Phil Parisi

That's where she was.

The door to it was open and I stood at the top of the unlit stairs, calling down.

She didn't answer, even though I could now hear clearly that someone was down there.

So I descended the rest of the stairs.

Her basement was big but completely unfinished, nothing but an expanse of grey cement floor and bare bones overhead lighting.

Tess was standing in the middle of that expanse, amidst a sea of chairs, spread out over a profusion of white sheets that had been laid all around.

She was wearing the same clothes as I'd seen her in last.

She was aggressively wiping down a new piece, kneeling on one knee, her head bobbing, her hair falling over her face.

There must have been 40 chairs of all kinds in various states of restoration.

Torn rags lay everywhere on those filthy sheets.

I asked if she was all right, and her head turned sharply toward me, and she said,

looked at me like I was an intruder she didn't recognize.

She looked pale and thin, and she said, no, very flatly and plainly.

I took a couple of steps toward her and suggested, trying to sound casual, that we get out of there for a bit, as if I'd simply just noticed it was a lovely evening for a stroll.

She said, I'm afraid to stop.

She didn't move, stayed kneeling, gripping her chair hard.

It was a straight-backed thing with velvet cushioning on the backrest, kind of like the ones my grandmother used to have at her dining room table.

How come?

I asked her.

"'Maybe they'll hurt me,' she replied, with the same neutral expression on her face as when I'd walked in.