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Stephen King: A Half Century of Scares
00:57:40
Host Meg Wolitzer presents two stories from a live evening at Symphony Space celebrating the prolific writer Stephen King. It was hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead. The program presents King in two different modes: the legendary scare-master who entered the horror genre with Carrie, and the author of stories that draw on memory and family like “The Last Rung on the Ladder.” An excerpt from Carrie is read by Carrie Coon, and “The Last Rung on the Ladder” is read by John Benjamin Hickey. Colson Whitehead speaks briefly from the stage.
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- [00:08]
Meg Wolitzer
Think you know Stephen King? Well, sure. He's the master of horror, author of the Shining and Carrie, which turned 50 in 2024. Also, he's a sharp, cogent writer, responsible for the Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Stay with me for selected shorts as we celebrate two very different sides of King. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. Stephen King holds a place in the popular imagination that few contemporary writers can rival. First and foremost, he's the master of horror, the guy whose dog eared paperback you eagerly snatched from your parents bookshelf in no small part because they warned you against it. Maybe your prohibited title was the Shining it or Pet Sematary. Whatever it was, you read it at night by flashlight under the covers and you scared yourself silly. And the important thing about scaring yourself silly is that silly is at the end of that phrase. You want to do it, you like it. It's a strange combination of high anxiety and deep pleasure. And it's hard to describe why we love it, but we do. Stephen King understands that combination better than any writer I can think of, and I have a hunch that maybe he feels it too, when he's writing. I imagine it is possible to type at a computer or even write by longhand while the hair on the back of your neck is standing up. Even if you haven't read one of his books, King is still kind of inescapable. Dozens of his titles have been adapted for film or television, sometimes two or more, if you count reboots. And 2024 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Carrie, his terrifying and wildly creative debut novel. The anniversary gave those of us at shorts a chance to celebrate Carrie and King himself, of course. Our show is about lifting short stories from the page into a live context, which is why we wanted to focus on King the writer, something apart from King the pop culture phenomenon. After all, he is much more than just bloody knives and creepy hotels. He spins yarns in genres from sci fi to alternate history. He builds tension with enviable ease, and his crisp, propulsive prose nearly demands the reader keep turning pages. And did you know he was the brilliant mind behind the Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. So today we're going to hear two kinds of prose from King, something from Carrie, one of his most well known books, and a lesser known but no less compelling story of inseparable siblings and one perilous game Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Colson Whitehead, a fan of King's, hosted Selected Shorts celebration of King.
- [03:12]
Colson Whitehead
So how do you do, everybody? Welcome to Selected Shorts. I'm Colson Whitehead, your host for the evening. You may remember me from such novels as the Underground Railroad and the Nickel Boys. But tonight it's not about my writing. It's about someone who's influenced me and more than a few of you in a profound way. With apologies to Poe and Lovecraft, Stephen King is the most popular horror writer of all time. There are a few things that all of us know. King is from Maine, he's crazily prolific, his paperbacks are ubiquitous, and the adaptations of his work are many. And while I'm not interested in dogmatic talk about genre, it's worth mentioning his stories encompass crime, sci fi, alternative history, fantasy, realism, and just about every other label out there. Well, not romance. Misery, maybe. In on writing his beloved book on Craft, King says that writing all art actually is telepathy. He's peered into our brains to identify the things that terrify us the deepest. The vampires and aliens and loved ones turned monstrous TV stars turned president, but also the things that give us hope. Because he knows that we have to believe that we can defeat the darkness, no matter how dark it gets. If you don't think that there's a chance to make it out, you might as well give up. And that's what animates his heroes and heroines and why we read his books. That foolish, miraculous hope.
- [05:14]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Colson Whitehead on stage at Symphony Space. Our first read is from the novel Carrie. If you don't know it or have forgotten it, though I'm not sure how you could. It's about Carrie White, a teenager from a strange religious household who is also bullied at school. And Carrie is telekinetic. The scene we'll hear is one of the cruxes of the story. The moment in which Carrie White finds out in an incredibly shocking way that she was not really voted prom queen. And her bullies have struck again. Colson Whitehead talking about Carrie before the performance.
- [05:50]
Colson Whitehead
It's an important book for me. Carrie made me want to write fiction. I was 12 years old when I read it, and its structure was so startling and confounding. There's that main narrative of Carrie's final days, but interspersed are flash forwarding pieces of congressional testimony, memoirs, science journals, newspapers, all these different kinds of texts. I didn't know you could be that weird in a novel. And if you find weirdness inspiring, you can't do better than Stephen King because there's a lot of weirdness.
- [06:24]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Colson Whitehead on stage at Symphony Space. Before we hear this excerpt from Carrie, it's worth mentioning that it's got some pretty vivid imagery and and may not be appropriate for children reading it is Carrie Coon, an actor who, like King, can excel in pop culture touchstones and smaller, more niche projects, too. She recently appeared in two films in the Ghostbusters franchise, as well as series including the Gilded Age and indie movies such as His Three Daughters. And now Carrie Coon performs an excerpt from Stephen King's Carrie.
