Take flight

The buildings stood in grandeur. Sheer, sheer glass cliffs rising straight from the sea, so far that the riding waves of people were nothing but ripples on a huge calm and the sun was masked by their enormous presence. Past these cliffs an intangible stench of pollution was wafted to and fro on the wind over the huge city, wrapping tendrils of smog between the sky scraping towers and causing the light on the city’s cold concrete bed to dance and dapple. Yet in the air above these cold glass citadels a bird swooped, desperately edging itself forward, faster, to freedom. It seemed strangled, smothered by the oozing black smoke that infiltrated the skies. And had anyone below given the bird more than a moment of their buy lives they would have seen it flutter hesitantly in pain before it soared into the heavens, touching the face of god as it disappeared into the ceaselessness of eternity.


The girl gazed vacantly at the street below her, its yellow taxis and colourful cars so far beneath her that they appeared to be bugs, scurrying under a toddler’s stare. She allowed a small glimmer of a smile to flitter across her face briefly, before turning towards the forgotten piece of paper that lay on the Adirondack table of her balcony. The sun’s first grimy rays had begun to paint the sky amber and beyond the Chrysler buildings peak her observant eyes made out the form of a bird, fluttering in confusion in the air above Manhattan. Glancing once more to the paper, she smoothed its crumpled edges, her hands repeating an action that seemed thoughtless, as though it had happened many a time before. Indeed, the page was worn and yellowing, and two eyes bored out of it, the face they belonged to worn and haggard, sallow and sunken in, from years of torture. Pencil markings darted across the page skilfully, the creases in the boy’s clothes drawn in so deftly that they appeared to leap out the page. She remembered the first time she had seen him, sitting on the same balcony that she was now, dreaming vacantly as only a dreamer can do.

He had been lying on the bench outside the building, listening to the waterfall tinkling as he tried in vain to get to sleep. Watching as he shivered in the rain, she had been captivated, a fish drawn in by the bait. He was just a boy, humming softly into the night’s sky, an unwanted urchin; Scars were laced up his wrists, the skin of his arms bruised and battered, like leather on an over used pair of boots. His black hair was matted with the freezing rain, and his grey eyes were dull with worry. He was tossing over his situation, dredging up the last of his already over exerted energy to mutter curses into the night, praying that they would land on his cruel mother, who had banished him to this death filled life; the life of a street rat.

Death had been a welcome end for him. Smothering his body with a warm blanket. Enshrouding him in comfort. Filling every crevice. He had been safe. For the first time in his life, he had been safe. Drifting up to heaven on wide spread wings, a bird escaping the bleak cityscape. Yet she had stopped him. Not out of any last modicum of motherly love that she had left, but to punish him. How dare he escape her? Escape the hell filled life that he had then inhabited?

And so the bird had been shot down, and he had awoken to the pounding fists of well-meaning doctors, thrown out of the ice palace to live an even slower, more painful life. The thing that really got to him was the cold. Never ending and bitter, inside and out. Nothing kept out the chill because he was as icy internally as physically and that's what really hurt. Not the reason his mother kicked him out. Not the reason he looked up at the pillars of darkened glass and wondered if perhaps if you could fall from there... Would wings catch you? Or would it be a welcome end many storeys below?