The Last Rung on the Ladder

"The Last Rung on the Ladder" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in King's 1978 collection Night Shift.

Plot summary[]

Larry discovers his estranged sister has committed suicide. He recounts a fateful day, when the two were children playing in their family's barn.

With their parents not home, they play a forbidden game, taking turns climbing to the top of a ladder in their barn and leaping off into a haystack. The ladder is old and unsafe, but that is part of the thrill. On his last turn, Larry realizes that the ladder is on the point of letting go. By the time he lands in the hay, Kitty is already climbing up again. The ladder breaks, leaving her clinging to the last rung. Larry piles hay below her. When Kitty cannot hang on any longer, he tells her to let go, and she does. The hay breaks Kitty's fall and saves her life, leaving her with only a broken ankle. Larry is astonished when Kitty tells him that she hadn't looked down before letting go, so she didn't know about the hay. She simply trusted him to save her.

Larry tells of how his sister grew up into a striking beauty. She was supposed to attend business college but, in the summer after graduation, she won a beauty pageant and ended up marrying one of the judges. After the marriage failed, Kitty moved to Los Angeles, landing some roles in B-movies and some glamour modeling shoots, and married again, only to have this marriage fail as well. As she aged, Kitty ended up working as a call girl. Larry was too wrapped up in his own affairs to come to her aid. Part of the problem was refusing to acknowledge she had grown up: "To me, my sister was a girl with pigtails, still without breasts." Larry now reminds himself of his failure to realize the importance of family by preserving a newspaper article of his sister's suicide; "Call Girl Swan Dives to her Death", and the final letter she sent to him two weeks before she died, which said "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". Larry states that those words would have been enough to make him come running. Unfortunately, he had neglected to tell his sister he'd moved, and the letter was not forwarded in time.

Connections to other books[]

Larry relates that the farm where he and his sister grew up was in Hemingford Home, Nebraska. This is the town that Mother Abagail lives in during The Stand. It is also the town next door to Gatlin, the location of "Children of the Corn", and appears in It to introduce Ben Hanscom. It is mentioned in Cell. "1922" from Full Dark, No Stars also takes place in Hemingford Home.

See also[]

• Stephen King short fiction bibliography

External links[]

• The Last Rung On the Ladder at IMDb
• Stephen King Short Movies
• NESCom Adaption Website
• Official 2011 Trailer

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