J.'s parents tell him never to go in the basement because "there's something wrong with the foundation of our house, and if we ever went down there, we'd have to find out what it is." So, for the first seven years of his life, he doesn't. He does what they tell him to, like go to school and carry the trash out to the curb and only watch one movie on a Saturday night, and brush his baby teeth because even though they're going to fall out, his gums hopefully aren't. He doesn't like it, but he does it. He wonders sometimes what's down there, and if finding out might actually make his life better, not worse, but until he's eight he resists taking any action. Maybe, he thinks, the life I'm living is the best one, if not the only. So he keeps going to school, where they talk about the Roman Empire, and planets, and paramecium, and pi, but these seem to be just words, or, at best, pictures, diagrams, maps, etc. Nothing that can do anything.
     He starts to get sad. He has friends, sure, at least a couple, and they play in the sandbox with trucks and shovels when they're little, and watch The Lion King when they're a bit bigger, and The Dark Knight when they're a bit bigger than that, and they eat pizza and Oreos and play laser tag on each other's birthdays, but still the sadness grows. He lies in bed and looks out his window at the factory up the street, belching smoke, and he watches the garbage truck chug by in the early morning, knocking over the cans, and he feels the sadness drip down from the ceiling and in from the walls, covering him up like a second quilt when the first one's already too hot. And underneath it all, at the very bottom of the house, he can feel something yawning, its burpy breath trickling through the kitchen, up the stairs, along the hallway, under his bedroom door, and into his bed. Something's waiting, he thinks, lying very still, unsure if he's dreaming.
     Something knows I'm up here, and is waiting for me to come down.
     By the time he's almost eight, the dream has developed a new phase. He doesn't tell his parents or anyone at school, or even himself really, not when he's awake and thinking in words, but it keeps coming like it doesn't need his permission. Like it has as much right to live in his brain as the rest of him does. In the dream, the basement door won't stay closed and the house starts to fill with thick, wet fumes, like lettuce and meat left out in a pile. He gags in his sleep and spits onto his pillow, trying and failing to get the smell out of his nose and mouth, until he finds himself walking down the stairs, tiptoeing in case whatever's in the basement can hear him, and then he's opening the fridge, rummaging for something to mask the smell, until he finds a metal bowl of leftover cherry Jell-O, covered in crinkly plastic wrap. He takes it out, wobbling in his arms, peels off the plastic, and throws it into the basement. It lands with a loud splat, much louder in the dream, he thinks, than it would be in real life, though he knows the dream is real too. It echoes through the whole house, so loud he's afraid it'll wake his parents, but it doesn't. Instead, it makes him feel like he's in a house by himself, in a world without parents or teachers or rules, just him and maybe the thing in the basement, if it's alive under the Jell-O.

As time moves on and his eighth birthday comes and goes, he finds he's having the dream more and more often, and looking forward to it. He begins to find the nights when it doesn't come unbearable. Long, still, boring nights where he just rolls in bed, not really asleep, and thinks about the years and decades to come, the tests in school, the five-paragraph essays, the work of applying to college, and going to college, and getting a job, and finding a house of his own, on another street near a factory with a garbage truck that wakes you up as it knocks the cans onto the curb at dawn.
     No, he thinks, the cherry Jell-O nights are better. So he starts asking his mom to get more, to get it every time she goes shopping.
     Sometimes she does, but sometimes she forgets, so he starts coming to the store with her, every time asking her to get cherry Jell-O, simply saying it's his favorite if she asks why, which eventually she stops doing. She just gets it, and makes it for dessert, because, she says, "me and your father are a little concerned but we want you to be happy, within reason." So she buys it and makes it and then she and his father sit back and watch while he eats a little, as little as possible, claiming he's saving the rest for his midnight snack, which she and his father say is a bit closer to being outside of reason, but is still okay as long as it's not every night.
     But it is every night. Every night, J. sneaks down, in the dream or not, it no longer seems to matter, and takes the leftover Jell-O from the bowl and throws it into the growing pile in the basement, listening to it splat and savoring the moment of tranquility as he hears the thing at the very bottom creak open, and though he can't yet see what it is, he comes more and more strongly to believe that it has to do with whatever's wrong with the house's foundation. He comes to believe that his house lies on a crack between worlds, and that this is why he's so sad living on this side, marinating in the bad breath coming through, when he should be living on the other.

