one odd story amongst many

She was born falling down the stairs (although, launched is probably a more apt term). Her mother sat at the top of the staircase, hands braced between the two cherry-wood beams of the banister as her body was torn apart at its center. Her father had gone out to get her mother something to eat (pickled asparagus or sauerkraut or something with a lot of pepper, he couldn’t quite remember which). Perhaps her father knew that he would be leaving her mother as she went into contractions one minute apart from each other, her mother’s water breaking in the master bathroom. She flew out of her mother like a projectile after fifteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds of agonizing labor (this amount of time brought her from the bathroom and to the top of the stairs), umbilical cord unwinding like some kind of spelunker’s roap, snapping halfway down. She landed on the bamboo hardwoods at the bottom, screaming (thankfully) from her tiny, fleshy, newly-formed lungs.

(When her parents had remodeled the house, her mother had insisted they get carpeting because the baby would be safer if he fell (ironic) and she liked the way it felt on her bare feet (her mother walked barefoot because it made her feel safe; it was her sixth sense). Her father could only think of the hassle it would be to clean and they didn’t have a vacuum and he loved a nice red wine, but he acquiesced to her (mostly to appease his then-pregnant wife and avoid the embarrassment she would cause by yelling at him (something she rarely did) in front of the saleswoman at Carpet Mill Outlet). After they lost her would-have-been-older brother to unexplained bleeding of the placenta late in the third trimester, her mother had the carpets removed and replaced with the more practical hardwoods, disposing of the rugs and the newly purchased vacuum and that one blanket that reminded her of the carpet, just in case (it’s a good thing they switched, too—cleaning up after-birth and blood out of a white carpet would have been a nightmare))

Her mother would later say that the birth was not extraordinary, akin to missing the bus or baking a decent batch of raisin bran cookies (not that she had any experience baking raisin bran cookies, or anything, for that matter, but that is what she would say, much to the confusion and disbelief of the limited family that she stayed in contact with and her few friends). There was panic (understandably) and fear (of course), but underlying all of that, like a heavy, concrete foundation, was a bubbling and insidious disappointment when her mother realized it was a girl—“How unfortunate,” her mother thought to herself (she never shared this with her husband). Her mother could see the lack of protruding genital features (a penis) from the top of the stairs and so didn’t move, not wanting to upset the delicate balance she had between the two wooden beams on the now wetted floor and not wanting to touch the writhing body of her daughter (her mother still doesn’t touch her much except to feed her and never from anything other than a rubble nipple). They both just laid there for four minutes and thirty-nine seconds, her mother deflated at the top, her screaming at the bottom (I still don’t know how she had that much air in those tiny, fleshy, newly formed lungs).

Her father interrupted this scene with paper bags in either arm (he ended up getting both pickled asparagus and a pepper crusted salmon fillet—he could never seem to make her mother happy anymore, so he wanted to be safe. Unfortunately, she had asked for sauerkraut). Her mother, not wanting to seem cold or uncaring, began yelling at her father to “help our baby!” (this was one of the few times either of them had yelled at the other, both much preferring terse silences and other small, simple expressions of disapproval such as ignoring phone calls mid-ring to make sure the other knew they had hung up, or parking in the wrong spot in the garage thus forcing the other to back up and re-park). Not knowing which insurmountable task (her or her mother) he should confront first, not wanting to be anywhere near the blood and placenta covered stairs (her father had had a weak stomach around fluids ever since biology in seventh grade when the innards of a piglet spilt all over him and he vomited on his lab partner, ruining his limited social currency with his middle-school peers and ruining the only pair of pants that fit him properly) and frightened by her mother’s yelling, he began putting the groceries away. The salmon would have to go in the fridge….though, they probably weren’t going to eat it tonight….so the freezer. He would leave the asparagus out though. He folded up the bags and put them in that little nook between the fridge and the cabinets to take up more time.They were both still screaming.

After floundering around the kitchen and feebly murmuring to himself about the mileage on his 2008 Toyota Camry and how he needed to get the oil changed, he realized there was no way to escape the inevitable (he was a master at escaping the inevitable, part of the reason he had gone out to get groceries in the first place and part of the reason he had delayed his wedding to her mother in the bathroom on the second floor of the Dorchester Hotel in southern Oregon in order to check if the stocks in General Electric had risen or fallen. They had risen). The scene had not changed as he walked back around the corner to the stairwell, except the color of her mother’s face, which had grown both a few shades greener and a few shades redder, creating a muted, slate grey color (her mother felt that the louder she yelled, the more it appeared she cared about the infant—volume equating to maternal compassion—but this also exacerbated the nausea threatening to add more to the already messy stairs).

To spare you the gory details, her father took the baby to the kitchen sink, her mother took herself back to the bathroom and into the shower, and the liquids remained on the stairwell (where they would remain for the next seventy-four hours, creating a neat boundary between her mother and her father, the first physical representation of the up-until-that-point-invisible wall that had been silently constructed between them, brick by brick, since before they even met). Things settled down quickly after they cleaned the floor, though, signaling some kind of (individual) cleansing of souls and (independent) rejuvenation. Her mother went back to work that next Monday, stocking the fridge with pre-pumped breast milk and calling her neighbor’s daughter to babysit (her neighbor was in desperate need of money and knew the generosity her parents had shown to others in the past, so jumped at the offer). Her father went back to sorting out his life, forgetting to bring lists to the grocery store, and taking bathroom breaks to check his stocks. The house’s stark, minimalist appearance became more haphazard and joyous as toys became scattered across the white wood floor (her mother called them “land-mines,” sarcasm not present enough to know if she was joking or being dangerously serious, as if the toys would explode with color and laughter and youthful innocence if touched. Her father just didn’t like the mess).

To this day, even after the move, she still dreams of bamboo floors and crumpled paper bags and she still believes that she can fly.