- [07:11]
Carrie Coon
Carrie by Stephen King when the buckets fell, she was at first only aware of a loud metallic clang cutting through the music, and then she was deluged in warmth and wetness. She closed her eyes instinctively. There was a grunt from beside her, and in part of her mind that had come so recently, awake she sensed brief pain. The music came to a crashing, discordant halt, a few voices hanging on after it like broken strings, and in the sudden deadness of anticipation, filling the gap between event and realization, like doom, she heard someone say quite clearly, my God, that's blood. A moment later, as if to ram the truth of it home, to make it utterly and exactly clear, someone screamed. Carrie sat with her eyes closed and felt the black bulge of terror rising in her mind. Mama had been right after all. They had taken her again, gulled her again, made her the butt again. The horror of it should have been monotonous, but it was not. They had gotten her up here, up here in front of the whole school, and had repeated the shower room scene. Only the voice had said, my God, that's blood, something too awful to be contemplated if she opened her eyes, and it was true. Oh, what then? What then? Someone began to laugh, a solitary, affrighted hyena sound, and she did open her eyes, open them to see who it was, and it was true, the final nightmare. She was red and dripping with it. They had drenched her in the very secretness of blood in front of all of them, and her thought, oh, I covered with it, was colored a ghastly purple with her revulsion and her shame. She could smell herself, and it was the stink of blood, the awful, wet, coppery smell in a flickering kaleidoscope of images. She saw the blood running thickly down her naked thighs, heard the constant beating of the shower on the tiles, felt the soft patter of tampons and napkins against her skin as voices exhorted her to plug it up, tasted the Plump, fulsome bitterness of horror. They had finally given her the shower they'd wanted. A second voice joined the first and was followed by a third, a girl's soprano giggle, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a dozen. All of them laughing, all laughing. Vic Mooney was laughing. She could see him. His face was utterly frozen, shocked. But that laughter issued forth just the same. She sat quite still, letting the noise wash over her like surf. They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder. But she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil. In this one she would bite a poison apple, be attacked by trolls, be eaten by tigers. They were laughing at her again, and suddenly it broke. The horrible realization of how badly she had been cheated came over her and a horrible, soundless cry. They're looking at me. Tried to come out of her. She put her hands over her face to hide it and staggered out of the chair. Her only thought was to run, to get out of the light, to let the darkness have her and hide her. But it was like trying to run through molasses. Her traitor mind had slowed time to a crawl. It was as if God had switched the whole scene from 78 RPM to 33 and a third. Even the laughter seemed to have deepened and slowed to a sinister bass rumble. Her feet tangled in each other and she almost fell off the edge of the stage. She recovered herself, bent down and hopped down to the floor. The grinding laughter swelled louder. It was like rocks rubbing together. She wanted not to see, but she did see. The lights were too bright and she could see all their faces, their mouths, their teeth, their eyes. She could see her own gore streaked hands in front of her face. Ms. Desjardins was running toward her and Ms. Desjardins face was filled with lying compassion. Carrie could see beneath the surface to where the real Ms. Desjardins was giggling and chuckling with rancid old maid ribaldry. Miss Desjardins mouth opened and her voice issued forth horrible and slow and deep. Let me help you, dear. Oh, I'm so sorry. She struck out at her Flex and Ms. Desjardins went flying to rattle off the wall at the side of the stairs and fall into a heap. Carrie ran. She ran through the middle of them. Her hands were to her face, but she could see through the prison of her fingers, could see them, how they were beautiful, wrapped in light, swathed in the bright angelic robes of acceptance, the shined shoes, the clear faces, the careful beauty parlor hairdos the glittery gowns. They stepped back from her as if she was plague, but they kept laughing. Then a foot was stuck slyly out. Oh yes, that comes next. Oh yes. And she fell over on her hands and knees and began to crawl, to crawl along the floor with her blood clotted hair hanging in her face, crawling like St. Paul on the Damascus road whose eyes had been blinded by the light. Next someone would kick her ass. But no one did. And then she was scrabbling to her feet again. Things began to speed up. She was out through the door, out into the lobby, then flying down the stairs that she and Tommy had swept up so grandly two hours ago. Tommy's dead. Full price. Paid full price for bringing a plague into the place of light. She went down them in great awkward leaps with the sound of the laughter flapping around her like blackbirds. Then darkness. She fled across the school's wide front lawn, losing both her prom slippers and fleeing barefoot. The closely cut school lawn was like velvet, lightly dusted with dewfall, and the laughter was behind her. She began to calm slightly. Then her feet did tangle and she fell at full length out by the flagpole. She lay quiescent, breathing raggedly, her hot face buried in the cool grass. The tears of shame began to flow, as hot and as heavy as that first flow of menstrual blood had been. They had beaten her, bested her once and for all, for all time. It was over. She would pick herself up very soon now and sneak home by the back streets, keeping to the shadows in case someone came looking for her. Find Mama. Admit she had been wrong.
- [13:35]
John Benjamin Hickey
No.
