How about a regular burglar?

Fearing the fall might’ve broken her camera, I inspected it for cracks and chipped plastic. I briefly entertained taking a dead-of-night, goofy-faced selfie as a functionality test, but the whirring camera would surely wake Mercy. I was not prepared to reenact that scene.

As I bent to return the camera to the canvas bag, there was a noise from the corner of the room, near the floating dresser. A click, or a tap, though the descriptor as a singular event wasn’t accurate. What I heard was fuller than a solitary note and more like a chorus of synchronized and harmonized occurrences.

I waited for a repeat or an encore and there was only the after-midnight sounds of Mercy’s breathing and the hum of the refrigerator. I stood motionless and I listened, and I stared at the dresser. Something was off. Was the drawer with the missing knob in a different slot again? Now it was third from the top, or one above the bottom drawer. My eyes traced the dresser frame down to where the legs and rollers met the hardwood, and I could not identify what was amiss. But everything was amiss, and my heart again stumbled around my chest like a drunk.

The floating dresser was no longer floating. The rusted rollers were flush against the floor.

The pain in my chest hardened into a stone. How had an expected sight (a dresser with legs in contact with the floor) become so deeply upsetting? Did the wall anchors give way, a result of my previous night’s autopsy? After all, I had put most of my weight on the frame at times, particularly when my head and shoulders were stuck inside. Did the dresser somehow delay its acquiescence to gravity, and do so that quietly and peacefully? I assumed what I’d heard moments earlier was the floating dresser’s equivalent of a tiptoe landing to the hardwood. The distance above the floor had not been substantial, but given the weight of the piece, the landing should’ve been more jarring and symphonic, not the subtle-as-a-whisper clacking I’d heard. Where was the cracking and tearing of the anchor screws rending from the drywall? Maybe an industrial-strength adhesive was used instead, resulting in the dresser sliding down the wall, but that didn’t seem likely. Perhaps the simplest explanation was the dresser hadn’t been attached to the wall, had never floated, was never floating. Marooned in the quasi-dark of a one-lit-bulb basement apartment, my shivers werewolfing into full-body tremors, I questioned the events of the previous evening, wondering if they’d happened, if it had all been part of an elaborate dream, or a dream within a dream, and I had now finally awoken in the middle of my first and only night at Mercy’s apartment.