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fingers. “Great,” she says pleasantly, pretending not to be about to fling the bottle across the room. The light from the keybox suffuses the water, and the girl feels like she’s trying to open a light bulb. She lays the keybox on the table. “There,” she says. “It will be so much easier to open this bottle when I am not holding another object.” This time, indeed, the cap crackles away from the security seal, and she is able to lay it aside and pour until the fizzing water splashes over the plastic cup’s brim. “How nice. It looks like

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room is smaller than she expected. Still big. But more like a barn than a cathedral. “I wouldn’t have minded stained glass,” she says, stepping around a folded chair that has tumbled off a stack of folding chairs. In the middle of the room three tables have been set up. Two are covered with paper table cloths. Dusty bottles of soft drinks and punch crowd the edge of one of the tables. The girl snatches a plastic cup from a tower of cups and slams it down next to a bottle of seltzer. The twist-off cap balks at her tired

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and bears down on it, really driving it back and forth and forth and back and back and forth and forth, really going at it, her arms burning, her shoulders aching, the keybox shining, blazing, vibrating. She cannot look at it at all now. It’s warm, not hot like you’d expect of something so bursting with light, warm. And the vibrating, the hum makes her palm itch as she rises, her knees pop. She holds the box up again, as high as she can with arms worn down by all that. And the light flows into a circular room. The

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keybox against the floor, sliding it back and forth between her hands. At first it’s just something to do, something to do unmindfully, the girl’s weariness having overtaken any thought of pushing things a little farther. If the box brightens when rubbed some, will it get really bright if you rub it a lot? It is actually some minutes before the girl recognizes she is conducting this experiment and that it is paying off. When it gets through at last that the box is giving off more light and more light, the girl grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes

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the atmosphere felt closer, warmer. A big hall doesn’t feel like that. At the very least sound carries farther so doesn’t seem all pressed together. The girl puts the keybox under her legs, her arm tired. If she looks at it, she can’t see anything else. She just sits there for a little, head sagging. Empty inside, not trying to crowd the emptiness with hopes, not picturing sanctuary around the corner, a smile from a janitor, a clean glass of water. A glass of water would be nice. She licks her lips with a gummy tongue. Idly, she rubs the

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more squares of the institutional umber wink up from the dark. Wandering out there wouldn’t be much different from plunging into a fogged-in room, especially if the unexpected ally of a glowing keybox decides it’s done. The girl sighs. More tired than she knows what to do with, she leans against the wall. She can see it, she can feel it, and if it’s about to hurry off on some errand, it hasn’t yet. Her legs wobble. So she slides down the wall until she’s sitting. Don’t big rooms feel like big rooms? Just before she discovered the keybox light

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meeting notes. Maybe there was something at the meeting about an impending change in the nature of reality? Might all the answers be in her cramped shorthand? It wouldn’t be the first time she wrote down what the teacher, the boss, or her mother said, without having really listened. The light continues to grow, and the girl can see the near wall curving gradually away before her and behind. Where she expects to see the far wall to appear, two or three arm’s lengths away, however, there is no wall, only more linoleum. She goes up on tiptoe. A few

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and sees her fingers silhouetted. Not imagining that, the girl says to herself. If only the darn thing were emitting enough light to be useful. She rubs the surface as though to encourage it and to her pleased surprise the box responds, its gold glow advancing to a glimmer. She rubs it some more. A gleam. A glisten. The rubbing has wakened the box somehow. It vibrates gently as the light increases. The girl raises the box above her head, where it won’t dazzle her dark-adapted eye. She blinks impatiently. Her left hand resolves first, clutching the creased and tattered

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judging the vibrations of the folded paper. If a wall popped up directly before her, her nose would not be the first to know. She only now wonders if the ceiling is coming down. If it does, she’ll just have to bonk her head on it. And if it is a ceiling bristling with spikes like some medieval torture chamber, well, what can you do? The girl is getting hungry. Thirsty, too. She reaches into a pocket and pulls out the gold box. Is it glowing? Yes, she can make out its shape. She brushes her hand over the lid

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been walking in the dark. Not yet an hour. More than fifteen minutes, easily. Long past time she should have come upon a door. Something clearly is different. She held her breath while listening but lets the air out now. She will breathe more evenly, more quietly. Who knows what she missed while huffing along. Certainly she’s been walking deliberately, placing each foot before adding the body’s weight. A stair step, a hole, could manifest at any moment. She’s been keeping her hands in front of her, the right held out and cupped slightly, the left sliding along the wall

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of silence. The girl stops. It’s true, isn’t it. Every sound comes directly from her. Her breathing. The creaking of her shoes. The scratching along the wall of the meeting notes; she’d fished them from her pocket to save wear on her fingers. Now. Standing, waiting. She’s not seeing lights. She’s not hearing the hiss of spume being blown from the billows. It’s just a dark hall in an office building. Not even dank like a dungeon. Stuffy, maybe. Is it getting warmer? Usually the girl has a pretty good sense of time. She tries to guess how long she’s

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into the ring. I slide one arm in, I slide the other arm in. Like I’m putting on an evening gown. And then, slowly, slowly, the water falling away from my body in a rush, in streamers, in drips drips, I am reeled in. The girl does not need to close her eyes for this picture, the black sea heaving as lances of light cut across it, for everything is black and heaves. Only the light she sees must be imaginary for it illuminates nothing. It is only itself, harsh, commanding, striking out from a din of. Of. A din

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the ship sank when really it wasn’t so bad, or there were lifeboats and emergency rations and flare guns and a radio somebody is calling for rescue on right now. Maybe the helicopters that swoop in, light up the howls of delight in the bobbing boats, maybe they’ll move on from those lucky duckies and sweep vigilant eyes across the jetsam and pick out my sad little brave little determined flail toward saving myself and down will drop a float ring right in my way, a twirling yellow rope tying it to the life above. Gratefully, almost indolently, I slide

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beginning.” She gropes on. Any moment she will feel the door frame, she will bruise her hip on the doorknob. “Every time, every time, every time,” she sings, forgetting the words. This goes on a long time. The girl thinks about turning around and going back but more as a story to tell herself, like the shipwrecked sailor clinging to the spar, kicking toward the island last seen from the burning deck but which might even now be falling away to the south and the swimmer’s tired legs pushing toward open sea. Suppose I could turn back, suppose I imagined