Winner of the Month: Up and Down

By Brad Shaw

Falling down the stairs wasn’t something Nancy had on her agenda for the day. Not on her to-do list, errands to run, or even a thought that crossed her mind. Yet, it still happened. And fell was a generous word. Pushed was more like it.  

But by who, or what, she would never know. Did someone leave marbles on the first step down? Did those fucking squirrels, as she called them, chuck acorns at her, just as her foot hit the top step? The obvious culprit would be snow and its icy aftereffects. 

No, it was something of a more sinister nature.  

And the fact that her head had turned at an 180-degree angle, an unusual, dead gaze. As if she were straining to look at the steps, which she had traversed at least a million times in her time living at the house on Meadow Lane. Now she is a lifeless corpse.

Perhaps being drunk would also have been a candidate for the cause of the effect. But she was sober six years this coming May, and those 12 steps had saved her life, whereas 14 of them had ended it.

The irony would be forever lost on her; the dead do not know irony.  

She had first climbed the incline with her husband Harold less than a decade ago, still in their honeymoon phase, recent newlyweds looking for a place to call home. A home that appeared normal on the outside, but harbored a tangible negativity hidden behind its four walls.

To say that Nancy was fond of the drink was an understatement.  

Poor Harold thought the stability of a solid marriage would do away with her party girl ways. Nope. Nada. Zip. They had not in the very least. If anything, it seemed to make her worse, some sort of caged beast wanting to break free.

He also thought it would disappear when she discovered she was pregnant. Abracadabra. His elation would have turned even more left if he knew that the child she was carrying wasn’t even his, just an offshoot of her affair with Bill Reynolds next door. Bill Reynolds, who had also gone up and down the steps on numerous occasions under the guise of needing a cup of this or that.

Milk or sugar, it was all subterfuge.  

But it was just her glass he filled with cheap whiskey; amongst another liquid he put into her. But she didn’t want the baby at all, not even one little bit. When she told him of their predicament, Bill Reynolds avoided 426 Meadow Lane, leaving her to drink alone. Well, not if you counted the life growing inside of her. 

A life she didn’t want, just as she didn’t want her own.

On a gray Fall afternoon with the trees full of bright, yet dying leaves, she hurled herself down those stairs in a grotesque version of a two for one special. Spoiler, it didn’t take for one of them. Ironically, Nancy was hospitalized two times over. First at County General and then she was transferred over to County General Plus, or Maple Grove as the local psychiatric hospital was known as.  

She resisted the treatments, medications, and gently mandated AA meetings. A bunch of drunks all sitting around, bitching and moaning about their weakness was not for her. No how. No way. Why she could stop at any time, any ol’ time at all.

There was no need for histrionics.  

She saved that for the following Spring when Harold had tired of her behavior. The wedge between them was shoved so tightly in-between that it would require a bulldozer to get to one another. He packed a suitcase and attempted to get to the door when she grabbed onto his leg. The begging led to pleading; the pleading led to shrieking, which led to screaming threats. Which led to her marriage ending with the slamming of a door. 

It also led to Harold not giving one single fuck what happened to her. Not one. Not a single solitary one was given. She could rot, just like her liver, as far as he was concerned. And he thought she had, until he received a letter from her last Summer, making amends for her actions, having joined Alcoholics Anonymous.  

“Oh, really? Did you write one to the baby, too? Miserable bitch!” He crumpled up the paper in a ball, took it to the sink and lit it on fire.  

Just like she had burned his world down to a pile of ashes. He watched the flames consume the paper with a fiery determination that he understood all too well. He’d show her that it wasn’t easy to forgive or forget what she had put him through. No sir. No way.    

When the police arrived to give the scene a once over, they discovered about a dozen crushed acorns at the top of the stairs, six marbles encased in the snow; the light reflecting off them belied the darkness behind them being there in the first place.  

Bill stood back into the shadow of the curtains, his face tattooed by patches of light, but he was no marked man. He accomplished what he’d set out to do; he’d hidden behind the oak tree, home to the fucking squirrels, and threw the acorns and marbles with gleeful abandonment. Pushing her was pure ecstasy.  

Still, there was one more thing to do. He had finished pouring the gasoline throughout the house, struck the match and made his exit through the kitchen door. No parting glances, no mournful ruminations on where his life had taken him, just his internal GPS steering him away from the past and into the future.  

It was the present he should have been concerned about.  

His feet went out from under him on the icy cement step. Harold caught himself on the metal railing, but something else caused him to lose his balance on the sidewalk. And he fell back and cracked his head wide open on the step. Bleeding out was a kind way to describe the amount of blood that rushed out of him all the way down to his shoes, under which were at least a dozen acorns.

Once, what was whole was now crushed.  

Fucking squirrels.