The Staircase

                Edgar grew up in a world of books and fantastic imagination. When he was seven, he tried to walk to Narnia through his grandfather’s musty old closet. At the age of eight, Edgar got his head stuck in a rabbit hole. Each day he came home from fourth grade, Edgar would cross his fingers and check the mail. His phantom tollbooth never came. At ten, he was still waiting for a sign from his godly Olympian father. When his Hogwarts letter never came, Edgar experienced his first heart break at the age of eleven.

                He’d always known about the staircase. It simply hadn’t been time yet. On a class field trip to the museum, Edgar had first seen it. While his sixth grade peers chattered, Edgar straggled behind, fully absorbed in his new copy of The Sword and the Stone. Completely lost in his book, Edgar meandered down the quiet hallways. And, when he finally looked up, all he saw was dinosaur bones.

                Not one to panic, Edgar did the most sensible thing that came to mind. He sat there. Plopping himself on the maroon carpet, Edgar reopened The Sword and the Stone. Of course, the curator, a bustling, generally worried man, came along and shooed Edgar away from the triceratops replica. Nose in his book, Edgar wandered away listlessly as the curator wrung his hands, berating the boy’s “lack of common sense.”

                Edgar shuffled down the sleepy hallways. In some vague sense, he wanted to be found but not all that badly. It was Edgar’s dream to just read, away from all the noise, and the worry, and the dullness of reality. He would have continued like this indefinitely, but for the clacking that broke his reverie. Frowning, Edgar shifted his book a little. At some mysterious point, the carpet had morphed into the white tile on which his brown loafers were now standing.

                The clacking noise disrupted his reading, so Edgar turned a one eighty and shambled his way back towards the door.

                But his loafers caught on something.

                His book went flying. Gingerly, Edgar picked himself off the floor. The Sword in the Stone lay open just outside the door.  Sighing, he then began casting around for his glasses. On his hands and knees, Edgar felt across the floor in his sleepy way. While his vision was good enough to see blurry shapes, the tiles were, for some reason, covered in blurriness. Edgar’s hands kept bumping against strange, alien cords of some sort. At last, his fingers curled around the familiar plastic. Returning the glasses to his eyes, Edgar saw his world refocus.

                It was something out of a fairytale. Awed, Edgar stumbled to his feet and stared. The entire oval room was white, piercing white. The ivy vines he had tripped over twisted and curled their way to the astounding spiral staircase in center of the room. Stretching out one hand, Edgar gingerly ran his fingertips over the beautiful metal banister. The spiraling staircase was gorgeous. Deep inside him, Edgar knew that this surreal creation was magic; perhaps the fairies had made it, just for him, so that he could go to a world more brilliant than even Avalon. He wanted to climb the staircase; he wanted it more than anything he had ever wanted.

                With a shudder, Edgar tore his eyes from the staircase and staggered backwards. Tripping over the ivy, he backed away from the dazzling staircase. It was too bright. It was terrifying.  Edgar turned his back from the staircase and ran, ran out of the room and back into the sleepy library. The sharp clacks of his loafers shifted back into comfortable, muffled thumps. Edgar sat down in the middle of the hall and hugged his book.

                He wasn’t ready for that staircase yet.

                Instead, Edgar opened his book and comforted himself in the cozy familiarity of fantasy as he waited for his class to find him.

Reviews

[paradise]

I really liked this great write!!!

[Malychyte]

Wow! This was sooo fun to read!! I really like the idea. Don't hate me for saying this, I was just wondering, at the beginning of the third-to-last paragraph, did you mean "something out of a fairytale"? Besides that everything looks really good for grammar and word placement and whatnot, rly! Really cool story!!