John was beginning to get very tired of sitting up against the wall of the bodega where Nick had left him five minutes prior with an admonition not to fall over. Once or twice, he tried reading the Socialist leaflet soaking in the puddle under his nose, but it had no pictures or paragraph breaks in it. Also, the text was blurry, in part because of the water, and in part because John was very drunk.

John was pondering whether the pleasure of going indoors and making Nick buy him somebiscottiwould be worth the effort of getting up, when suddenly a black rat ran past him.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that, it being New York and all. However, as the rat scuttled past his leg through the propped-open bodega door, John was somewhat surprised to hear it grumble:

"Outta my way, pal."

"I'm sorry," said John automatically, for he was a very polite young man, except for those times when he was an enraged gorilla. He moved his leg so that the doorway would be entirely unobstructed, but the rat had already gone inside.

He probably didn't hear me, John thought, struggling to his feet. I should go after him and apologize properly.

The cashier glanced up as he stumbled in, then went back to reading her romance novel. John looked around. Except for him, the bodega was empty of customers. The rat wasn't by the Chinese-language ATM, or the chips stand, or the deli counter, or the shelves with gum and candy.

He walked farther, between the shelves with cookies and cereal. One of the shelves, stacked high with Oreo boxes labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet, had a cat on it. The cat was washing its face and paid John no mind.

"Pardon me, have you seen a rat go by?" John asked the cat.

The cat stopped its ablutions and looked at him with round light green eyes that seemed somehow familiar. Then it opened its huge sharp-toothed maw and creaked out a mew which morphed halfway into a yawn. John decided not to bother it further. It was probably on break.

The shelves with foreign cookies soon gave way to shelves with pasta and condiments, then Goya beans in a rainbow of flavors, then off brand household cleaners. And then, by the wall of phone chargers, all of them for Nokias at least three years out of date, John spotted the rat. It was scampering just ahead and grumbling to itself:

"Fuck me, I'm going to be so late…"

John was about to call out to it, when the floor under his feet gave way, and he fell into the cellar.

Either the cellar was very deep, or he fell very slowly, or the ten nickel shots he had at O'Halligan's were making themselves felt, but John had plenty of time as he went down to look around and wonder what was going to happen next.

First, he tried to look down, but it was too dark to see anything. Then he looked around. The walls werelined with yet more shelves with random items on them. There was shampoo (within reach), tampons (not within reach), and even a TV with old-fashioned rabbit earsshowing a soccer game (West Germany was tied with Netherlands 1-1). There were also old maps of New York on the walls; sun-faded shots of Daniel Aiello; pegs with old-fashioned 1940s newsman fedoras...

At one point, John passed by a shelf stacked with boxes of biscotti and tried to grab one. However, the box snapped at his fingers, and John withdrew his hand with haste.

Down, down down… 'How deep do they build the cellars in these god-forsaken bodegas, anyway?' thought John. 'I must've fallen a mile by now. And I've got work tomorrow. There better be an elevator to take me back to the surface, because I am SO not walking up stairs…'

John tried to calculate in his head how many stairs it would take to go up one mile, and he got so far as 'four and five equals twelve', when he landed into a pile of something soft and pungent, and the fall was over.