What waits Above

The man stood at the bottom and began to climb.

The first floor held an infant. He looked at it and smiled, then cried. The infant did not cry back. It lay wrapped in light, waiting for a life that hadn't started yet.

He climbed. A boy in school clothes ran past the next landing, laughing at something no one else could hear. He remembered the sound. He had made it once, in a body that no longer fit him.

Higher up, college ended and love began on the floor after it — plain fabric giving way to a collar, to something with intention behind it. He cried at this one, and didn't understand why until the stairs opened into a wedding. A woman in white. His hand shaking as he took hers.

Then he was back on the stairs.

On the landing above, his wife stood holding a newborn. He froze. Behind her, two more children waited, then a third, all watching him from a step he hadn't reached yet.

He turned and ran.

Down, into the dark, faster than the stairs should have allowed. Past the wedding. Past the college boy. Past the laughing child. Past the infant who still hadn't cried. He didn't stop until the light above was gone and there was nothing left but his own breath.

He sat in the dark and grieved, crying into hands that no longer felt like his. The dark didn't answer. It never did.

Then he understood. The mistake wasn't in the climbing. It was in the running.

He climbed again, desperate now, two stairs at a time, breath raw in his throat. The infant. The boy. The groom. They blurred past him, stations on a line he no longer had time to stop at.

His wife was waiting again. A son stood beside her, his face hard, unhappy. The man reached for them, arms out, chest still heaving.

The place changed with him.

The stairwell was gone. In its place was a room that smelled of antiseptic and something fainter beneath it, sweetish and wrong. Machines breathed where he could not. A thin line of green light traced itself across a screen, rising and falling, indifferent to the weight of what it measured.

He was old now. Wrinkled hands lay on a blanket too thin for the cold he felt underneath his skin.

Beside the bed stood a young man. Young the way a photograph is young — fixed, untouched — but his eyes were old in a way skin never gets to be, like he had done this before, more times than could be counted on any single lifetime.

"Are you done?" he asked. "I don't have much time."

"I have not completed my whole life," the old man said, his voice smaller than he remembered it. "It is still left. I have to remember."

The young man didn't move. He only waited, the way the dark had waited at the bottom of the stairs — not cruel, not gentle, just patient in a way nothing alive could afford to be.

The bed was gone. The stairs returned beneath his feet, solid, cold. He began to walk quickly, then faster, the young man's question still ringing behind him.

He saw every stage still left in a man's life, laid out ahead like landings he had skipped on the way down. Another child arrived on one of them — he didn't see the birth, only felt himself already rearranging some quiet room in his chest to make space. Then both children were older, uniforms too big at the shoulders, shoes squeaking on floors that smelled of chalk and wet raincoats.

He fought with his wife on one of the landings. He didn't remember what it was about, only the shape of it — his voice too loud in a kitchen, her back turned toward a sink full of water gone cold. He climbed past it before he could take any of it back.

Then it was his daughter's wedding.

She stood in white the way her mother once had. Both parents were crying, openly, without the shame he'd have expected from himself. His wife gripped his arm hard enough to hurt. He let her. Somewhere a music he couldn't name was playing, and he thought: I climbed all the way here, and I didn't run once.

He was on the stairs again, moving faster than before. The landings blurred at the edges the way stations do from a train picking up speed.

Then the stairs opened onto a grey day.

The ground was soft underfoot, freshly turned. A coffin sat lowered into the earth. He knelt beside it, his knees sinking into the cold ground, and did not care. His hands found the wood and stayed there, as if warmth could still pass through if he pressed hard enough.

He cried without shape, without shame. "Thank you," he said, "for everything."

Then the grey lifted.

Sunlight. A garden he didn't remember planting.

He sat on a low stone bench, moss softening its edges. He heard them before he saw them — small feet on the stone path, quick and uneven, still learning how to run without falling. Two children cut across the grass toward him with the urgency only the very young have.

He sat still for one breath longer than he needed to, just to feel it — the sound of them coming for him, wanting him, before anything was asked of him at all.

Then he got up.

His knees protested. He didn't care. He chased them in slow, deliberate circles that let them believe they were faster than him. For a moment there was no staircase at all. There was only grass, and small hands, and his own breath, easy for once.

Then the antiseptic smell again. The green light, rising and falling.

He was on the bed. Beyond the door, he could hear his son and daughter crying — not the sound children make, but the sound grown people make when they are trying not to be heard and failing anyway.

The young man stood beside him, unchanged.

"Now I am done," the old man said.

Something in the young man's tired eyes shifted, softened, the way water does just before it stills completely.

"Is there chocolate ice cream?" the old man asked.

"There is everything you desire."

The old man smiled — not bracing for something, but the smaller, easier kind that arrives on its own. "My wife used to love chocolate ice cream," he said.

He said it simply, the way you'd mention the weather, but it carried the whole weight of everything that word — wife — had meant across every landing he'd climbed. The young man said nothing back. He didn't need to. The green light kept rising and falling behind them, waiting for nothing in particular.