The Fall

The Fall

The cars look like ants. The people look like moving colored pinpricks.

What a perspective.

Every single dot down below had their own thoughts and decisions and problems and questions roiling in their minds, but from here, they were but mere dots.

Placing a distance from the world helped to make it seem so insignificant. It made her understand how some people could kill.

But that wasn't what she was up here for; to understand the mentality of a killer. No. She was up here only because it was high. That really was all.

She was on the roof of some building. She didn't remember which one, nor did she particularly care to remember. Metal railings ran round the perimeter of the roof top in an attempt to keep people from falling off. A weather beaten sign stood in a corner, saying in faded red letters "DO NOT SIT ON RAILINGS" and she spared it a glance before hopping right onto the railings and hooking her legs around the bottom rails.

"Because fuck you." She shrugged as she spoke aloud to no one in particular.

The wind blew across her face, bringing with it the smell of gas fumes and smoke... The smells of the city. The busy busy buzzing city, absolutely brimming with life.

She shrugged again as if brushing off a feeling she didn't want or a memory she didn't like.

"Time to do what you came here to do." She speaks like a reminder, again to no one. Maybe to herself.

She's wearing an oversized jacket and a pair of skinny jeans. From the pockets of the jacket she pulls out a note. It's crumpled and crinkled and yellowed. It looks like it had seen better days once, as a page in a notebook or as a piece of foolscap paper. She spreads it out with her hands and tries to flatten out the creases. Then she puts it in her cupped palms and holds it out to the city.

The note flies away from here, carried by the light breeze to somewhere.. She doesn't know where. But that's the point. She begins to regret not giving it purposefully to someone specific, but it's too late now anyway.

She watches as the note goes out of sight before she looks down again.

People like pinpricks. Cars like ants.

She unhooks her legs.

There's a minute of freedom. She can feel it, slipping and sliding in and out of her reach.

Closes her eyes.

The world goes black. Someone honks. Someone yells. But that's okay.

Pushes.

And now, there's only the fall.

---

The same day...

"Momma! Come look!!! There's something stuck on the window!" Seven year old Mindy yelled. Kaylie rolled her eyes and walked out to their living room, wiping her hands on her apron.

"What is it, honey?"

"There's something stuck on our window!"

Kaylie inwardly smirked at the idea of it being a window. The 'window' was a tiny, one paned square and it opened out sideways to a spectacular view of the walls of the next apartment block.

Said window currently had a huge, A4 sized piece of lined paper stuck to it. It had writing.

"Let's get it in, shall we?" She asked little Mindy who nodded vigorously.

She opened the window and gently peeled the paper off the window and began to crumple it up. Then she noticed that some of it was still empty so she gave the paper to Mindy. "Here, you can draw on this."

Mindy took it and ran off to her room. Kaylie smiled at her antics as she closed the window. 'The young ones were so energetic now,' she thought to herself, 'I am sure that when I was younger, I wasn't half as active.'

She had not even made it back to the kitchen when Mindy came running out again.

"Momma? What's su-ee-cide?" She enunciated carefully, face scrunched up with the effort.

"It's when a person kills themselves." Kaylie answered, "Where did you learn that?"

"From the letter!"

"The letter?"

"Yeah! The one you took from the window." Mindy thrusted the paper at her mother. "It's too hard for me. Read it to me?"

Kaylie looked at it dubiously.

"Okay. Let's read this."