Fantastic Metropolis

At three a.m you wake up gasping for breath, as if you’ve been running for hours full speed. You lie there, looking at the familiar furniture, listening for the TV. You hear nothing.

Maybe the power is off. But, no, the clock radio changes from 3:07 to 3:08. You try to calm your heartbeat so you can hear over it, listen again. Nothing.

You’re scared to move, but you get up anyway, put on your robe and house shoes, and pad down the hall.

And hit the wall. It runs down the middle of the house, cutting the bedrooms off from the living room and kitchen. You sigh, regretting the kitchen. But at least you have the bathroom. Which you use now, before going back to bed, where you don’t sleep any more.

In the morning you climb out the bedroom window. One wall skewers your property in half. Another cuts through your next door neighbors’ house. The street is blocked on both sides. The only way out is through yards. It doesn’t look like you can get very far that way.

You knock on the neighbors’ door. No answer. They were probably in bed when it happened. Then you remember that the houses are the same. Their kitchen must be on this side. You break a window and climb in, find coffee and cereal.

The neighbor is a handy type, always fixing something. You get his drill, sort through the bits, find the ones for concrete, run an extension cord, and start in on the wall. It takes longer than you expect to even make a dent.

By mid-afternoon you have blunted all the concrete bits and made a dent three inches deep. You try the wood bits, and make no progress at all.

You go back to your bedroom, taking food and tools.

At three a.m. you wake up trying to scream, but cannot make a sound. The room is completely dark. You know without looking that the wall is right outside the bedroom window.

You climb shakily out of bed, thinking vaguely of a drink of water. But you run full tilt into the other wall. It’s between you and the door.

You back away slowly, bump into the bed, and collapse back on it. But this is not the time to give up.

You take the pickax you stole from your neighbor and begin to strike the closet floor. The wood gives easily, and soon you have a hole, exposing another layer of wood. You hack at that until you can see the ground, and thank God that the house was not built on a concrete slab.

Once the hole is big enough, you take a shovel and dig. First you toss the dirt into the crawl space, but it fills up, so you start piling it on the bedroom floor. By daybreak you can stand in the hole up to your shoulders. It’s almost as wide as the closet.

You eat a peanut butter sandwich, admire your work. It’s time to start the tunnel sideways.

You dig like a woman possessed. Now you forgive your husband his laziness: If you hadn’t spent all that time doing yardwork you’d never have been strong enough to dig this tunnel. You dig it wide and deep enough so you can crawl along on your hands and knees.

After a few feet, you can no longer use the shovel. You crawl inside and use a trowel. The going is slower now. You take a break and eat the rest of the peanut butter.

You figure you must be almost to the edge of the house. You’ll be under the wall soon, and you start getting excited about what might lie on the other side. Will the neighbors be there, house back together? Will you have to explain about the food and the tools?

You start digging faster and faster. And then clunk. You’ve hit a rock. You pull back, and do what you do when digging in the garden: dig a little farther away. Clunk.

Slowly it seeps in. You haven’t hit a rock. You’ve hit the wall.

After awhile, you get tired of crying, and just quit. You wipe a dirty forearm across your face, blow your nose on your pajama top, and crawl back out of the hole. You open a can of tuna fish.

Nourished once more, you climb back into the hole. You know you’ll never get around the wall, know it goes too deep to dig under. You start digging.

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This story first appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 8 (June 2001).