Prompt from here.
My mother had always lived by the two minute rule, “if it’ll take you less than two minutes to clean, clean it!” She would say. I had grown out of it over the years, getting lazier with every rotation of the Earth, sometimes you’re just too dang tired to clean. However, I might have stuck with it longer if she had told me that putting off cleaning a minor mess would lead to ripping a hole in reality.
It was just a small scruff, a streak of red from dried up pasta sauce from last night’s dinner. Nothing more than a sliver no wider than a grain of rice and no longer than the top half of a thumb. Wren and I had just finished out dinners, full and ready to collapse on the couch I took both our plates in hand while she wiped down the table. One of the forks, my fork, fell out off the plate and tumbled down towards falsely tiled kitchen floor. The fork hit the white vinyl surface leaving the small red mark across one of the thin gray lines, like a teacher’s red pen on graph paper.
The words of my mother echoed through my head, it won’t take that long to clean up anyways. But I didn’t want to, that could be a problem for future me. Plus it had been a long day at work, my energy no longer the roaring fire it had been that morning, but exhausted down to nothing but embers.
Too exhausted to handle the minor mess I figured I’d get to it tomorrow morning when my body and mind were fully rested and recharged. I picked up the fork and placed the bowls in the sink, I’ll handle those tomorrow as well. (Take that mom!) Wren and I spent the rest of the night watching Parks and Recreation until we grew tired.
I woke up to Wren still asleep, as usual. On autopilot I slipped from under the covers and made my way towards the kitchen to prep the coffee pot for the day’s work. I loaded the Mr. Coffee and went to finish last night’s unfinished work. I started with the dishes, which cleaned easily. (See mom, no big deal!) A quick rinse and into the dishwasher they went. Next was the red stain across the floor, I wetted a paper towel, dabbed a little dish soap on it, and got down to my knees and began scrubbing.
Like an erasure to a white board the stain went away, mostly. A tiny finger nail sliver remained, hardly visible unless you were looking for it. But I couldn’t leave it so. The burnt orange mark of the pasta sauce stood out too much on the white flooring, and the scorn of my mother grew louder in my skull. I pressed against the stain and scrubbed away.
The stain remained there, unchanging. As if it were mocking me for not abiding by my mother’s rule. If only I hadn’t been so lazy this task would have been over within a second or less. (Dammit mom, you were right!) I pressed all my weight into the red scare and scoured that pesky mess.
Like the mouth of a rabid dog, a white froth formed on the surface of the floor. I scrubbed until the surface had given way. My thumb slipped through the damp towel through the flooring and into a hole. I halted my mad scrubbing and withdrew myself from the situation. Where the remnants of the sauce had laid now sat a small crack, no larger than my thumb, and as dark as the mouth to a cave on a moonless night.
Had I put too much of my weight into it that I had ruptured a hole in the cheap flooring? God I hoped not. I leaned over to the hole and peered. It was too deep for any sort of the overhead lighting to reach the bottom. I got up and searched the kitchen drawers for our flashlight.
Light in hand I went back to the rip and switched it on. Odd, not even the beam of the flashlight could reveal what lied beneath. The light’s beams seemed to just stop at the edge of the hole, unable to travel any deeper into the void.
I stuck my finger in. I could not see past the threshold where the flooring met the hole. Using my free hand I switched on the light to see any traces of my finger. There were none. I withdrew my hand from the hole, and sighed in relief upon seeing my index finger fully in tact.
I spent the rest of the morning experimenting with the strange abyss. I stuck forks in it, then butter knifes, which were longer, and later a tape measure to see how far the tunnel went. At least twenty five feet, the length of the tape measure, perhaps more. I hadn’t realized the time until Wren had dragged herself into the kitchen. She asked me what I was up to, I told her reconsidering my cleaning habits. Then got up and told her to watch out for the hole in the ground. Groggily she said “sure.” And poured herself some coffee.
This will be the last time I ignore the sage advice of my mother.