“Wakey wakey, sleepy dumbassy,” said a blessed, beautiful, annoyingly sharp voice.
“Mrgh,” said Cameron, and in being conscious enough to wish for sleep he knew that he’d already lost. “No.”
“You only have ten minutes.”
“Shit! Why?”
“Because you were so worn down last night you needed the extra time. Up and at ‘em.”
Cameron launched himself upright and into his clothing and into the kitchen and through a piece of toast with a nominal amount of egg attached to it and (resentfully) kissed Sophia’s cheek because she was right and annoying and he ran into the new day with such a jolt of adrenaline and purpose that he forgot his coffee until he’d taken his first step out the door, which made him miss it and nearly fall head over heel down another three more.
Thank fuck the start of his commute had a guardrail.
As it was, there went his left ankle, and there went the morning being smooth. Mournfully he thought of Sophia, but she’d already started on her own workday, left the house by her own set of steps, and her day wouldn’t converge for his for a long ways yet.
“Fuck,” he mumbled, and resigned himself to limping. Luckily his commute were relatively level here, and the steps were broad and smooth. Now and then it became so broad he crossed into public transit and shared shoulder to shoulder space with others, but then their paths diverged and Cameron was on his own little spiral downwards again, sore-footed already before he reached work.
Work, when he found it, was just like usual. Slightly uneven, oddly textured, and with a height between steps that was just barely inconsistent enough that you were never sure if you were imagining it. There were guardrails, and they were worn and thin and if you leaned against them they sagged in places you suspected they shouldn’t.
It was a typical white collar job, the kind Cameron’s father had railed against as sucking away his life in meaningless toil. Cameron didn’t disagree but he’d seen what’d happened to most of his friends and his brother Sean, who probably wouldn’t have killed Cameron to take his job but would’ve had to think twice about it first. Sean worked at a Wendy’s, and his steps there were so steep and crumbling that the day was a constant fight not to avoid falling but to avoid sliding.
It could be worse. Cameron and Sophie’s friend Janice wouldn’t say what her job actually was CALLED, but it was functionally a ladder without handholds.
“Cameron,” his boss called from his left, veering closer to him as their paths briefly helixed together. “Do this assignment.” And he threw some keyboards in front of Cameron and was carried out of sight once more.
This? This was peanuts by comparison. The trick was to step on the zeroes with your left foot, and the ones with your right foot. Or the other way around, if you preferred it the other way around. That way the only thing that could confuse you would be if you had to enter two zeroes or two ones in a row, because then you had to hop and if you weren’t careful you could lose your balance and start to fall.
Cameron’s left ankle politely reminded him it was there. Unrelatedly, he was very, very, very careful. Unrelated to THAT, he was also slow and had barely gotten anything done before lunch, blessed lunch, wondrous lunch roiled into view from out of the mist, broad as a mile and with a single long, well-worn rail for everyone to hold onto and lean against and shoot the shit about.
“I twisted my ankle this morning,” Cameron told his coworker whose name he would never ever remember or feel bad about forgetting.
“That’s too bad,” said the coworker thoughtfully. “Did you get your coffee?”
“Forgot it, missed the first step specifically because of that.”
“Bummer. I’m on meds for my anxiety, it helps. I used to freak out real bad in the morning too, and you know how that always adds drop height. Now my gradient’s way gentler.”
“Oh. Nice.” There came the edge again already in the corner of his eye, with lunch passed in a moment of pure relief and a short conversation, the same as always. “See you later.”
“You too.”
And indeed, as Cameron departed down his afternoon shift, he saw the coworker’s own flight led – just briefly, just slightly – almost upwards.
Distracted by this, Cameron tripped on the first keyboard and fell down half of his next shift in a single ferocious instant, ruining his pants and scabbing his knees and cracking a very small hairline something—or–other his left forearm and sending a stray ‘q’ key flying off into the distance, where it beaned his boss in the noggin.
“You’re fired,” he called, low and sonorous. And just like that, Cameron’s day narrowed and deepened and shortened until every footfall had to be placed with the precision and care of a chess piece in the tail end of a six-hour game.
He was going home, at least. But at a pace and in a way he was unfamiliar with. He steered a little to one side and got some whiskey, and lo and behold, the discomfort was replaced with calm and things were wider again, the world was opening up in golden brown warmth. His foot, his arm, his knees, none of it was that bad anymore, and everything was going to be okay.
Then Cameron took a step, and the step was level because it wasn’t a step.
He blinked. Then he wiped his eyes. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on and looked around, and looked around, and looked around, and for the life of him he couldn’t see a single step. He was standing there, alone, on open, empty ground, stretching off to either side of him as far as he could see.
In the distance, someone was approaching.
“Hello?” called Cameron. But they were too far away to hear and didn’t respond when he waved.
Cameron shrugged and shuddered, and above and below him people descended onwards on their own days, on their own stairways, as far as he could crane his neck, and it was precisely when he was looking upwards as hard as he could as high as he could that the oncoming car reached him.
He was flattened.