She didn’t know what the parade was for. People carried crosses. Flowers pink as bubble gum. The rain was coming in over the capital. She saw sheets of it before the drops got there and soaked through her shoulders, the top of her head. The black rainwater rolled down the street gutters. She had places and parties to go to. She jumped right in the gutter rainwater. Maybe the parade was for something bad that had happened, death, or in protest, perhaps it was a celebration. She joined with a skull made of sugar resting in her palms.
As the parade made its way through town, she saw a man standing at the top of a tall building, at least ten stories high. He was a small, shadowed figure against the sky. She saw him take part of the roof and drop it off the edge. The piece of the roof fell and fell towards the ground. She watched it as if it were a human body. Things happened because they had to. When things didn’t work it was because they couldn’t.
The parade made its way towards the water. It blocked traffic and people honked their horns. She looked back towards the building that touched the sky. The sky was full of the outlines of birds, and the avalanche of the clouds. She handed her sugared skull to the woman beside her and turned towards the building where the man was. The doors were locked but she didn’t let them stop her, she took the bobby pin from her hair and picked the lock. She took the stairs, not the elevator. Elevators are like being in the stomach of some creature, something futuristic, a gleaming, golden inside.
From the roof, the city glowed like an ornament. A bird heart. A fist. Around him she immediately spoke in hyperbole. Everything was the fucking best thing ever. One of the fucking best things ever was when the fog came in low and gray near the palm trees, like today. It didn’t look right, didn’t go together. On the roof with this man, she felt that everything was its most superlative version of itself, matchless, incomparable, and without equal. The bay glistened and was dotted with ferries.
She touched his hipbone and felt sure that she’d seen it somewhere before. His eyes were like green marshes, sticky and full and hot. They had things to tell each other.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked.
She let her fingers dart out towards him and then back towards her own body as if emphasizing a point. What was her point, exactly? She felt like a teenager, like she wished she had a bedroom door to lock and her whole life ahead of her. He was taking the roof off, the sticky black tar papery part of the roof. It came off in squares and he threw each square off the side. She watched. She saw the parade in the distance. She heard gunshots to the South. Planes flew overhead full of hundreds of people who were safe. She knew that she was never safe, she preferred it that way.
“What are you doing up here?” he asked back.
“I do have other places to be,” she said. It was true. Her red dress was for a cocktail party. She had cocktail umbrellas in her purse and small diamonds in her ears. She knew that the two of them, him and her, would never make it. But when she talked to him she felt her arteries. She wanted him to touch her dress. Her arteries sizzled like they were made of electrical wiring. The cocktail party would be under a tarp on a porch. There would be whiskey and ice cubes. She imagined looking across the party and seeing him there. She didn’t ask him if he was married. She wanted to know a lot of things about him. She didn’t ask if he wanted to go to the party with her. She imagined him fucking her.
“That reminds me,” he said. He kissed her. The first time you kiss someone their mouth seems too hard, not soft like you’d hoped, and you realize that you don’t know them at all, but then it is very very soft and you realize that it’s too late. It’s happened.
“Well, god,” he said.
She wonders if he can see her or if she’s disappeared. There are one thousand futures. They splay out. Each time, it is close. Each time, she’s there. She thinks perhaps she has one thousand decisions to make, and when she runs out, she will look around at what she’s chosen and it will be permanent. Then, like some piece of material, like something inanimate, she throws herself off the roof. She has places to be. Things start off small, but then they press down, they hold weight.
Laura Schadler grew up in the mountains of Virginia. She studied film at Bard College and will have her MFA in Writing from the California College of the Arts in May of this year. She currently lives and writes in San Francisco, and is working on her first collection of short stories, Everyone Who Feels Homesick. She has been published in Fireweed Magazine and Confessions of a Doorknob Queen. She wears high heels even though she is tall, likes mango sorbet, and overuses the word awesome. She has a few ideas for her first novel, which is, at this moment, entirely unwritten.
Photo by Steve Shearer