The Lightswitch

It was there when we bought the house, of course. I asked the realtor, and she said the inspector would take a closer look, but after clicking it back and forth a few times, the inspector just shrugged. Some switches don't connect to anything.

But stumbling through the dark or day, or on the phone as Bailey wouldn't stop crying, I'd hit it, and even though I couldn't see anything change, I felt something go.

Sometimes I'd find the switch flipped backward, and my husband and I fought more than once about the damn thing. He told me to worry about the bigger things. Bailey had fallen on the stairs that day—nothing serious, but enough to leave a bruise on her forehead. I wondered if the switch had been on or off.

Eventually, I tried to forget about it, and I did until my husband had an idea for the room. You know that extra switch, he said. So, we got an electrician to come to the house to hook up the new lights, but when he opened up the panel, the wires were impossible to tell one from another, and he shrugged and told us it was already connected to something. To what? But he declined the paycheck, saying we'd have to invest in untangling those wires, and at the end of the day, it was hardly worth it. It was, after all, just a light switch.

But one day after school Bailey was hyper, and I heard her clicking it back and forth in the room, and I came up and I told her to stop, except I must have yelled because her eyes filled with tears, and then she yelled back that it doesn't do anything, except we didn't actually know that, I reminded her, but she was already running out of the room, and in my hurry to go after her, I must have left the switch in the wrong place, or did I hesitate, turn it back, and fail to catch her as she slid with her socks on the hardwood floor, as she couldn't stop the tumble down the stairs.

There were months of silence after that. It would sizzle, crackle, but never spark.

Then, the switch.

I noticed it flipped one day and put it back, only to realize I didn't know which way was back anymore. I thought I knew, but then I'd lie awake, sure it was the other way. I would flip it some days like Bailey had, feeling my heart switch off and off.

It was a day he had a business trip that I began to dig. It started carefully—four screws to remove the panel—and then, in the nest of wires under, I had to trace by hand. I shut all the fuses, but I could still hear the hum of a live wire. I yanked the rest of them out by the fistful, reaching in as far as my hand could go.

I got the hammer from the garage. Clawed. The walls surprised me with their fragility. We were, it turned out, never held by the house at all. The floor the same. I traced the wire down to the basement. Into the concrete itself.

The jackhammer was heavy, but not too heavy to carry. I drove into the concrete until I hit dirt, and still the wire would not stop. I slammed shovel into clay until my hands blistered, and then I scraped with bleeding hands. I followed the wire into the maw of the earth.

And then I hit something solid. It took years to clear away by hand. I opened the casket and found an incandescent bulb connected to the wire. I thought, if someone flipped the switch now, I would see my world lit up. But when I lifted my head, I couldn't even see the surface.