A Tread On The Stair

                                        A TREAD ON THE STAIR

         The sigh reverberated off the walls, sounding loud in the heavy silence shrouding the night.
         Tess stood at the bottom of the staircase staring up at the darkness above. It looked to be like any other old and time worn staircase. Nothing significant. Only she knew that if she stood in the hall beside it she would see the way each stair tread dipped slightly, worn by the many feet that had passed over them the last hundred years or more.
         The pantry lie under the staircase, spices lending the air around the door an aromatic flavour. Some of the scents embedded in the very wood that made up the shelves within. Even on the rare occasion that the pantry had been emptied, it still leant the air an aroma that made one take a deep breath when passing.
         Tess no longer took a deep breath but relied on memory alone to recall the fragrance of the spices. Memories were really all that was left to her for time had not been kind. Of course she expected she deserved nothing more. That didn’t mean she did not wish for more.
         With another sigh, this one seeming to echo off the walls, Tess rested her palm against the coolness of the wide banister. How many pairs of hands had caressed this length of wood down the years? And how many young bottoms had defied the harsh orders of parents to not risk injury and slid backward down it’s smooth surface? Well, she thought with an ironic smile, one of those bottoms had been hers. Of course it was not to be done by boys let alone well behaved young ladies. She had been seventeen the last time she had slid along its surface, only to fly laughing into the surprised arms of the young man who soon became the one true love of her life.
         Who would’ve guessed that would be the last time she would ever feel so carefree as to throw caution, and her mother’s scorn, to the wind and slide down this same banister. That one childish act had changed her life forever. Odd when actions so innocent trigger actions that were meant to be. The course of life was a tricky one to be sure.
         She had married Thom two years later, and one child and two years following the marriage, she had lost him. The shoals off Cranberry Island had claimed Thom’s life as he slipped beneath the cold water’s off Cape Canso. A tragedy that even now she could not bring herself to fully recall.
         Tess set her foot down upon the bottom tread, then stared at her shoed foot as though seeing it for the first time. She couldn’t help thinking that time was very much like the worn tread beneath her sole. With every tread that carried you up and down there was change. Some of it good, some of it not so good. But normally one survived and eventually slid down the banister to the unexpected.
         Life had been tough with Thom alive and fishing to bring in money for food and necessities. But it was drudgery plain and simple after his untimely death at sea. Tess had taken in sewing, washing. anything just to make ends meet.
         She set her foot on the second tread.
         Then life had shifted and changed once again.
         Their son Oliver, the love of her body, contacted pneumonia in the spring and soon his small lungs could no longer fight to breathe. His loss had numbed her in a way nothing else could have.
         Two great losses brought on initially by a slide down a much worn banister.
         But life, and death, went on.
         Slowly she progressed up the entire thirteen steps, coming to stand at the top of the landing. Hand still braced on the banister she glanced to the left. All the bedroom doors, and there were four in all, were closed except for one. The young occupant oblivious to his night time visitor. Truth be told Tess preferred to keep it that way.
         At least the house had managed to remain in the family. It had originally been floated down from the shore back in the late 1800’s and set here on the foundation of what had once been that of a lighthouse. She sensed other presences on nights like this but they left her alone, keeping silent on this her night of wandering.
         Turning to the right she slowly walked the floorboards to where the small window, between the front gables, looked down over the road below. It was here that everything as she knew it had come to an end.  She hadn’t meant to commit the sin, shivered to think on it even now. Suicide after all was a sin in the eyes of the Lord.
         Turning away from the window, Tess gazed up at where the beam used to be that had supported her weight nearly a century before. It was the one change her presence had wrought in the structure of the house. No new room addition. No new windows. Only the removal of a chunk of wood. The removal of a sinful memory.
         Even now she could feel the rope as it burned into the flesh of her neck. Tightening and pulling. Cutting of her life's breathe.
         Suicide was a sin.
         She had forever veiled her entrance to heaven and the ability to see her Thom and Oliver once again, all for the length of a piece of rope. She had been selfish and could not have waited any longer for life to move her on to the next tread on the stair of life.
         And so now she tread the stairs of her past life. Revelling in the memories each step evoked and each caress of a worn banister brought to mind.
         Funny really, how she died a little everyday in life, and now lived a little every night in death.