Trial by Carpet

Sid squeezed the little ball of putty she kept on her office desk; she felt it squish between her fingers and smash between each knuckle. It was good stress relief, but sometimes when she looked at it she would get mad that its original brilliant yellow was faded and smudged with brown fingerprints; it would make her squish harder while the other hand straightened the note pads to be at a perfect ninety degree angle to her stapler.

Her phone rang and she smoothed the putty into a perfect circle and placed it delicately, to avoid denting it, on the dish where it belonged and answered the phone.

"Hey, it's Mike. I wanted to call and check in on you and Arabia."

She pulled the phone a little closer to her ear and she looked around the corner of her office into the living room. Arabia was calmly sitting cross-legged on the corduroy couch bobbing her head, hair static around her face, singing along to her favorite cartoon raccoon movie.

"I've got Arabia watching a movie in the family room and I was about to start a project for a new client. Are we still planning on going out to the park to feed the ducks after you get home?"

"Yes," he told her, "as long as I don't get pulled into another late meeting."

"Oh, please don't," she begged him, fingering the pearls around her neck that he had given her as an anniversary present, "I could stand a break from the house and Arabia has been quacking at me all day. She's so excited!"

"She's an imaginative one," he laughed, "I don't think anything should keep me from getting home on time today."

"Good," she turned back into her office, "I'll see you this afternoon then. I love you."

"I love you too," Mike said and they disconnected.

"Arabia, would you like a snack?"

"No Sidney."

"You can," Sid let out a exhausted breath of air finishing the sentence under her breath, "call me mommy." She and Mike had dated for a year before they were married, two months previously, and she had never considered herself good with children. It was at his insistence that she be called "mommy" and it was as rough on her as it was on Arabia, especially when Arabia insisted on using the full name no one else used.

"She lost her mother at a very young age," Mike would tell her, "she'd only just started to learn the word."

When Mike said lost he meant it literally. His first wife had abandoned them completely leaving Mike to come home from work to find his toddler crying in her crib alone.

"I'm going to be working on a project at my desk. Let me know if you need anything, okay?"

Arabia shook her head up and down, agitating her long, disheveled, black hair into a bigger frizz around her face. It was midday and she was still clad in her happy ice cream cone union suit pajamas.

Sid walked through her office and into the kitchen where she stopped in the stainless steel fridge and emptied a small bag of baby carrots onto a clean square plate and filled a condiment bowl full of ranch dressing. It would help her focus if she had a healthy snack to munch on while she crunched the numbers of the project.

The main floor of their house was a semi-open floor plan where her office led into the kitchen which led into the family room and back around to her office again. Between the office and the living room was a small entryway with a staircase going up the center and into their separate bedrooms. It was a small house, but it made it easy to keep it clean and tidy. Before she returned to her office she looked around the corner of the stairs to check on Arabia who was laying on her back, feet in the air, still bobbing her head along to the movie.

Sitting down at her desk she moved some papers and envelopes into a stack to her right, the carrots to her left, and pulled out her silver letter opener. She held the opener in one hand and fingered her pearls with the other, humming with concentration on a task she wasn't excited about. New projects were never her favorite, but she did like the accomplishment of getting it started. "Let's see the resources they sent," she said to herself and picked up the first envelope, slicing it cleanly through the top.

One by one the letters were opened and set in a neat stack, the discarded envelopes and other unnecessary letter debris making its way into the shredder by her desk.

Sid picked up a carrot, wet and slippery from the bag, and dipped it into the ranch dressing. She lost her grip on the orange root and dropped it into the bowl, watching it slip under the surface before she could grip it again with her red-nailed fingers.

"Crap," she said, diving into the bowl and shaking off the vegetable's excess dressing, "slippery little bastards." She popped it into her mouth and licked her fingers clean.

She wasn't sure how much time had gone by that she had been working opening envelopes, making notes and charts on her computer, and then sealing new envelopes with a quick lick of her tongue, when Sid felt a tug at the sleeve of her shirt.

"Sidney," Arabia whispered, "the movie ended."

"Do you want to watch it again?"

"No, come play with me."

"Tell you what," Sid said, turning to her daughter and brushing her hair into place with her hands, "I think you should get out of your pajamas that you've been in all day and we'll comb your hair and make some lunch, but mommy needs to keep working a little longer first."

"Okay," Arabia said with a sulk and a sigh, her black hair floofed out around her face again, concealing the sad eyes Sid knew that she was hiding from her.