By the time he turns nine, the basement is so full of Jell-O it almost reaches the top of the stairs, like the water level in an in-ground pool. He wonders if his parents know it's there, and decides that they must, but what can they say, really? Nothing, he thinks, as he decides that tonight's the night. He has dinner with his parents, listening to them discuss Mr. Veitch, his dad's boss at work, who has halitosis and gave himself another bonus instead of fixing the damn copier, and he watches his mom make what she doesn't know is her last batch of cherry Jell-O.
     He eats a couple of tiny spoonfuls, as ever, and watches her cover the rest with plastic wrap and go to bed, and he goes to bed too, though he's too excited to lie still. As soon as he's sure both parents are asleep, he gets up, puts on his bathing suit, kisses his plastic allosaurus goodbye, and heads down to the basement to find out if the Jell-O's deep enough. He's seen in the dream that he needs to take a deep dive; otherwise, he won't make it through the passageway. It'll be too dry and narrow, and he'll bang his head on the cement and maybe die. So, at the top of the stairs, he gets out the bowl of Jell-O, peels off the plastic, and hurls it onto the pile, listening for the splat. As soon as it comes, he takes a deep breath, puffs up his chest, and throws himself in, breaking the surface like a torpedo.
     He speeds downward, sucking Jell-O in through his nose and swallowing it effortlessly, like this is the one true skill he's been learning all his life. It doesn't fill him up, it doesn't make him sick, it just makes him stronger, helping him fight his way down, past the suspended bicycles and barbells and boxes of papers, all the basement trash hovering between him and the crack in the bottom. Swallowing more and more, he cuts through the Jell-O with the sides of his hands and forearms, pulling himself downward, through the dark red toward a glowing seam far below. As he approaches it, it stretches open, glowing reddish pink, and he knows the Jell-O's working; he knows it's doing its job. He closes his eyes, takes another deep breath, which serves to fill his lungs with cherry, and goes through.

It sucks him in, spins him around, and for a moment he blacks out. Everything becomes distorted and hot and he forgets his name and where he came from and why he's here. The cherry smell is gone, though the redness remains. He swims deeper, pushing his way through the murk, determined simply to keep moving. Time slows down, or speeds up, or ceases to apply. Perhaps, he notices himself thinking, years are passing. Perhaps I'll be old when I get out of here, if I ever do.
     Swimming along once he's gotten used to this new place and let go of any effort to determine what it is, he comes to an area with a number of hovering beasts. Horses, cows, eagles, parrots, and other mammals and birds hover in reddish aspic, kicking their legs and scrabbling their wings, trying to break free but not trying that hard. They look worn out, confused, resigned. Some are completely still, hanging in place with their tongues out, their eyes filmy and grey.
     He looks at these creatures and begins to get scared. This isn't normal, he thinks. This isn't right. Whatever's happening to them, I can't let it happen to me. And it wants to happen, he thinks. The Jell-O, or whatever I'm in now, wants to slow me down. It wants to hold onto me. It wants to make me a morsel in its giant sloppy gut. He swims harder, aware that his energy is limited, but determined to get out of here before he gets stuck. His stomach hurts now and he can't swallow any more, so he has to spit as he swims, pulling it past him with his eyes squinting just enough to see a bluish light in the far distance.
     Good, he thinks, anything other than red. Now he's passing people suspended around him, old people mostly, their hair white and their skin wrinkled and loose, but some young people too, fat ones and ones with angry, envious eyes, staring at him as he swims past.
     He picks up the pace even though it exhausts him, forcing his way toward the blue light, which shimmers brighter the closer he comes. He starts to think, as he gets near it, about what it might mean to leave the Jell-O behind, about whether the blue is where he was going all along, or if it's actually back where he started. But it's too late now, he's almost there. Maybe, he finds himself thinking, his voice familiar in his head now, all those horses and crows back there, maybe they all got partway, toward something, toward whatever it was that I too am trying to reach, but then they just...
     He doesn't bother completing the thought. He doesn't have time. Now he's surfacing, first his head, then his chest, then his waist. His feet are planted firmly in the sand and he's striding out of the surf, panting, spitting ropes of snot, coughing into his fist as he scans the beach, which is full of families. Umbrellas, carts, screaming babies, flying Frisbees, and behind it all a row of cars parked in the sun.
     After he catches his breath, he begins walking along the beach, glancing at the families, wondering which one is his. And if none of them are, he thinks, unsure if this thought is strange, I'll just pick one. Doesn't matter which. Just any family that seems to have space on its blanket. As he's walking, looking at one set of faces and then another and then the one after that, he feels a hand on his shoulder, clamping down. He spins around to see a tall, thin boy in board shorts and an attempt at a mustache. "Yo, Mike," the boy says. "I was looking for you. Wanna get some food? Mom gave us cash." He waves a twenty in the air and grins.
     Following this older boy—his brother, seemingly—up the beach, the person whose name is now Mike feels his memory of Jell-O and the basement and the crack slipping as his mind fills with questions of hamburger or hot dog, curly fries or sweet potato, regular Coke or diet? By the time his turn to order comes, he's made up his mind.

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The idea for this piece came very late at night, when my fiancee asked me to tell her a bedtime story, as she sometimes does. I started rambling about a little boy swimming through a basement full of Jell-O and, I believe, nodded off somewhere in the telling and began to dream. The rest of the story developed from the notes I jotted down in the morning.