22 steps.

22 blocks of hard, unforgiving concrete bolted together with unfeeling steel and heavy iron railings. 22 chances for fledgling hand-eye coordination to fail and forcibly diminish one’s altitude in a guttumbling, skullcracking splatter.

Stairs? This is why I couldn’t go home?

After surviving a brain hemorrhage, laying prostrate for weeks, learning to walk again, browbeating my surgeon into a discharge, stealing my own car to drive home, dammit, home, despite my seizure risk, singing all the way, it’d be STAIRS that would steal the triumph of my doorstep.

What cruel simplicity that even on prescription morphine, I could not convince myself to take the risk of ascending STAIRS.

So I stared up them impotently, Hands out stretched, the feeble fingers whispering “why?” In desperate clenches.

I read the door over and again.

436

436

436