Stairs

An old woman and her grandson are walking down the wooden steps leading from the deck of a beach house to the driveway. They’re holding hands but the old woman misses a step and tumbles forward and her hand slips out of the boy’s grasp. She does two somersaults and lands on the pavement and the boy hears her breath escape her and sees blood pooling by her head. It’s a darker color red, as it fills crevices in the black asphalt, than he’d seen blood before.

He turns and runs up the stairs and calls to his father through the sliding screen door.

“Dad, grandma fell down the stairs!”

The father leaps up from his chair and races to his mother. “Mom,” he says. “Don’t move.”

Her eyes are squinted shut but she nods.

An ambulance arrives soon and she is taken to the hospital. She will be fine. Six stitches, that’s all.

The father tells the boy, “You did the right the thing coming to get me so fast. You didn’t panic and that’s important.”

The boy is not so sure. He remembers his grandmother’s fingers, like plastic straws in their paper sheaths, and wonders, How did she not break?

(Previously.)