- [13:37]
Carrie Coon
The steel in her, and there was a great deal of it, suddenly rose up and cried the word out strongly. The closet, the endless wandering prayers, the tracts and the cross. And the only mechanical bird in the Black Forest cuckoo clock to mark off the rest of the hours and days and years and weeks, decades of her life. Suddenly, as if a videotape machine had been turned on in her mind, she saw Ms. Desjardins running toward her and saw her thrown out of the way like a rag doll as she used her mind on her. Without even consciously thinking about it, she rolled over on her back, eyes staring wildly at the stars from her painted face. She was forgetting the power. It was time to teach them a lesson, time to show them a thing or two. She giggled hysterically. It was one of Mama's pet phrases. Mama coming home, putting her purse down, eyeglasses flashing. Well, I guess I showed that elder thing or two at the shop. Today there was a sprinkler system. She could turn it on, turn it on easily. She giggled again and got up, began to walk barefoot back toward the lobby doors. Turn on the sprinkler system and close all the doors. Look in and let them see her looking in, watching and laughing while the shower ruined their dresses and their hairdos and took the shine off their shoes. Her only regret was that it couldn't be blood. The lobby was empty. She paused halfway up the stairs and flexed. The doors all slammed shut under the concentrated force she directed at them, the pneumatic door closers snapping off. She heard some of them scream and it was music, sweet soul music. For a moment nothing changed, and then she could feel them pushing against the doors, wanting them to open. The pressure was negligible. They were trapped, trapped, and the word echoed intoxicatingly in her mind. They were under her thumb, in her power. Power. What a word it was. She went the rest of the way up and looked in, and George Dawson was smashed up against the glass, struggling, pushing, his face distorted with effort. There were others behind him, and they all looked like fish in an aquarium. She glanced up and yes, there were the sprinkler pipes with their tiny nozzles like metal daisies. The pipes went through small holes in the green cinderblock wall. There were a great many inside. She remembered fire laws or something. Fire laws. In a flash her mind recalled black, thick cords like snakes, the power cords strung all over the stage. They were out of the audience's sight, hidden by the footlights, but she had had to step carefully over them to get to the throne. Tommy had been holding her arm. Fire and water. She reached up with her mind, felt the pipes, traced them, cold, full of water. She tasted iron in her mouth, cold, wet metal, the taste of water drunk from the nozzle of a garden hose flex. For a moment nothing happened. Then they began to back away from the doors. Looking around, she walked to the small oblong of glass in the middle door and looked inside. It was raining in the gym. Carrie began to smile. She hadn't gotten all of them, only some, but she found that by looking up at the sprinkler system with her eyes, she could trace its course more easily with her mind. She began to turn on more of the nozzles and more. Yet it wasn't enough. They weren't crying yet, so it wasn't enough. Hurt them, then. Hurt them. There was a boy up on stage by Tommy, gesturing wildly and shouting something. As she watched. He climbed down and ran toward the Rock band's equipment. He caught hold of one of the microphone stands and was transfixed. Carrie watched, amazed, as his body went through a nearly motionless dance of electricity. His feet shuffled in the water, his hair stood up in spikes and his mouth jerked open like the mouth of a fish. He looked funny. She began to laugh. By Christ, then let them all look funny, and in a sudden blind thrust she yanked at all the power she could feel. Some of the lights puffed out. There was a dazzling flash somewhere as live power cord hit a puddle of water. There were dull thumps in her mind as circuit breakers went into hopeless operation. The boy who had been holding the mic stand fell over on one of his amps and there was an explosion of purple sparks. And then the crepe bunting that faced the stage was burning. Just below the thrones a live 220 volt electricity cable was crackling on the floor, and beside it Ron Desymerd was doing a crazed post dance in her green tulle formal. Its full skirt suddenly blazed into flame and she fell forward, still jerking. It might have been at that moment that Carrie went over the edge. She leaned against the doors, her heart pumping wildly yet her body as cold as ice cubes. Her face was livid but dull. Red fever spots stood out on each cheek. Her head throbbed thickly and conscious thought was lost. She reeled away from the doors, still holding them shut, doing it without thought or plan. Inside, the fire was brightening and she realized dimly that the mural must have caught on fire. She collapsed on the top step and put her head down on her knees, trying to slow her breathing. They were trying to get out the doors again, but she held them shut easily. That alone was no strain. Some obscure sense told her that a few were getting out the fire doors, but let them. She would get them later. She would get all of them, every last one. She went down the stairs slowly and out the front doors, still holding the gymnasium doors closed. It was easy. All you had to do was see it with your mind. The town whistle went off suddenly, making her scream, and put her hands in front of her face. The whistle. It's just the fire whistle. For a moment her mind's eye lost sight of the gymnasium doors and some of them almost got out. No, no, no. Naughty. She slammed them shut again, catching somebody's fingers that felt like Dale Norbert in the jam and severing one of them. She began to reel across the lawn again, a scarecrow figure with bulging eyes toward Main Street. On her right was the downtown, the department store the Kelly Fruit, the beauty parlor and the barbershop. Gas stations, police station, fire station. They'll put out my fire. But they wouldn't. She began to giggle, and it was an insane sound. Triumphant, lost, victorious, terrified. She came to the first hydrant and tried to twist the huge painted lug nut on the side. Oh, it was heavy. It was very heavy. Metal twisted tight to balk her. Didn't matter. She twisted harder and felt it give, then the other side, that, then the top. Then she twisted all three at once, standing back, and they unscrewed. In a flash. Water exploded outward and upward, one of the lug nuts flying five feet in front of her at a suicidal speed. It hit the street, caromed high into the air, and was gone. Water gushed with white pressure in a cruciform pattern. Smiling, staggering, her heart beating at over 200 per minute, she began to walk down toward Grass Plaza. She was unaware that she was scrubbing her bloodied hands against her dress like Lady Macbeth, or that she was weeping even as she laughed, or that one hidden part of her mind was keening over her final and utter ruin because she was going to take them with her and there was going to be a great burning until the land was full of its stink. She opened the hydrant at Grass Plaza and then began to walk down to Teddy's Amaco. It happened to be the first gas station she came to, but it was not the last.
