The Thirteenth Step in Tunjungan

Time bends in malls. They trap the same songs, same perfumes, same lights from 2008 and call it progress.

There’s a staircase outside a shopping plaza
I never liked,
because the thirteenth step
feels wrong under your shoe.
Like it sinks a little,
like it remembers something
it’s not supposed to.

One day, it said my name.
Or I imagined it.
Doesn’t matter.

I stood there too long.
People behind me sighed,
coughed on purpose,
the universal sign for “move.”

But I couldn’t.

That’s the moment it all made sense.
My father never took stairs.
Always escalators.
Always elevators.
Said he hated walking up.
I called him lazy.

But he fell once.
In that same spot,
years before I was born.
A story buried in the family archive,
shared once during a power outage,
like it was folklore.

He didn’t limp.
He didn’t talk about pain.
He just… avoided steps.

It wasn’t his knees.
It was fear.

I thought I knew him.
But the step knew more than me.

Now, I take that same staircase every month.
I stand on the thirteenth step.
I wait.

It still sinks.
But it holds.
And in some weird way,
I think it remembers him too.

Not perfectly.
Not kindly.
Just enough
to make me feel like I’m not imagining everything.

---

Fendy Satria Tulodo is a writer based in Malang, Indonesia. His work explores memory, everyday surrealism, and quiet emotional fractures. His fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in House of Long Shadows, Across the Margin, Horrific Scribblings, Farmer-ish, Talk Vomit, Teach Write Journal, CafeLit Magazine, and others. He is also a contributor to the nonfiction book Scale Up Business: Teori dan Penerapannya pada UMKM and has work archived in the AUNILO Library Network.