“Eliza, what the hell is the problem with the furniture store?”
I don’t know how to verbalize this. I’m convinced that furniture stores exist in a quantum superposition of grand opening and going out of business sale. That means it’s both and neither at once until someone comes into the store, at which point it becomes one or the other.
It gets worse. Because you know exactly where the store is located, you can’t know how fast it is going out of business because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. If you knew when it was going to go out of business, you’d have no idea where the store was. Long story short, the laws of physics suggest that you can’t go into a furniture store, and yet people do.
Do you think I could verbalize any of that? Nope. All I could get out was, “They break physics”
“What?”
I got tongue tied when I tried to explain why the furniture store violates the laws of physics. Somebody overheard us and said something that unlocked a memory. “I think you saw something when you got lost looking for the bathroom.”
It happened last year, as we got ready to move out here. I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, so I asked where it was. I followed the directions, only to be stymied by a sign that read, “NO ENTRY - you must go around” with an arrow that pointed to the left.
That arrow pointed me to a fork: I now had to choose between a flight of stairs and a dark hallway.
I chose the stairs. Each step on the steep, narrow, uneven stairs had round edges. I tripped and slid down. I opted to go down the dark hallway beside it. I had no idea what wass down there. from where I started, all I could see was an unknown devoid of light, kind of like a black hole, except without the hypergravity.
It started off just a normal hallway. It had open doors leading to empty rooms. it started narrow and got progressively narrower. I nearly got stuck.
The lights died out towards the end. When the lights flickered on, I saw red letters that said, “DON’T GO IN HERE.”
I looked back at all the doors and saw that they now had red X’s on them. The warning made me wonder what was in there.
I went through the last door and found myself in a large room with concrete walls. There was a discarded Christmas tree on one side of the room and a trap door on the other side. In the corner of the room opposite the trap door was a TV set.
I wandered over the TV set and saw two little girls watching Care Bears. I recognized the girls: my younger self and Bebe, someone I only marginally knew from that one year of U8 soccer I did.
I heard a low growl and lots of thudding. An angry polar bear came racing through the trap door. In a flash, it angrily mauled and ate the girls. I wanted to look away but I couldn’t.
The polar bear saw me. It charged at me. I ran right back the way I came.
The good news was I didn’t need to use the bathroom anymore. The bad news was, I peed myself. Worse still, my mom got angry with me and said, “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you keep peeing yourself!” That might be true, but it was not the right thing to say to me at that time.
That question felt like someone ripped a bandaid off a wound that didn’t fully heal yet. Now that I think about it, that’s how the bedwetting started again. It also hit me with the realization that whatever was in that room is now out there, wreaking havoc on the world.