- [21:22]
Meg Wolitzer
Thank that was an excerpt of Stephen King's novel Carrie, read by actor Carrie Coon. It's hard to believe it's 50 years old, isn't it? King is so good at narrowing in on real, universal human fears, especially those squirmy adolescent ones that we seem to have no defense against, even long after we've grown and left the angst of high school behind us. For me, while King's storylines are ingenious, his characters remain the most resonant. I recall sitting on the school bus, mesmerized by Carrie, both the novel and the title character. Stephen King is brilliant at making the unreal real in two entirely different ways. In his hands, the supernatural becomes possible, but also fictional people take on the properties of actual, living, breathing people. I began to think and fear that Carrie White was sitting right in front of me on that school bus, and that any minute, if someone on the bus did something mean to her, we were going to fly off the Long Island Expressway and into oblivion. When we return, a different side of King, exploring a bond between siblings and the terror of adulthood. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You're listening to selected Shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back. This is Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. In this episode, we look at different sides of Stephen King. If you've got a favorite writer, maybe they're overlooked or, like King, deserve revisiting. Drop us a line. We're always looking for new short stories and writers we've never read before, ones that might make an actor like Liev Schreiber or Sonia Manzano very happy. Get in touch on Facebook, Instagram x or write us@shortsymphonyspace.org in the first half of the show, we heard an excerpt from Stephen King's Carrie, a novel that helped establish him as the master of horror. Now let's hear something completely different, a story from King's 1978 collection, the Night Shift. This piece is less about supernatural frights and more about terrestrial ones, like the way time sneaks up on us all performing it. The multi talented John Benjamin Hickey. He has both appeared on Broadway in shows such as the Inheritance and directed on Broadway, as he did with the revival of Plaza Suite. The first reading of which, we should add, was produced by Symphony Space. While he's been in scores of films and TV shows, it's worth mentioning he's a star in the latest adaptation of King's Salem's Lot. Now John Benjamin Hickey reads the Last Rung on the Ladder by Stephen King.
- [24:45]
John Benjamin Hickey
The Last Rung on the Ladder I got Katrina's letter yesterday, less than a week after my father and I got back from Los Angeles. It was addressed to Wilmington, Delaware, and I moved twice since then. People move around so much now, and it's funny how those crossed off addresses and change of address stickers can look like accusations. Her letter was rumpled and smudged, one of the corners dog eared from handling. I read what was in it and the next thing I knew I was standing in the living room with the phone in my hand getting ready to call Dad. I put the phone down with something like horror. He was an old man and he had had two heart attacks. Was I going to call him and tell him about Katrina's letter so soon after we'd been in Los Angeles? To do that might very well have killed him. So I didn't call and I had no one I could tell. A thing like that letter, it's too personal to tell anyone Except a wife or a very close friend. I haven't made many close friends in the last few years, and my wife Helen and I divorced in 1971. What we exchange now are Christmas cards. How are you? How's the job? Have a Happy New Year. I've been awake all night with it. With Katrina's letter. She could have put it on a postcard. There was only a single sentence below the Dear Larry. But a sentence can mean enough. It can do enough. I remembered my dad on the plane, his face seeming old and wasted in the harsh sunlight at 18,000ft as we went west from New York. We had just passed over Omaha, according to the pilot, and dad said, it's a lot further away than it looks, Larry. There was a heavy sadness in his voice that made me uncomfortable because I couldn't understand it. I understood it better after getting Katrina's letter. We grew up 80 miles west of Omaha in a town called Hemmingford Home. My dad, my mom, my sister Katrina and me. I was two years older than Katrina, whom everyone called Kitty. She was a beautiful child and a beautiful woman. Even at 8, the year of the incident in the barn, you could see that her corn silk hair was never going to darken and that those eyes would always be a dark Scandinavian blue. A look in those eyes and a man would be gone. I guess you'd say we grew up hicks. My dad had 300 acres of flat, rich land and he grew feed corn and raised cattle. Everybody just called it the home place. In those days all the roads were dirt except Interstate 80 and Nebraska Route 96, and a trip to town was something you waited three days for. Nowadays I'm one of the best independent corporation lawyers in America. So they tell me, and I'd have to admit for the sake of honesty, that I think they are right. The president of a large company once introduced me to his board of directors as his hired gun. I wear expensive suits. My shoe leather's the best. I've got three assistants on full time pay and I could call another dozen if I need them. But in those days I walked up a dirt road to a one room school with books tied in a belt over my shoulder, and Katrina walked with me. Sometimes in the spring we went barefoot. That was in the days before you couldn't get served in a diner or shop in a market unless you were wearing shoes. Later on my mother died. Katrina and I were in high school up at Columbia City then, and two years after that my dad lost the place and went to work selling tractors. It was the end of the family, although it didn't seem so bad then. Dad got along in his work, bought himself a dealership, and