A spiraling stairway to nowhere, a sea of pessimism, limbo, death. She races skyward, absentminded leaps of faith off one step, to the next, feather feet weighed down by arduous gasps for air. To escape, survive the oven of insulated boardrooms suffocating in noxious smoke seeping through crevices from the floors below. Sweltering claws swiping at the singed backs of prone bodies clamoring on, fingers dug deep into cheap, flammable rugs. It’s close, the imminent last step before her flight ends, where she’ll stare out the windows on the world, an open palm atop fractured glass, invisible to the paralyzed witnesses beyond. Locked. No point in pushing, pulling, pounding on unforgiving steel. Locked. Maybe if she knocks, politely, a gentle rhythmic tap, by some miracle an angel will greet her from the other side, swing the door open wide, with a golden halo bid her to stay alive. Locked. Imagine that, to stay alive, to cherish one more breath, to birth one more quirky idea into a void of squandered dreams. What if it wasn’t Locked? Awaiting rescue on a desolate roof, shielding her eyes from ashen wind as it sweeps past her sweat-laced hair, looking for a helicopter amongst the bits of paper fluttering at a backdrop of pristine blue. She’d inch to the very edge, peer over and through the bent lens of vertigo watch a synchronized performance of house ants in dark suits fleeing the anthill as fire ants in red uniforms rush in, all set to a symphonic score of emergency sirens. Locked. Her legs finally give, draining spent adrenaline as powerless tears. Think of a happy place. Rouse a far-flung memory. When the Sun shone infinite possibilities, when his warm soothing hands met her bare trembling skin for the first time, the moment she wasn’t alone anymore. An earthquake. When the Moon illuminated her nightmares, when he promised to always be there, to never leave, to never let go. Gravity awakens and stands askew. She weeps his name and blindly reaches up. A deafening roar. He’ll reach down from the ether and save her, he’ll hold on. Nothing but dust to break her fall, she clenches her fist, senses her beating heart, and disappears into the black cloud.