By Terrance Wedin
STAIRCASE
Someone in the shop said it was the radio. The song on the radio. That he was distracted by a Pink Floyd song playing on 105.3 The Bear. Wish you were here.
He cut through pine first, then bone. Treads for a staircase that didn’t go anywhere but backstage. The teeth were moving so fast the blood dried almost immediately.
Someone in the shop tied his finger with twine. Someone else hit the button that turned off the table saw.
All Dad said was, “Someone go find my car keys.”
He played pool that night. Wrapped finger tapping the felt between shots.
Maybe this is where we got it from. Brothers able to endure. Sons told not to look away. Let it wash over you until you no longer feel it.
Was it hanging off? Was it dismembered?
Dad’s pool shark buddies asked these questions. They wanted to know how he planned to play league with a Frankenstein finger. They wanted to know how to line up a shot with a finger with no nerves.
Once, Dad told me a story about his father covering their trailer in kerosene and lighting it on fire. They spent a few weeks of hurricane season in wet clothes because the windows of the car they slept in leaked. His father’s knee ballooned to the size of a softball. Infection from his wet jeans. He pulled his leg behind him, making it a part of his grift as he pointed at Dad back in the car and pocketed cash in a parking lot.
Karl didn’t believe it could all be true.
I reminded him of the staircase Dad finished. Reminded him of a Beckett play we saw once. Reminded him of a radio station that still exists.
DAD, SMOKING IN 1995
Sometimes after dark, Dad didn’t smoke on the balcony. Sometimes he’d walk down the flight of stairs, through the laundry room where the dryers and electrical meters hummed, and stand in the field outside our building. Six other buildings in Foxridge looked back at him.
From my top bunk, I pushed the blinds on our bedroom window down and watched the ember of his cigarette move. Smoke looped from his hip to his face, back and forth. Most nights I counted the seconds he took between each drag. I looked past him, adjusted my face against the cold window so I could line my eyes up with his, to see whatever he was fixed on out there.
All the buildings looked the same as ours. Same balconies. Same shade of brown paint. Same parking lot. Same yellow lights behind curtains in other people’s windows where I sometimes caught shadows watching him like I was. He’d stretch his arms up, adjust the fanny pack the doctor made him wear because of his bad back. Sometimes he would take a few steps in his white Reeboks, like he was going to sprint toward one of the other buildings, toward anywhere else. But he would stop, like someone had grabbed him by the arm, retrace his steps carefully back to his spot.
Dad smoked everywhere. He smoked on the couch. At the dinner table. In the car. On the balcony. All those places made sense to me. He was doing something while he smoked. Outside, he was just standing and looking and smoking. The streetlight near the dumpster cast a perfect square of light across his shoulder, some nights through spring showers, some nights splitting the mosquitos clouding around him, just above where he kept the green pack of Benson Hedges rolled into his shirt sleeve. He blew smoke straight up or tilted his head to the side, sending it away from his face. Sometimes he coughed into his fist. Sometimes he spit mucus into the grass.
There was one time Mom walked out there after him, her house slippers leaving dragging marks in the snow. His footprints made circles around him. I watched her talking to him in her winter coat, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She stood five feet away, talking at his back, jabbing her finger at the space between his shoulders. He never looked back at her. Never said a word. Just kept smoking as the snow fell between them.
Mom bent down and packed a snowball in her bare hands and tossed it at his back. Just kept smoking until she walked away.
Some nights I’d close my eyes while he was out there. I’d tell myself when I opened them, he’d be gone. But then I’d listen for him. I’d count the seconds between each sound bringing him back inside. His footsteps up the stairs, the clang of the metal front door, the television volume coming back to life, his lighter sparking up one more cigarette.
Terrance Wedin lives in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Esquire, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, Washington Square Review, and other literary journals. His first novel, ANCHOR, will be published by Haskell Industries in 2026.