Sitting on the Stairs with My Father, 1969
By Paige Gilchrist
October 15, 2023
October 15, 2023
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It was probably just the foundation dig
for a new housing complex. Clawed-out earth leaving steep slopes. A shallow, muddy pool at its basin. I had seen it that morning on a walk with other children and our mothers. So different from the neat parks and clean playrooms of our curated days. To my four-year-old eyes it was raw, wild. A place where things escaped and hid. I wanted to see it for myself, not in the bright sun but when the light turned jagged—this fresh tear in the earth, descending into what I imagined was a secret riverbed. I wanted to be there alone. Feel myself on the edge of the excavation. See if my foot, in its little red tennis shoe, would slip on the loose gravel of the slope. Someone caught me making my way to the site. One of the cocktail-party adults who had fanned out to find the hosts’ missing little girl. Which is how I ended up at the top of the white, carpeted stairs of our townhouse, ice cubes clinking in glasses below, with my father. He must have had his own version once. Maybe a set of rusted tracks he’d been warned not to wander along, sun drying the grassweed and heating the steel rails that pulled him—mirage in the hot air ahead— farther than he should have gone. Past dinner. Maybe all the way to dark. That must be why, with people from the office and perfume and scotch swirling around, he walked up, in black trousers and cream turtleneck, and sat down. We had already had a stern talk about safety and rules. I had finished crying. Now, he said, tell me about this mysterious valley and the ancient river you found. |
Paige Gilchrist lives in Asheville, NC. After years in nonfiction publishing, she now teaches the movement and meditation practices of yoga and studies and writes poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Juniper, Kakalak, ONE ART, and The Great Smokies Review.