I thought I felt the room open in in front of me, but my left shin bashed into something solid, and I screamed, then somewhat absurdly said, “I’m not feeling well, so I’m going back to my place.”

I took three more pictures, one after the other. In the first flash, my route forward was clear, and I was most of the way across the room, but the coat rack was swinging down in front of the door, like the arm of a tollbooth. It clattered to the floor before I pressed the button for the second photo. In that next flash, the coats, skins emptied of their former bodies, were pooled at the door, and on top, Mercy’s green jacket, and it twitched. It moved. The flash lasted for a fucking millisecond or whatever, but it moved. It turned. Maybe it was better to remain in the dark and walk into whatever it was I was going to walk into. That’s how we get through most of our days and nights, right? We fumble heedlessly forward into the unseen future, a future guaranteed to one day cut us down. I shot one more photo anyway. I was almost to the door but all I could focus on was her green jacket and the face. There was that face again, the same one from the sleepover, that face made of folds, buttons, and stitch lines, and it had a frozen, ambered look, and it blamed me, and it wanted something from me, and that naked, unvarnished, violent-but-honest want was the most familiar and most horrible face one could ever see.

I refused to see any more of it. So, I plowed forward to the lone exit, and I muttered, “I want to go home, I want to go home…”

You’re not in Kansas, Dorothy.

Wading into the coats, I sank ankle deep into their clutching mud eager to drag me down, to sink me. I turned the doorknob and fumbled for the dead bolt. Something coiled around and between my legs and it squeezed and it climbed over my knees, and even though I couldn’t see it, that face was pressed against my left thigh and my skin itched with its lips worming voiceless threats and promises. My spine curled despite its metal scaffolding. My heart faltered, a dropped bass drum tumbling down a flight of stairs, and a stabbing chest pain ran down the length of my left arm. I couldn’t breathe, or I couldn’t breathe enough, and purple ink blots Rorschached in my vision. I was ebbing away.

Mercy, then behind me, possibly, above me, said, “I can give you a lift.”

I opened the door, and the hallway light misted inside the apartment. I muscled out of the coat bog and lurched over the spindly coat rack, stumbling into the hallway. The hallway tilted, like a listing submarine, but my sputtering engine carried me away. I didn’t hear her door close behind me.