Behind me, the lamp was at a higher and still increasing elevation. With my right foot stretching, begging for the floor, the lamp lighthoused a beam at Mercy’s bed. As though on cue, her curtains parted, the plastic rings from which the purple cloth hung screeched across the bowed rods, and the cloth billowed, fingering into the room, reaching toward me.

There was a pop of the lightbulb mashing into the ceiling and then utter darkness. I was tossed backward. I landed on my unprepared feet, crumpled onto my right side, and spun and slid across the floor as everything else crash-landed around me. I couldn’t see anything, so I wasn’t sure of my orientation within the room. I reached out and around for the TV wall or any wall and felt the cold nothing. There was no ambient streetlight sneaking through the windows that should’ve been on the wall behind me or from the kitchenette wall to my right. For a crazed moment I thought I’d crashed through the basement floor into whatever cavern was beneath. Instinctually, I pressed myself lower to the floor, but I couldn’t get lower. I tried not to, but I was breathing so loudly, broadcasting where I was and what state I was in. My shaking limbs rattled the debris I flotsamed against.

Something to my left moved, a soft footfall, then the rough scraping of a wooden drawer pushed aside. My echolocation was off, as the noises sounded both far away and inches from my ears. I said, “Leave me alone.” Had those three words ever stopped anyone or anything in this miserable, malignant universe? Another dresser drawer, or perhaps the dresser itself, slammed into a wall. I rolled onto my knees with the camera clutched against my chest.

The camera. I could take a picture, use the flash to find a path to the front door. Click and flash and whir.

Instead of eidetically processing and memorizing the room’s layout, my eyes were trained for Mercy, or for any figure or form moving on my left. As I stood there blinking away the flash afterimages, did I hear a muzzled sigh of irritation? Fucking hell, I almost apologized for wasting her expensive film.

I didn’t see enough to be able to sprint across the room to the front door without a guarantee of my crashing into something. I did recall the couch toppled upside down directly in front of me, but already my memory of the flashed room had gone memetic. Figures crouched in the corners and among the debris, their features blurred but for the malicious stares from greedy eyes.

I shuffled forward, not daring to lift my foot for fear I might lose gravity again. Fixing my view lower, toward the floor directly in front of me, I snapped another picture. Okay, there was a path. I could avoid the couch and smashed end table by moving about forty-five degrees to my right. As I sidestepped, the sounds behind me and to my left became quieter; little creaks and moans, small taps of wood against wood, delicately stirred broken glass. Imagining Mercy airily traversing over the rubble, I quickened my pace.