got tapped for a management position. About nine years ago. I got a football scholarship to the University of Nebraska and managed to learn something besides how to run the ball out of a slot right formation. And Katrina. It's her I want to tell you about. It happened, the barn thing, one Saturday in early November. To tell you the truth, I can't pin down the actual year, but Ike was still president, mom was at a bake fair in Columbia City, and dad had gone over to our nearest neighbors that was seven miles away to help the man fix a hay rake. There was supposed to be a hired man on the place, but he had never showed up that day, and my dad fired him not a month later. Dad left me a list of chores to do, and there were some for Kitty as well, and told us not to get playing until they were all done. But that didn't take long. It was November, and by that time of year the make or break time had gone past. We'd made it again that year. We wouldn't always I remember that day very clearly. The sky was overcast, and while it wasn't cold, you could feel it wanting to be cold, wanting to get down to the business of frost and freeze, snow and sleet. The fields were stripped, the animals were sluggish and morose. There seemed to be funny little drafts in the house that had never been there before. On a day like that. The only really nice place to be was the barn. It was warm, filled with a pleasant mixed aroma of hay and fur and dung, and with the mysterious chuckling, cooing sounds of the barn swallows. High up in the third loft, if you cricked your neck up, you could see the white November light coming through the chinks in the roof and try to spell your name. It was a game that really only seemed agreeable on overcast autumn days. There was a ladder nailed to a crossbeam high up in the third loft, a ladder that went straight down to the main barn floor. We were forbidden to climb on it because it was old and it was shaky. Dad had promised Mom a thousand times that he would pull it down and put up a stronger one. But something else always seemed to come up when there was time. Helping a neighbor with his hay rake, for instance, and the hired man was just not working out. If you climbed up that rickety ladder. There were exactly 43 rungs. Kitty and I had counted them enough to know you ended up on a beam that was 70ft above the straw littered barn floor. And then if you edged out along the beam about 12ft, your knees jittering, your ankle joints creaking, your mouth dry and tasting like a used fuse, you stood over the haymow. And then you could jump off the beam and fall 70ft straight down with a horrible, hilarious dying swoop into a huge soft bed of lush hay. It has that sweet smell hay does, and you'd come to rest in that smell of reborn summer with your stomach left behind, you way up there in the middle of the air, and you'd feel, well, you'd feel like Lazarus must have felt you'd taken the fall and lived to tell the tale. It was a forbidden sport, alright. If we had been caught, my mother would have shrieked blue murder and my father would have laid on the strap, even at our advanced ages because of the latter, and because if you happened to lose your balance and topple from the beam before you had edged out over the loose fathoms of hay, you would fall to utter destruction on the hard planking of the barn floor. But the temptation was just too great when the cats are away. You know how that story goes. The day started like all the others, a delicious feeling of dread mixed with anticipation. We stood at the foot of the ladder looking at each other. Kitty's color was high, her eyes darker, more sparkling than ever. Dare you, I said promptly from Kitty. Dares go first promptly from me. Girls go before boys. Not if it's dangerous, she said, casting her eyes down demurely, as if everybody didn't know she was the second biggest tomboy in Hemmingford, but that was how she was about it. She would go, but she wouldn't go first. Okay, I said, here I go. I was 10 that year and thin as scratch the demon, about 90 pounds. Kitty was 8 and 20 pounds lighter. The latter had always held us before. We thought it would always hold us again, which is a philosophy that gets men and nations in trouble time after time. I could feel it that day beginning to shimmy around a little bit in the dusty barn air as I climbed higher and higher. As always, about halfway up, I entertained a vision of what would happen to me if it suddenly let go and gave up the ghost. But I kept going until I was able to clap my hands around the beam and boost myself up and look down. Kitty's face, turned up to watch me, was a small white oval in her faded checked shirt and blue denims. She looked like a doll. Above me, still higher in the dusty reaches of the eaves, the swallows cooed mellowly again I wrote. Hi down there, I called, my voice floating down to her on motes of chaff. Hi up there. I stood up. I swayed back and forth a little. As always, there seemed to suddenly be a strange current in the air that had not existed down below. I could hear my own heartbeat as I began to inch along, with my arms held out for balance. One time a swallow had swooped close by by my head during this part of the adventure, and in drawing back I had almost lost my balance. I lived in fear of the same thing happening again, but not this time. At last I stood above the safety of the hay. Now looking down was not so much frightening as sensual. There was a moment of anticipation, and then I stepped off into space, holding my nose for effect, and as it always did, the sudden grip of gravity yanking me down brutally making me plummet, made me feel like yelling. Oh God, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. Let me back up. And then I hit the hay, shot into it like a projectile, its sweet and dusty smell billowing up around me, still going down as if into heavy water, coming slowly to rest buried in the stuff. As always, I could feel feel a sneeze building up in my nose and hear a frightened