The Stairs to Nowhere

A short story inspired by the many steps of Pittsburgh

Illustration generated from a black and white photograph in the public domain

Snowflakes were tumbling down on the rusted roof of Gus's Diner, a closed greasy spoon that could no longer cling to life on Braddock Avenue, like most of the buildings. Outside, the skeletal form of the Steel Works loomed along the Monongahela River, the last of the monuments to a bygone era where smoke choked the sky and Braddock roared with life and put money in men’s pockets. Now, only the wind moaned through the cracked windows of mostly abandoned houses, rows and rows of despair, of those who couldn’t afford to move away, like the tilted gravestones in the town’s cemetery up on the hill above.

On this particularly bleak afternoon, a sliver of strange white light caught Gus's eye amidst the monotonous grey. It was a scrap of a flyer, half-shredded and stuck to a chipped payphone that no longer worked. A picture dominated the flyer: a rickety old wooden staircase, rotting against a swirling sky, reaching i…