Because music meant I was healing, I had returned to myself, I was doing fine, I wasn’t afraid, I was living life, being me, a new and improved me, I wasn’t in pain, not living in fear, not existing for existence’s sake, not walking like I might break, not walking like I was simply waiting for and accepting the inevitable horrors to be (I still walk like that sometimes). The house and basement had their considerable rebuttal during the brief silences between one record finishing, the needle whirlpooling to the record’s center, the tonearm lifting and retracting, the next record falling on top of the mini stack of used records on the platter, and the arm carefully bowing until the needle made contact.

Maybe an hour or so before Mom was due to come home, I got sloppy as the haunted-house DJ and fell asleep in the rocking chair, a sleep too heavy for dreams and for remembering what it was I was supposed to do. As I clambered into waking, Living Colour’s Side 2 of Vivid finished up with Corey Glover’s screams and a sample of a somber news broadcast punctuated by a gunshot. Then silence, one too thick, and it made it hard to think and it made it hard to breathe and I blinked and waited and pleaded for the next song until I remembered that was the last record in the queue. There was no more room on the platter for records and I forgot to be vigilant, to be ready to swap the spent disks out with minimal auditory interruption. This was bad. I turned the TV on at full volume to make up for the lack of music, but the set’s tinny built-in mono speaker wasn’t enough to fill the house. Not even close.

I stumbled into the living room, then the dining room, and a full-throated rusty screech and floor-tremoring clang in the basement filled the musicless void. Was that the bulkhead opening and closing? I was beyond scared, yes, but I could function because I was furious with myself; whatever was to happen would be my fault for letting the music end. I triple-checked the basement latch and I moved a dining-room table chair in front of the door. Jamming the seat back under the doorknob sparked flames between my shoulder blades. I sprint-walked the short distance to the turntable stationed on the other side of the wall in the foyer. A sliding, sandpapery rasp in the basement mimicked my first-floor movement and progress. Not thinking clearly, I removed the spent albums instead of just restacking the same ones, and let them drip to the floor until the platter was an empty spinning circle.

In the basement a foot clapped on the bottom step, the one that was loose and sagged like a wannabe letter u, and the rickety handrail ricketed, then a second stair clap, this one louder and closer, then a third.