It would be a good couple of hours before Mike came home and she was making good headway on the project . Mike had been encouraging her to take more interest in Arabia's playtime to boost the connection between the two and entice Arabia to start using the "M" word. "How about this," she stopped her daughter and pulled her into a hug, "go change into whatever outfit you want to wear today, any outfit at all, I will shut down my project for the day and come out and play anything you want when you are ready."

"Anything?" Arabia smiled and ran from the room, her bare feet slapping against the wood laminate of Sid's office.

"Anything at all," Sid yelled up to her. They had several board games that Arabia liked, but she would more likely be pulled into a tea party with a stuffed tiger and pink zebra. Sid hoped for board game because it would go by more quickly and they could play at the kitchen table.

Assuming her daughter would quickly change clothes Sid turned back to her project and started to organize everything so that she could get back into it when she could. There was a lot left to be done, but she had ample time to finish later that night or the next day. Quite a while went by without her daughter reappearing when Sid heard a raucous coming from the living room. She slid out of her chair and followed the sounds of the kerfuffle through the kitchen and into the family room.

"Stop!"

"Oh?" Sid asked, adjusting the clasp of her pearls to the rear of her neck. Her daughter was standing on the couch, wearing a rainbow unicorn clad white t-shirt and pink tutu tights, tossing a pillow into the entryway. Her hair was still disheveled, a strand or two sneaking its way into her mouth, and plastered to her face.

Sid's heart started to beat a little faster. Her hands shook with a slight tremor as she had to hold herself back from cleaning up immediately. Both Mike and Arabia had grown used to her perfectionism of keeping a clean and tidy home and this was an offense off the charts of her normal day to day.

"The ground is quicksand. You have to step on the rocks."

Sid wanted to forget her promise and start to argue about the mess, seeing her couch's cushions thrown throughout the family room and pillows speckled between those, but she held her tongue. She did promise to play whatever her daughter had wanted. "Anything," she thought to herself, "I had to tell her we could do anything."

She kicked off her heels and let them clatter against the tile in the kitchen. She hopped onto one of the blue couch cushions, "what happens if I land in the quicksand?"

"You sink silly!"

"Oh, of course, I am silly," she move from the cushion to a smaller pillow to her left, teetering slightly to maintain her balance on the smaller object.

"You have to get the golden monkey statue and take it up the waterfall and give it to the magician." It dawned on Sid the similarity to the movie she had just been watching; Arabia didn't want to watch the movie again, she wanted to play that she was in the movie.

Arabia bunny-hopped from the couch onto a blue cushion, "like this." She wobbled onto a pillow and giggled, jumping high-legged from one pillow to the next until she was sharing the pillow Sid stood on.

"I'm the magician," Arabia whispered to Sid, "so you have to go up the waterfall and find me, okay?"

Before she could nod her head, her daughter leap-frogged from one pillow to the next, up onto the couch, across the ottoman, and a giant leap to the stairs. She took off up the stairs screaming, "wait for me to get ready! Don't step in the quicksand!"

A multitude of thumps and bangs came from the floor above before Sid asked, "are you ready?"

"No! Not yet... No. Almost... Okay, I'm ready!"

Sid moved from the pillow she was on to the cushion a foot away, "I'm on my way magician."

She heard a giggle from upstairs and even though her daughter could hear her she did start feeling a little silly that she was alone in the room and still hopping from one cushion to the next.

Her feet moved from the cushion to the couch, she felt the springs creak with her weight, "These rocks are so slippery, I hope I don't fall!"

She scooted from one end of the disemboweled couch to the other, letting her feet drag across the thick carpet flooring. "Oops, better not get sucked in," she said quietly to herself with a laugh, but she wasn't sure if she was laughing because she was starting to enjoy the childlike feeling of the game or at the uncomforting feeling of the situation she had gotten herself in with a disastrous living room.

"This is going to take me forever to clean," she whispered.

Her cell phone rang. "That's fitting," she thought when it was the theme song to Indiana Jones, Mike's favorite movie.

"Sweetheart, your daddy is calling, I have to stop playing for a minute," she told her daughter as she stepped off the couch and onto the carpet.

"What mommy?" her daughter yelled back down in reply.

"Your father is calling," Sid took two steps onto the floor and realized that she had just been called mommy. It made her freeze for a moment and fiddle with her pearls, she could tell Mike they finally had a breakthrough! She broke out in a big grin and moved toward her office.

A few steps onto the carpet and she realized that the floor was wet, "did you pour water into the carpet Arabia?"

She picked up her feet to inspect the water. It was the same beige as the carpet itself, and kind of thick, like paint against her foot. "Gross," she said while running a finger through the thick sludge. Despite the success of being called mommy she couldn't let this slide by, it was too much, "Arabia, you're going to be in so much trouble."