field mouse or two fleeing for a more serene section of the haymow, and feel in that curious way that I'd been reborn. I remember Kitty telling me once that after diving into the hay, she felt fresh and new, like a baby. I shrugged it off at the time, sort of knowing what she meant, sort of not knowing. But since I got her letter, I think about that too. I climbed out of the hay, sort of swimming through it until I could climb out onto the barn floor. I had hay down my pants, down the back of my shirt. It was on my sneakers, sticking to my elbows, hay seeds in my hair, you bet. She was halfway up the ladder by then, her gold pigtails bouncing against her shoulder blades, climbing through a dusty shaft of light. On other days that light might have been as bright as her hair, but on this day her pigtails had no competition. They were easily the most colorful thing up there. I remember thinking that I didn't like the way the ladder was swaying back and forth. It seemed like it had never been so loosey goosey. And then she was on the beam high above me. Now I was the small one. My face was the small white upturned oval as her voice floated down on errant shafts, stirred up by my leap, high down there. Hi, up there. She edged along the beam and my heart loosened a little in my chest when I judged she was over the safety of the hay. It always did, although she was always more graceful than I was and more athletic. That doesn't sound like too strange a thing to say about your kid sister. She stood poising on the toes of her old low topped heads, hands out in front of her, and then she swanned. Talk about things you can't forget, things you can't describe. Well, I can describe it in a way, but not in a way that will make you understand just how beautiful that was. How perfect. One of the few things in my life that. That seem utterly real. Utterly true. No, I can't tell you like that. I don't have the skill with either my pen or my tongue. For a moment she seemed to hang in the air as if borne up by one of those mysterious updrafts that only existed in the third loft. A bright swallow with golden plumage such as Nebraska has never seen since. She was Kitty, my sister. Her arms swept up behind her and her back arched and oh, how I loved her for that beat of time. And then she came down, plowed into the hay, and out of sight an explosion of chaff and giggles rose out of the hole she made. I'd forgotten how rickety the ladder had looked with her on it. And by the time she was out, I was halfway back up again. I tried to swan myself, but the fear grabbed me the way it always did and my swan turned into a cannonball. I think I never believed the hay was there the way Kitty believed it. How long did that game go on? It's hard to tell. But I looked up some 10 or 12 dives later and saw the light had changed. Our mom and dad were due back and we were all covered with chaff, as good as a signed confession. We agreed one more turn each going up first. I felt the ladder moving beneath me and I could hear very faintly the whining rasp of old nails loosening up in the wood. And for the first time I was really actively scared. I think if I'd been closer to the bottom, I would have gone down and that would have been the end of it. But the beam was closer and it seemed safer. Three rungs from the top. The whine of pulling nails grew louder and I was suddenly cold with terror, with the certainty that I had pushed it too far. And then I had the splintery beam in my hands, taking my weight off the ladder, and there was a cold, unpleasant Sweat matting the twigs of hay to my forehead. The fun of the game was gone. I hurried out over the hay. I dropped off. Even the pleasurable part of the drop was gone. Coming down, I imagined how it feel if that was solid barn planking coming up to meet me instead of the yielding give of the hay. I came out to the middle of the barn to see Kitty hurrying up the ladder. I called, oh, no. Hey, come down. It's not safe. It'll hold me. She called back confidently. I'm lighter than you are, Kitty. But she never got finished, because that was when the ladder let go. It went with a rotted, splintering crack. I cried out, and Kitty screamed. She was about where I had been when I'd become convinced I'd pressed my luck too far. The rung she was standing on gave way, and then both sides of the ladder split. For a moment, the ladder below her, which had broken entirely free, looked like a ponderous insect, a picture praying mantis or a ladybug which had just decided to walk off. And then it toppled, hitting the barn floor with a flat clap that raised dust and caused the cows to moo worriedly. One of them kicked at its stall door. Kitty uttered a high, piercing scream. Larry. Larry, help me. I knew what had to be done. I saw it right away. I was terribly afraid, but not quite scared out of my wits. She was better than 60ft above me, her blue jeaned legs kicking wildly at the blank air, the barn swallows cooing above her. I was scared, all right. And you know, I still can't watch a circus aerial act, not even on tv. Makes my stomach feel too weak. But I knew. I knew what had to be done. Kitty. I balled up at her. Just hold still. Just hold still. She obeyed me instantly. Her legs stopped kicking and she hung straight down, her small hands clutching the last rung on the ragged end of the ladder like an acrobat whose trapeze has just stopped. I ran to the haymow, clutched up a double handful of the stuff, ran back and dropped it. I went back again and again and again. I don't remember it after that, except the hay got up my nose and I started sneezing. I couldn't stop. I ran back and forth, building a haystack where the foot of the ladder had been. It was a very small haystack. Looking at it, then looking at her hanging so far above it, you might have thought of one of those cartoons where the guy jumps 300ft into a water glass. Back and forth, back and Forth. Back and forth. Forth. Larry. Larry, I can't hold on much longer. Her voice was high and