Ch1

There’s an old man on the fucking roof.

Norah Kestrel gawked open-mouthed into the sky like a useless baby bird, rooftop gravel crunching beneath her as she sat upright. She squinted past storm clouds and smudged eyeliner, sharp face tear-streaked and crimson. Today, she had reserved a particularly horrific meltdown for her usual rooftop hideaway and had hoped to savor its ugliness in private. But there he sat amongst the morning fog and screaming birds, perched like a headstone statue atop the building’s incinerator chimney.

That had to be what- she huffed, attempting to calculate the distance from her seat on the hospital roof to his. Thirty feet at least? Surely that’s impossible, right?

But regardless of impossibilities, there he sat, unfazed like a fucking pigeon.

Her nose had found him first, hooked by the old man’s candied cigar smoke, reminiscent of her father’s. It transported her to many moons ago, a time littered with gargled screams and violent outbursts. The tobacco’s woody bite in her nostrils reminded her of the red flash of blood on her father’s knuckles. The white noise of the broken car radio. Her mother’s silent sobs.

Norah blinked hard and shook the past from her skull, eyes finding the old man again. She pinched her arm with biting fingernails and lifted her gaze to the tower once more.

There he still sat. She wasn’t going crazy. She wasn’t dreaming.

Shit.

The elder above was bowed and bearded, quiet and still like a blue belted Kingfisher. The sun glowed behind his plumage of ivory hair as it whipped and twisted in the wind while he spectated the black asphalt ocean below. At the seemingly insurmountable height, many of his features were hazy, as though he, too, was paling and made of clouds.

How in the fancy-fuck did he get up there?

Norah cinched her coat’s gold buttons up to her throat and tiptoed towards the incinerator chimney with the quiet finesse of an ornithologist. Her hands and legs stretched at sore skin, imprinted with the fossils of gravel and cigar butts.

From the base of the smokestack, a murder of crows cocked their heads upon her before springing to the skies. Glossy feathers caught the sun in gemstone green and blue glints as they flapped past the old man’s derby boots.

He trailed the birds into the horizon and drew hard on his cigar, thick as the trunk of a sapling. With each movement, the silver buckles of his belt, shoes, and sleeve garters shone. His swinging calves wore patterned dress pants and bright floral socks whose cadence slowed as Norah drew near.

He bowed his head and stilled his old tremors to listen.

Norah stopped dead in the brick tower’s shadow, a half-breath caught in her throat.

Then, with the whirring head of a great snowy owl, he swiveled about and found her below. His brows ironed flat in awe as though she were the anomaly.

They stared at one another like prey animals in the wood, eyes wide and mouths ajar. The elder glanced over his shoulder as though she might be goggling at someone else atop the incinerator. Finding only himself, his pink lips stammered and his hands rubbed his knees like knobby stones.

How in the actual damned hell.

While there were steel footholds driven into the brick incinerator, they were crumbling and antiquated. Nor’s eyes followed the rebar climbing into the heavens to his minuscule perch. The structure seemed far too weak to withstand an old man of his stature.

He was luckier still that the archaic tower no longer steamed with hospital trash and cooking body parts as it had decades prior. There was a time when the entire town smelled as dead and rotting as it often felt to Norah.

Noticing him beginning to shuffle, Norah withdrew a great breath in hopes of calling up to him, to say something, anything…

But then, with the casual, uninhibited dismount of leaving a bar stool, the old man shoved away from the incinerator chimney, however many feet above her, and plunged down into the morning mist towards the gravel rooftop.

His button-down swelled and whipped like the beating masts of a ship beneath a bright blue waistcoat, a silk scarf waving like a crimson flare over his shoulder.

Norah slapped her mouth and braced for the gore of his shriveled lungs and entrails to rupture and splatter across the rooftop. Her eyes clenched shut, and she braced for impact.

CLAP echoed a great slap of concrete against the hospital’s old bricks. More disturbed crows cawed in the distance.

Then, a throat cleared politely, just feet from her.

Nor dared to peek through narrow eyelids.

He’d landed on his feet, unfazed by the descent just heartbeats from his heels. He winced with seemingly aching joints, but he casually tucked in his loud ascot and approached her.

He’s alive.

Holy shit, he survived.