She stumbled, slipped in the wet flooring and landed with a thin splashy thud on her knees. She let out a disgusted grunt and went to stand up, but found that everything below her knees were covered in the white sludge.

"What the hell is this?"

The carpet didn't appear to be wet from looking at it. She leaned down and pinched at one tendril of the saxony fibers; it melted into her fingers with a grainy residue of a thick bowl of grits.

As she ruminated over her situation she didn't realize that she was no longer kneeling on the carpet, but rather absorbed into it from the knee down and as she made this realization she pushed up on the ground. Her hands were saturated with the thick gooey carpet melt and she didn't dare reach out to soil the couch cushions. She reach down to the carpet and pushed herself upward again, but found that instead of being pushed up, her legs sunk further into the flooring.

Fear and disbelief struck Sid simultaneously, "Arabia? Can you come down here?"

"What?" her daughter called down.

The theme for Indiana Jones had already ended and it started for the second time as her soupy flooring swallowed her thighs. She grabbed at the carpet around her and each strand of fabric she reached for melted in her grip to become more paste. The liquefied flooring grew tight around her waist and she struggled to pull herself up and out.

Sid let out one exasperated "ha" as her breathing quickened into a two-way race with her heart rate. What had she been told before, about quicksand, that if you don't struggle you won't sink? She had also been told that quicksand wasn't actually similar to what it was in cartoons and movies.

Then she let out a louder and longer laugh, "My carpet isn't quicksand," she said to no one as she struggled to keep her arms from submerging and her belly button filled with the cold course liquefaction.

Her phone stopped ringing.

She shook sludge from her arms and reach for the most nearby cushion, but she only managed to smear beige handprints across the blue fabric. She sank further until the bottom of her breasts touched the floor and she had to hold her arms above her head. She used one hand to help swim her way around in a circle until she faced the couch and reached out for it. Her fingernails scratched at the wood foot of the couch, but she was just out of reach. With desperation she dug her fingernails into the wood, but only managed to gouge a tear into the leg.

"What are you doing, mommy?"

"Arabia," Sid said to her daughter, trying to keep still so that she wouldn't sink lower, "bring mommy something to help pull her up. Bring her chair from her office or something. Bring mommy something."

She was frantic, but tried to stay calm and not move.

Arabia, calm as ever, hopped from one pillow to the next until she was close, but out of reach from Sid. "Oh, mommy," she said, hands on her hips and wild hair scattered around her face, "I thought you were Rosco Racoon, not a Witch."

"I'm not playing anymore Arabia," she said, slapping the ground with a dull wet thud. Her breasts were beginning to submerge despite her efforts to stay still.

"Only witches go in the quicksand," Arabia said and turned back toward the stairs, "I'm scared of witches. I have to go find Rosco."

"No, Arabia, come back! Mommy is Rosco. Help mommy!"

Arabia disappeared from sight as Sid felt the strain on her lungs and her breasts began to fully submerge. She grabbed at the pillow again, feeling the soft stuffing crush under her weight. She closed her eyes and hugged the pillow tighter.

"If this is real then these are rocks," she told herself, "please be a rock."

The carpet was up to her neck and she could feel the carpet fibers mush rubbing against her chin.

"Be a rock," she chanted, clutching the pillow with one hand, "please be a rock. Please. Please be a rock."

She tilted her head back so that her nose and mouth remained above the slop and let the pillow slip from her grip, "please be a rock."

The last of her cries were muffled as she sunk below the surface and a series of bubbles escaped from the carpet with loud bubblegum smacks as it smoothed back out into beige perfection and silence filled the main floor.

The front door opened and Mike walked in. "Hello," he called out, "I tried to call to let you know I was coming home early. Sid?"

"Daddy! I'm upstairs," Arabia called, "come up here and play!"

"Where is your mother?"

"She's a witch daddy!"

Mike walked into the family room, "your mother allowed this mess?"

He picked up a cushion and brushed some stray carpet fibers from it. He tossed the pillow on the bare couch and turned to go upstairs, kicking off his shoes and loosening his tie.

"Are you ready to go to the park?" he called up the stairs.

As he started to climb the first steps he saw something glint from the floor just barely beneath the couch and went back to the family room to inspect it. He leaned down to pick it up; it was a strand of pearls. He pulled at it and the clasp snapped up, tearing more carpet fibers with it as it came up. He rolled it between his fingers and stuck it into his shirt pocket.

"Come upstairs and play daddy, but be careful because the waterfall has piranhas in it!"