despairing. Kitty, you got to. You've got to just hold on. Back and forth, Back and forth. Hay down my shirt. Back and forth. The haystack was as high as my chin now, but the haymow we'd been diving into was 25ft deep. I thought that if she only broke her legs, it would be getting off cheap, and I knew if she missed the hay altogether, she'd be killed. Back and forth. Back and forth. Larry, the rung. It's letting go. I could hear the steady, rasping cry of the rung pulling free under her weight. Her legs began to kick again in the panic. But if she was thrashing like that, she would surely miss the hay. No. No, Kitty. I yelled. No. Stop that. Just let go, Kitty. Just let go. Because it was too late for me to get any more hay. Too late for anything except for blind hope. She let go and dropped the second I told her to. She came straight down like a knife. It seemed to me that she dropped forever, her gold pigtails standing straight up from her head, her eyes shut, her face as pale as china. She didn't scream. Her hands were locked in front of her lips as if she was praying, and she struck the hay right in the center. She went down out of sight, and hay flew up all around her as if a shell had struck, and I heard the thump of her body hitting the boards. The sound, a loud thud, sent a deadly chill into me. It had been too loud. It had been much too loud, but I had to see. Starting to cry, I pounced on the haystack and pulled it apart, flinging the straw behind me in great handfuls. A blue jeaned leg came to light, and then a plaid shirt. And then Kitty's face. It was deadly pale. Her eyes were shut. She was dead. I knew it. As I looked at her, the world went gray for me. November gray. The only things in it with any color were her pigtails, bright gold, and then the deep blue of her irises. And as she opened her eyes. Kitty. My voice was hoarse, husky, unbelieving. My throat was coated with hf. Kitty. Larry? She asked, bewildered. Am I alive? I picked her out of the hay and I hugged her, and she put her arms around my neck and hugged me back. You're alive, I said. You're alive. You're alive. She'd broken her left ankle, and that was all. When Dr. Peterson, the GP from Columbia City, came out to the barn with my Father and me. He looked up into the shadows for a long time. The last rung on the ladder still hung there aslant from one nail. He looked, as I said, for a long time. A miracle, he said to my father, then kicked disdainfully at the hay I'd put down. He went out to his dusty DeSoto, and he drove away. My father's hand came down on my shoulder. We're going to the woodshed, Larry, he said in a very calm voice. I believe you know what's going to happen there. Yes, sir, I whispered. Every time I whack you, Larry, I want you to thank God your sister is still alive. Yes, sir. Then we went. He whacked me plenty of times. So many times I ate standing up for a week and with a cushion on my chair for two weeks after that. And every time he whacked me with his big red calloused hand, I thanked God in a loud, loud voice. By the last two or three whacks, I was pretty sure he was hearing me. They let me in to see her just before bedtime. There was a cat bird outside her window. I remember that her foot, all wrapped up, was propped up on a board. She looked at me so long and so lovingly that I was uncomfortable. And then she said, hey, you put down hey. Of course I did, Kitty, I blurted. What else would I do? Once the ladder broke, there's no way to get up there. I didn't know what you were doing, she said. You must have known I was right under you, for cripe's sake. I didn't dare look down, she said. I was too scared. I had my eyes shut the whole time. I stared at her, thunderstruck. You mean you didn't know? You didn't. You didn't know what I was doing? She just shook her head. And when I told you to let go, you just did it. She nodded like Kitty. How could you do that? She looked at me with those deep blue eyes. I just knew you must be doing something to fix it, she said. You're my big brother. I knew you'd take care of me. Oh, God, Kitty, you don't know how close it was was. I put my hands over my face. She sat up and took them away. She kissed my cheek. No, she said. But I knew you were down there. Gee, I'm sleepy. I'll see you tomorrow, Larry. I'm going to have a cast. Dr. Peterson says she had the cast on for a little less than a month and all her classmates signed it. She even got me to Sign it. And when it came off that, that was the end of the barn incident. My father replaced the ladder up to the third loft with a new strong one. But I never climbed up to the beam and jumped off into the haymow again. So far as I know, Kitty didn't either. It was the end, but somehow not the end. Somehow it never ended. Until nine days ago when Kitty jumped from the top story of an insurance plan building in Los Angeles. I have the clipping from the LA Times in my wallet. I guess I'll always carry it. Not in the good way. You carry snapshots of people you want to remember or theater tickets from a really good show or part of the program of a World Series game. Carry that clipping the way you carry something heavy. Because carrying it is your work. The headline reads, call girl swan dives to her death. We grew up. That's all I know, other than facts that don't mean anything. She was going to business college in Omaha, but in the summer after she graduated from high school, she won a beauty contest and married one of the judges. Sounds like a dirty joke, doesn't it? My Kitty. While I was in law school, she got divorced and wrote me a long letter, 10 pages or more, telling me how it had been, how messy it had been, how it might have been better if she could have had a child. She asked me if I could come. But see, losing a week in law school is like losing a term in liberal arts undergraduate. Those guys are greyhounds. If you lose sight of that little mechanic mechanical rabbit, it's gone. It's gone forever. She moved to la, got married again. When that one