The stairs that led down to the lapping water have always been there. They showed up yesterday. The moss and oceanic slime so deeply entrenched that the grey stone freckled with salt is stained green. 

Yesterday I saw her standing on the stairs, leading to the water. I had never seen her before. I know her well.

She’s stood there since I was born, a navy coat wrapped tight around her, hair hidden beneath a bright orange toque. She didn’t turn around but I know her eyes, they are my eyes. I know her mouth, it is my sister’s mouth.

My mother stood waiting on the stairs, that until yesterday, weren’t there. The stairs aren’t built into the sea wall. The notches remain where they once were, and are now not.
She spoke some words into the air and the greedy wind grabbed them before I could get close. I knew she had no gloves, her hands looked red and chaffed, shoved as far as they could into the coat pockets, full of stones.

The steel grey sea sang to her, and she stood at the top of the seven steps leading down, tide low.

I had played in the sharp crabgrass, by where the stairs were not, as a child. The biting breeze and the scraped knees were my sister’s and mine. My mother had stood at the top of the stairs, leading down into the water, and never turned around. I knew the moment I saw those stairs, that she would be on them. I told my sister last night. She wouldn’t hear of it, but she couldn’t hear most things. Not the sea lapping at the stone or the sea-sweet song that called me home. I heard, and I saw. My sister slept and I stalked the ocean wall. The house had held five, before, now two. No more children played before the waves, just me and her, eyes trained inward at the harbour master’s daughter. If she succeeded her suit, then one. Her skin turned pink and true with love. But me, I stare into the sea, dragged inland like refuse, refusing to lie sleeping. My mother is standing there still. I can’t see her at all. The stairs stretch down down down deeper than they should, but tide is in, and I’m tired again. The stairs that shouldn’t be, with my mother who isn’t there, she turns to me.

Begs me. Look beneath the fireplace. She does not speak or turn, she is not there. I do not yearn.

I go to the fireplace, and pull up stone after stone. The hearth burns but we had not lit a fire or banked the coals, the heat comes from deep below. Before sunrise my sister joins me. She doesn’t ask, just pulls, her warmth steady, even if I am not. Our hands turn black, nails chip and splinter.

A scrap of fabric sits at the foundation. Ash and charred and whole in our hands. We both pull, it comes easy to us. It comes to us easily. The skin as freckled and grey as the stairs beneath the lecherous lichen.

She comes with me to the stairs that aren’t there, and when my mother pulls it over her, the seal skin tight over her bones, orange toque left on the wall, she turns and looks at us with our eyes, our mouth. Her pockets were full of stones, our fireplace of bones. The seal is gone from the stairs that aren’t there, it never was. My sister kisses my head with my mother’s mouth, and heads inside. I sit on the steps that are not there, where it is not precisely warm, and not yet cold.