What they don't tell you about stairs is the anatomy.
A stairway has a nuanced body. There's the shoe molding, where the hulk of the stairs is constrained to the floor. Your toe may nudge this before you traipse up or down the horizontal risers and vertical treads. The smooth railing that your hand clutches is called the balustrade. It's an intricate system of handrails, baserails, and spindles that sprout from the steps like ribs from a spine. If you peek below the balustrade, you can spy the spandrel, the empty belly of space beneath the stairway. Volutes, turnouts, wall brackets, winders, nosings, and countless more parts combine to form the body of a stairway.
What they don't tell you about stairs are the laws.
Human bodies have laws. We do not grow to be fifty feet tall nor shrink to five inches. Similar laws dictate a body of stairs. Building mandates assert the Riser-Tread formula: Riser + Tread equals 17-18 inches. The minimum tread length is a mere nine inches. This is shorter than the average person's foot. So when you climb a stair, your foot does not completely fit on each step.
What they don't tell you about stairs is the danger.
1000 people die from falling down stairs every year. I have always known that I will be one of them. I will be flying down a stairway, rushing to a movie, an interview, or a wedding, and my foot will miss the riser by an inch. Just an inch. The stair's sharp edge will peel of a petal of skin from my heel, and I will lurch forward, my stomach twirling, the corners of my mouth wilting with shock. My hands will shoot up to shield me, but gravity will overpower me, and my elbows will buckle from the steep collision. The stairs will shatter my jawbone and nose, and I will thump down the stairs, a carpet of blood unrolling behind me. I will die alone on that stairway, caught between where I was coming from and where I wanted to go.
What they don't tell you about stairs is that they can kill you before you ever realize your dreams, or meet the person you want to marry, or see the sun rise on the east coast. They can kill you while you are texting, dreaming, scheming, or laughing. One inch of surprise space and you could be nothing but a scrambled mass of flesh and blood strewn between floors, never to go up or down or anywhere again. Stairs can end your life while your are waiting for it to begin. So climb with care.
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while a tad morbid, i like the part where you talk about "the carpet of blood unrolling" behind you. i know what you mean though, i can totally relate to this fear. i'll fallen down my share of stairwells and actually have made mortal enemies of ladders and gravity (they're terrible when they team up on me...) thanks for sharing this!
ReplyDeleteGreat, now I'm horrified of stairs. You've convinced me in a short amount of time that stairs are pretty dangerous. I wonder if it's actually nice knowing how you'll die because now you don't have to worry about it? And the line about texting is funny because a recent survey showed that one out of ten people in England have suffered some kind of injury while texting...that's a pretty high number, lol.
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