Staircase

By Sophia Ross

I’ve never seen the stairs in question, but I’ve often tried to picture them. I imagine they are steep and narrow, leading to an unfinished basement. Depending on who you ask, my mother either fell or was pushed down these stairs the day of her father’s funeral in 1985. She maintains that she was pushed, that her little brother pushed her. He was so consumed with rage that he lost the little control he had left, she says. Maybe it was his grief for their father, or maybe it was the grief from his recent divorce, or it might have been that after the Stegner fellowship, he was stuck living at home with both his parents, now one parent, the other just died of a heart attack.

My grandmother, the widow, shrieked when my mother hit the floor. They were arguing before she fell, my uncle and my mother. No one has told me what about, but it isn’t hard for me to imagine. They have fought all twenty-eight years of my life, and now they aren’t even on speaking terms. They argue about family artifacts, about God, about writing. They both idolize their pastor father, and each has written their own accounts of his magnanimity. My uncle drinks, my mother worries. They put me in the middle, use me as a topic of conversation when things get dull. They send me letters and out-of-print copies of their
favorite books with thoughtful inscriptions. They despair because I haven’t yet been published and I’m almost thirty. At my age, my uncle was pen pals with Raymond Carver, my mother was winning poetry contests and being compared to luminaries by her mentors. I am like them, but maybe less so than they thought.

I think the staircase must have been in complete darkness when she fell, because no one saw her hit the floor, they only heard her. My aunt, the one who is married to my other uncle, the older brother, says the sound shook the small bungalow where my grandparents lived with their youngest son. I don’t know where my mother’s husband was – her first husband, not my father – but he wasn’t between them, the way my father would have been. My grandmother, a small woman then in her late sixties, was crying. My other uncle, a Lutheran pastor, was not there to be a peacekeeper. And so, she fell.

This is what my aunt says. She tells me when I’m much older, after I’ve already left home. I must have brought up the incident. It’s the sort of thing I would do; I want to experience the events I wasn’t present for. She was close to the edge and lost her balance, my aunt says. No hands came out to push her, she just fell backward, and when she crashed to the floor, they thought she might be dead. My uncle rushed down the stairs after her and lifted her limp figure like a doll. He was still angry, still swearing, but he carried her up the stairs and drove her to the hospital, the hospital where their father died just three days before. He is not a kind man, my uncle. He is cruel. I have seen him be cruel, to my mother, to his brother, to his nieces and nephew. He has never been cruel to me, but I have always known he could be. I have always known he might turn on me one day, and he may not pick me up afterward. Maybe this is why my mother thinks he pushed. Maybe my aunt was at the wrong angle, maybe she didn’t see the arms fling out and force my mother down. But I think it’s more likely that the rage between the two of them grew so volatile that it exploded and threw my mother backward. The stairs beneath her were purely accidental – the rage did not know they were there. It would not have mattered either way.

My mother hits the floor, my grandmother shrieks, my uncle rushes down the stairs. I will not be born for nine more years, and one year after I am born, my father will secretly help my grandmother pack her belongings in this bungalow. They will drive off before my uncle gets home and she will move into our small house two hours away. Her arm will be broken and she will not say how it broke.
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About Author

Sophia Ross (she/her) is an MFA candidate at George Mason University, where she serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Phoebe Journal. Her fiction has been shortlisted in contests by both Room and Ruminate magazines. If she isn’t at her computer or reading a book, she’s out in the woods with her dog, searching for the perfect stick.

Author’s Socials:

Website: sophiaross.me

Twitter: @sophiassor

Instagram: @sophiassor (also on Threads)