broke up, I was out of law school. There was another letter, a shorter one, this time more bitter. She was never going to get stuck on that merry go round. She told me it was a fixed job. The only way you could catch the brass ring was to tumble off the horse and crack your skull. If that was the price of a free ride, well, who. Who wanted it? P.S. can you come, Larry? Sure. Has been a while. I wrote back, told her I'd love to come, but I couldn't. I landed a job in a high pressure firm, low guy on the totem pole. All the work and none of the credit. If I was going to make it up to the next step, it would have to be that year. That was my long letter. It was all about my career. I answered all of her letters, but I could never really believe that it was really Kitty who was writing them. You know, no more that I could really believe that the hay was really there. Until it broke my fall at the bottom of the drop and it saved my life. I couldn't believe that my sister and the beaten woman who signed Kitty in a circle at the bottom of her letters were really the same person. My sister was a girl with pigtails still without breasts. She was the one who stopped writing. I'd get Christmas cards, birthday cards. My wife would reciprocate. And then we got divorced and I moved and I just forgot the next Christmas and the birthday after the cards came through, the forwarding address, the first one. And I kept thinking, gee, I've got a wire Kitty, and tell her that I've moved. But I never did. But as I've told you, those are facts that don't mean anything. The only things that matter are that we grew up and she swanned from that insurance building. And that Kitty was the one who always believed the hay would be there. Kitty was the one who had said, I knew you must be doing something to fix it. Those things matter. And Kitty's letter. People move around so much now. It's funny how those crossed off addresses and change of address stickers can look like accusations. She'd printed her return address in the upper left corner of the envelope. The place she'd been staying at at the time she jumped. A very nice apartment building on Van Nuys. Dad and I went there to pick up her things. The landlady was nice. She had liked Kitty. The letter was postmarked two weeks before she died. It would have gotten to me a long time before if not for the forwarding addresses. She must have gotten tired of waiting. Dear Larry, I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and what I've decided is that it would have been better for me if that last rung had broken before you could put the hay down your Kitty. Yes, I guess she must have gotten tired of waiting. I'd rather believe that than think of her deciding. I must have forgotten. God, I wouldn't want her to think that, you know, because that one sentence was maybe the only thing that would have brought me on the run. But not even that is the reason sleep comes so hard now. When I close my eyes and I start to drift off, I see her coming down from the third loft, her eyes wide and dark blue, her body arched, her arms swept up behind her. She was the one who always knew the hay would be there.
- [53:52]
Meg Wolitzer
That was the last rung on the Ladder by Stephen King, read by John Benjamin Hickey. We spoke to Hickey before His reading. He liked working with a piece that tapped into King's understanding of family.
- [54:04]
John Benjamin Hickey
One of the things that struck me was how deeply compassionate and heartbreaking and what a beautiful love story it is between a brother and a sister and their childhood and something that happens and his memory of it. This is that vein of Stephen King's that Stand By Me came out of, I believe, which is a look back at childhood that is filled with sentiment but never becomes overly sentimental. No sentimentality. And it's such an unbelievable fine line he treads. I just think he's a master of.
- [54:41]
We all do.
- [54:41]
But this form is something that he's not often, you know, associated with a kind of a romantic family story.
- [54:49]
Carrie Coon
It has such powerful imagery which he sets up very early. How are you going to approach that? So we have that.
- [54:56]
John Benjamin Hickey
I think you just paint the picture for yourself and hope that it's channeling.
- [55:04]
Through to the audience.
- [55:05]
Carrie Coon
Had you read this story before?
- [55:06]
John Benjamin Hickey
I think I had. It was familiar to me. I've read an enormous amount of Stephen.
- [55:11]
King, as most of us have.
- [55:13]
Carrie Coon
What did you like about it?
- [55:14]
John Benjamin Hickey
My goodness.
- [55:14]
My Stephen King story is like so many others, but it's, of course, dear to me. I was probably 14 years old when the Shining came out in paperback, and I bought it at the Safeway grocery store in Plano, Texas, and it was a metallic cover and I read it in broad daylight. It scared the living crap out of me, so much so that I think I had to make a palette in my brother's room and sleep on the floor. It so unnerved me and it sort of set off my love of literature. I mean, it was like maybe the first kind of big book I read. I was intimidated by the novel form, and it opened my eyes and opened my brain, my heart, and made reading exciting for the very first time.
- [56:01]
Meg Wolitzer
That was John Benjamin Hickey backstage at Symphony Space. It's nice when a writer like King, so well known for supernatural horror, displays his skill in building tension in a very different context. A story like that accesses a different kind of fear than the one poked by killer clowns and a sadness unlike the one which visits when facing zombie pets. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for joining me for Selected Shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimpkin, Vivienne Woodward and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the Deal, performed by the Deardorf Petersen Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space.
- [57:30]
John Benjamin Hickey
SA.