Jered's Job & The Stairwells, Stories, and Things You Can’t Unsee

There are people in this world who wake up each morning, drink their coffee, pull on their boots, and walk straight into a job that nobody really understands unless they have lived it. Jered was one of those. Transitional housing director. Which meant he was the mayor of a seven story village where most of the citizens had seen better days and were still hoping there might be better ones ahead. He was part landlord, part social worker, part peacekeeper, part janitor, and part confessor. Folks trusted him. People yelled at him too. Often in the same sentence.

He came in that morning thinking about nothing important. Something about a sandwich he had been meaning to try from the corner deli. He had barely set his bag on the counter when the fire alarm let loose. Not the polite kind of alarm that chirps like a needy bird, but the long wail that could wake the dearly departed.

Most of the residents kept right on as if nothing had happened. This was common. In that building smoke alarms were as regular as afternoon soap operas. Someone would burn eggs on the second floor or forget they had noodles boiling while they stepped into the hall to share neighborhood gossip. So the whole place would light up and holler, and people would mutter and stay put.

But this time, someone told Jered that the city called in saying the word gas. Real gas. The kind of gas leak that makes headlines and ruins neighborhoods. So Jered gathered his small crew and they started up the stairwell. Bang bang bang. Every door. Everybody. Not a drill. Move now. Get out. No arguments.

Staff met resistance, of course. Grumbling. Cussing. One man accused Jered of interrupting his morning devotional which, based on the language he was using, must have been an unusual devotional indeed. Still, Jered pushed on. First floor cleared. Second. Third. Halfway up the fourth, he reached a door that stayed quiet no matter how long he pounded. He tried again. Nothing.

So out came the master key. The little piece of metal that feels like power until the moment you have to use it. He opened the door and found the resident sitting in his easy chair like he had simply leaned back to rest. Only he was terribly still. And terribly gone.

Jered stood there with the alarm blaring down the hall and felt something ancient and hollow rise up inside him. He had been dead for a number of days by the state his body was in. Honestly, it looked like a scene from a horror movie. The kind where the man would rise up out of his chair hungry for brains. But this wasn't a movie. This was a real person who, in life, was a kind man who had a decade of down-on-his-luck days until he died. Jered had known the man. Spoken to him often enough to know that his wife passed away some years back from cancer, and that he liked crossword puzzles and disliked instant coffee. Jerod quickly collected himself. This was not a moment for grief. This was a moment for orders. He called it in on the radio. Kept his voice steady as he asked the front desk to notify emergency services. Then he closed the door as gently as if the man were sleeping.

Then Jered kept going because there were still three more floors and a whole building of souls who needed someone knocking and shouting their name.

Up the stairs. Fifth floor clear. Sixth floor clear. The seventh floor was almost clear, too. Only one last apartment. Jered knocked and felt dread trickle down the back of his neck. He knocked again. Nothing. Just like before. He closed his eyes and prayed a quick prayer to be saved from discovering death again.

He slid the master key into the doorknob once more, wishing he could hand it to someone else, anyone else. The door opened with the same soft click. Inside, he found a man sprawled on his bed like someone who had fallen onto it instead of sliding into it. For a moment, Jered’s heart stopped. Then he stepped closer and saw the faint rise and fall of breath. Ever so faint. The man was alive. Just lost in a long and drunken sleep.

Jered tried to wake him. Nothing. He tried to lift him. No chance, as the man must have weighed four hundred pounds or close to it. Jered pushed until his arms shook. Then the firefighters finally arrived and told him to step aside. It was their problem now. They demanded that Jared leave the building now as well. He walked out of the room feeling older than he had been when he woke up that morning.

Twenty minutes later, the whole thing was called off. No gas leak. No danger. Just a false alarm from an ancient fire alarm system that had tripped the alarms and set a whole building into a tizzy. People filed back inside, annoyed, hungry, and ready to complain. Life returned to normal, or whatever counted as normal in a place like that.

But Jered did not return to normal. Not really. Not completely. Something had shifted inside him. A thin crack in the foundation that would widen over the next two years. A slow, creeping exhaustion that people later identify in him as burnout. It was a phantom weight he carried without knowing how to set it down. But those are stories for another time.

Jered stood outside that morning while the noise died down and the building settled again. And for a long moment, he felt the world tilt. A man died in his chair. Another is barely clinging to consciousness. So many lives balanced on the thinnest of strings. And him, just one tired man trying to keep the whole fragile place standing.

It left him stunned. Bewildered. Quiet in a way that stayed with him long after the alarms stopped.

And if you had been there, if you had seen him standing in the pale morning light with his master key hanging from his hand, you would have understood something about the world that people rarely say out loud.

Some jobs do not just wear you down. They take little pieces of you as payment.

And Jered paid his share that day.