How in the hell did he survive that fall?

The old man snatched the cigar from his teeth and extinguished it between his palms where it vanished out of sight. His round cheeks were red as Nor’s and boyishly embarrassed as though she’d caught him pissing in the wind. His wrinkles bunched with shame beneath thick, cumulonimbus hair.

He has to be what, in his late fifties, sixties? she mused. And that fall didn’t kill him. He’s alive.

A multitude of vibrant tattoos crept up his throat, arms, and beneath his blue waistcoat. A small peony was tucked into the pocket. His bold colors and silver trimmings were a striking contrast to Corvid’s historic gloom.

“Apologies for the s-s-smoke,” he stuttered over the rocky terrain in his neglected throat. His voice rumbled with the lilt of a faraway land, reminiscent of the craggy boulders of some mainland against a distant sea. Its depths reminded Norah of the great, vintage purr of a sports car, like the ferocious V8s that once snarled from her father’s favorite car shows on the television. The nearly blown speakers could send shivers across her arms.

“N-no, it’s fine,” she managed, tearing her eyes from his decorated flesh.

She inhaled the remnants of his cigar on the wind and its sweetness captured her with a hunger, a jealous yearning for its fire in her throat. Her empty pack of cheap cigarillos lay crumpled in the waste bin of her office below.

“No, no, it isn’t. Tis’ your space and I’ll leave you to it,” he said with raised hands, avoiding her stare. He rushed for the door with his head ducked beneath his shoulder blades like a scolded sheepdog. Floral socks peeked with each of his long strides.

“No,” she called after his heels, pursuing him eagerly. She wanted answers. She wanted to know how in the hell he wasn’t dead. “You were here first, really. Hey!”

He spun, eyes gaping at her fingers as though they might scratch and snatch at him. But as she felt him read her wet cheeks and tomato-red features, he softened.

He knows how pathetic you are, Kestrel. You cry more than Mom these days. Pitiful.

“I don’t have the credentials to be here, doc,” he grumbled, nodding to the badge at her hip.

“Oh God, no, I’m not a doctor,” she scoffed, imagining her self-doubt breaching its already critical depths. “Are you a patient?”

“Not today.” He managed a weak smile that didn’t reach his wrinkles.

“And the key code?” She gestured to the steel door.

“Lucky guess I s’pose.” Silver glistened on his jaw, where his empty grin persisted. The handsome senior was stamped with a lifetime of lines, but none of them alluded to an existence of ample smiling.

And the roof’s entrance merited a ten-digit code. A “lucky guess” would’ve been nothing short of im-fucking-possible.

But as long as you don’t go bounding off the edge, I don’t give a damn what you do up here.

“I have to get back anyways,” she lied. It was apparent that the pair of them would make for a horribly anxious smoke break, so she put them both out of their introverted miseries. “Enjoy your cigar, really,” she said, brushing past him with a smile. He smelled of marmalade and leather polish.

Her fingers reached for the door’s handle-

“Are you alright?” he called, age smoothing his words like beach glass on the shore.

She closed her eyes, sighed, and spun.

The wind’s fingers tousled their hair, but his shy eyes found hers, shining and blue like a sky far from Corvid. His features were lengthened and sad at her leave, deepening the shadows in his cheeks and crooked nose.

“I’m better now,” she lied yet again, “but thanks.” Tears threatened to well past her lids. Heat warmed her cheeks and nose.

The ends of his mustache rose, and his bushy brows bent with skepticism. The kind soul looked like the wholesome sort who would’ve offered her sacred bucketfuls of his time to her. He was likely an excellent listener, capable of accepting and affirming her darkest feelings.

But she was certain that if space were to be offered for her bile, she’d either disintegrate within it like candy floss or harden like cement, incapable of softening for her clients or anyone else ever again.

They exchanged their porcelain grins, balanced carefully atop their inner unease. It seemed they both knew those masks well, even if their peculiar paths hadn’t crossed prior. They recognized the mastery, the craftsmanship it took to fabricate such detailed, ornate, and utter bullshit.

Her vision burned and warped with salt, sending her skittering down the stairs. She was nearly quick enough to outrun the taunting of her fact-based prefrontal cortex:

That’s right, run away. Run like Kestrels always do.