Nola stairs

On this trip there were more of us visiting home than my folks have beds to bunk, so I alone slept downstairs on the livingroom couch. Nola was loosely curled in her bed a few feet off. Her pale belly fur was just visible in the slantwise streetlighting coming in through the front window. The house had been sleepiing for an hour or so. Apart from my hands tapping at a midnight laptop, it had been still. Nola stretched and woke up, an inscrutable shifting of layered darkness behind the glare of an LCD screen. Her collar gave a faint tinkling as she got to her feet. I shut my laptop and peered. Nola wasn't looking at me, but down through the diningroom and toward the kitchen and the staircase. I told her goodnight. She sauntered off. Her claws clicked softly on the hardwood flooring, then more sharply when she crossed onto the kitchen linoleum. For a moment, it grew quiet. Nola paused at the bottom of the stairs looking up. The stairs are a little treacherous; the risers are missing and a few of the paint surfaced treads wobble underfoot froma loose nail. My father installed intermediate stage in the house remodel more than ten years ago, so the slippery backless staircase was the only one Nola ever traversed. She would consider carefully before putting those stairs between her stiffening body and the back yard where she peed. After gathering herself, she set up the stairs. Her uneven footfalls sounded through the treads and the hollow space beneath like a deadened marimba. I listened, anticipating the pitch and creak of each stair from my sleeping place at the other end of the house. It was hard to discriminate between the sounds of Nola padding up the stairs that night and the same sounds from every other night, ringing out from memory in my ears. Only this time, she's headed up and away, growing fainter, until she reached the soft carpeting above and I can't hear her any more.