"  As she got back to her feet, she realized she wasn’t sure where she was nor where the stairs were.  Inching her way back in the direction she thought them to be, she felt ahead of her.  After several feet, she decided this must be the wrong direction, so she turned around and headed back the other way, until she ran into what she thought to be a small table.  Her fear welled up again as she realized she had no idea where she was.

                She got to her hands and knees and began to crawl, feeling around in front of her.  After a few minutes, she felt something cold, wet and gushy.  Jerking her hand back, she quickly crawled back in the other direction until her head hit what she thought was a wall.  She hand climbed up to her feet and realized it was a large box.  It had something on top of it which fell on the floor and broke as she brushed it with her arm.  Being bare footed, she was afraid to walk or crawl for fear of stepping on the broken glass.

                She began to sob.  "Now what?" she asked her self.  She knew her grandmother was upstairs on the second floor, and that she was mostly deaf anyway.  Shouting would not bring her down.  She decided to shuffle her feet in the direction she thought the staircase should be in.  Slowly, she slid one foot forward, then the other.  Now she felt a piece of broken glass against her toe, and she bent over to pick it up.  As she did, she banged her forehead on the edge of a table or shelf, and briefly saw stars.  By now, Joan was in a full scale crying session.  This was terrible.  She was lost, her head hurt, and she had no way to get any help.  She reached forward to feel of the item she had banged her head on.  It felt like a wooden table.  Carefully, keeping her hand on the table for reference and for support, she bent over again and picked up the glass.  She laid it on the table, and turned left.

                She began scooting her feet again, her tears flooding her face.  Another piece of glass, and this time, she bent her knees and squatted down to pick up the broken glass.  She had no place to lay it so she hung on to it.  Scooting forward some more, her toes found a solid object.  She reached forward and found that this was a wall.  Now she only had to follow the wall and she would find the staircase.  She shuffled along the wall, and touching many non descript things along the way, and finding more glass, she finally came to a corner.  But the corner turned away, and she couldn’t remember this feature being here.  She had envisioned the cellar as a simple square room.  Yet here was a corner turning the wrong direction.

                With no other choice, she followed the wall around the corner, and continued to encounter things hanging there, and leaning against the wall.  She knocked over a group of things she decided were garden tools with long handles.  Almost tripping over them, she stepped gingerly over them until the way seemed clear.  Then she went back to scooting forward, feeling her way, and always keeping a contact on the wall.  Now, there was something from about her chest up blocking her way, but she could tell the wall continued on.  Deciding to follow the obstacle, she turned and began scooting her way down its length.  There was something large on the floor in front of her, and she could not continue her way forward.  She had to navigate around what she decided was a lawn mower.  Down here?

                Working her way to the other side she reached forward to find the chest high wall, or cabinet.  What she found instead was the coal bin.  It was pilled high and she could feel the individual lumps.  "Well, now I should know where I am." she thought.  The coal bin was under the stair case, so the other side of the bin should be the stairs and her bucket.  She wiped her face, feeling she might now get out of the situation alive after all.  Slowly she felt her way around the bin and to the wall on the other side.  She kicked something on the floor.  Her bucket.  Reaching down, she picked it up, and found the handle.  Shuffling her way back to the coal bin, she filled the bucket by feel.  When it was filled, she worked her way back around and found the hand rail of the stairs.

                She started up the steep stairs and carefully felt her way up each step.  It seemed there were way to many stairs going back up.  She should be at the top by now.  How many stairs had she climbed.  She should have counted.  Then her toe hung on the next stair and she fell forward to her shin against the next step, dropping her bucket.  "Ouch!"  She heard the bucket tumble all the way back down the stairs and the coal with it.  She turned around and sat on the stairs and started to cry in earnest.  "I won't let this beat me.. I won't!" she decided.

                She stood up, turned around, and climbed the last three stairs before she found the door.  She opened it and went into the kitchen where she found a flashlight.  Returning to the door, she stopped and went back to the kitchen to get a chair.  Dragging it over, she hooked it under the door handle, wedging the door open, and she started back down the stairs, the flash light beaming it's way ahead.  There at the bottom of the stairs she found her bucket and some of the coal.  Picking it up and putting what coal she found there into it, she aimed the light around the basement to see what all she had run into and felt down there.

                The basement was a mess, things scattered and lying all over the floor.  It was no wonder she had gotten turned around.  There was no order to anything and there were things against the wall as well as out in the middle of the floor.  She saw the broken glass on the floor on the far side of the basement, and was surprised she had managed to get that far across the room.  Turning now to the coal bin, she walked the last couple of steps and refilled her bucket.  She dropped the flashlight and it went out.  Feeling for it and not finding, she decided it had rolled under the coal bin.  Even with the door open at the top of the steps, it was pitch black here, with only a glimmer of light casting ominous shadows.  When she stood back up, and felt for her bucket of coal, she knocked it off the bin, and it fell scattering the coal again.

                Totally unnerved now, she made her way carefully back to the stairs and with tears in her eyes again, slowly climbed the stairs feeling defeated.  "You know.. I think a sponge bath would be fine tonight," she decided.. and made her back into the kitchen.  "Besides, burning coal pollutes the atmosphere."