Arms spread wide, she flies, she flies!
Like a young school girl twirling in the wind. Spinning and spinning, tassels and long ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Her skirt flares about her as she twirls, joyous in the sun, blue and white and ruffled and pleated. She is a panoply of colour, yellow blouse flashing in the bright sun, ribbons in her blonde hair coming loose as she runs and dances. Her snow-white sneakers drift over the ground so fast and light she barely leaves a mark to show she was there. The other girls sing and dance as they run alongside her, each wishing they could be her on this perfect day. This glorious day, when she flies.
The sun warm on her back, warm on her face, bright in her eyes which reflect the blue of the sky as she runs, as she flies. The grass beneath her feet is a vivid green so intense it hurts the eyes to look at, its rich verdant smell drifts up as she runs and dances, filling the air with that smell that can never be recreated. Spring! Cool air, warm sun, green grass, running girls.
Such a picture of perfect joy cannot be wholly described. Watching her, the watcher wishes they were her. She smiles, pink cheeks over straight, white teeth, pale lips bent in a grin of such loving happiness that it is beyond words. She breathes the clean air, the floral air that carries the lustrous odour of the orange blossoms over the fence behind the schoolyard, revelling in its sweetness. She fairly floats as she runs. She flies!
You want to be close to her, just watching her. She is beauty, and joy, and innocent merriment in the warm spring sun. You want to be her as she flies.
Her laughter and that of the other girls rises like the song of a hundred bright yellow canaries into the cool air, carrying with it a wordless worship for the day, for the year, for the world itself. Such a pristine moment, as she flies.
Such a pristine moment that cannot last.
She flies, she flies. She flies through the air, arms spread wide, white ankle-length coat flapping behind her, tumbling and twisting and spinning like a sun-drenched school-girl. She flies, and the ground approaches and with a sudden crunching impact, she flies no more.
I gaze at her briefly, arms and legs broken and bleeding, body crushed, neck broken. Her pretty face is distorted by her terror and only now knows peace. I watch the last breath leave her body, see her broken body relax into death and then I step back from the edge, wiping my hands on my trousers.
I have no idea who she was. I don't care. She is nothing to me, less now that she is broken. Dead she held no fascination. Alive, she had been an endless source of amusement and pleading.
I walk past the dark hulks of the air-conditioning units, huffing their humid exhalations into the cool night air, past the exhaust vents and access panels, across the roof of the apartment building and into the lift engine room. Slowly and with grim satisfaction I close the door gently behind me and start my slow, quiet descent. The dusty staircase welcomes me like a lover, echoing and muffling my footsteps on each dusty stair. The quiet dark swallows me.
It seems moments later that I am on the ground floor, my access pass allowing me to surreptitiously exit via the service door to the left of the lift-well, safely outside the gathering circle of onlookers clustered around her body. I take care to ensure they do not notice me arriving, and then rush forwards pushing through the crowd.
"What happened? Did anyone see what happened?" I cry as I kneel quickly at her side, carefully keeping my knees upstream from the slowly seeping pool of blood.
"She must have jumped," someone comments. A callow youth dressed to impress in his antiestablishment gothic costume, all black lipstick and white face-paint. I couldn't have asked for a better alibi, and of course he thinks she jumped. He, obsessed with death and nihilism, rejecting sense and order to embrace, if fleetingly, the chaos of the world in his brief rebellious phase. How could he think anything else? The cold romance of a suicide pulled at his soul no doubt like gravity had pulled at her body after I pushed. Unremittingly, inarguably, inevitably. I mildly wondered how long he would maintain such a morbid view of the world, such a passionate interest in death, if I had my hands on him and slowly choked the life from him. It would be interesting to find out I admitted to myself, I'd have to keep that in mind.
"Don't just stand there, call an ambulance you idiot," I yelled back at him, taking quiet glee in the way he jumped and looked guilty. They all did. If they'd been moral and upright members of the community they'd have called the ambulance on spotting her crumpled body rather than gathering around in gossipy crowds staring and poking with their toes at her crumpled form. Humanity disgusted me, that’s why we died, that’s why we are made to die.
In the hurried rustling and patting of pockets to find a mobile phone I stood and simply walked away, smiling. She flies? No, she flew.