heavenlystranger

Jonah sat on the quiet of his roof, smoking the last in his pack of Persephones and enjoying the ashy air, which hung all around him. He sat with his knees to his chest, but Lily Red dangled her own unknowable legs over the side of the building. He told her she was going to fall, but she just rolled her eyes at him and continued to look where he was looking, to think what he thought.
The phone was dead and Jonah enjoyed freedom from the fear of being bothered by Lenora or by his work, which would certainly be missing him, being that he had been three days absent. The city relaxed with him and as Jonah lay back against the hard surface of the roof, two pyramid-old buildings fell in district twenty. The news made page five of the next days paper.
He put his hand under his shirt and absently rubbed his stomach. He knew every ridge under there, broken ranges of flesh which were the result of some long-forgotten accident with fire, or perhaps metal. They hung across his torso like ropes and they only one he remembered at all was the thick band he wore over his heart. It ran counter to the other scars random loops in a purposeful dash, the result of heart surgery performed on him a million years ago. The doctors went into his body to fix a faulty valve and Jonah did not ever touch the scar which resulted. There was no reason for this except the silly fear that if he rubbed the scar too hard, the long-removed stitches would fray and his ribs would fall away, letting his heart out.
He did not allow himself to touch that scar and he did not allow anyone else to touch the other ones, except maybe Lily Red in the middle of the night when he decided to lie to himself about being alone. Even then, Lily Reds hands didnt actually touch him. She just took his own hands and moved them over his body.
But for the time being, the scars were forgotten and Jonah was content to touch his own stomach without feeling the old, dull sorrows and shames that usually accompanied the action. He crumpled the spent package of cigarettes in his hand, obscuring the picture of the flower-strewn maiden who beckoned out from the wrappings. He tossed it over the side of the building and let the city winds take it, fluttering it down into everything which writhed below him.
It was his birthday and he could have been eighteen or nineteen years old. He didnt know it was his birthday, though. He couldnt remember the last time he kept track of things like that, and even if he did know, he would have been content to celebrate by doing the same thing he was doing: smoking and letting the city cradle him in its upturned palm. He lay alone as everything else in the entire city grew out like a fractal around him and the only things above him were the purple-lighted guardians, who flew on their angel path high over the smoke, and who no one bothered to bring down, even though anyone who even thought about the last old war was long dead.
Jonah dozed and woke to a raindrop falling in his eye. The storms excited him and he vowed to quit smoking, as he always did when it rained. He thought about remaining on the roof to let the ashy water of the sky soak him, but he remembered he was wearing his good coat and so began to swing down off of the roof, leaving Lily Red up there to play hopscotch between the raindrops.
Before he slipped inside, he emptied his coat pockets, which were full of scribbled-on pieces of paper, into the barbecue. Jonah regarded the thing as he always did when preforming this ritual, but he could never quite figure out what it was supposed to be used for. He just emptied his thoughts into the charred bowl and let the rain wash away anything he may have written there.
Once inside, Jonah got the urge to write again, and maybe have a bath. He punctured a hole in a can of tomato soup and licked off the splatters of pulp that fell on his arm, drank, rubbed his lips until they felt chapped and pulled himself over to the old typewriter, which sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a radius of paper.
That time, he fell down into it easily. The rain washing over the side of his small tenement and the tapping of Lily Reds feet pacing the roof above served as a metronome to his thoughts. The skinless man came, stood in the kitchen for a while, but Jonah barely noticed his old, paper bag skin and black eyes. The mans footprints faded into the floor as quickly as they appeared. His thoughts clacked and buzzed around him like wooden bees as Jonah wrote into being a city that couldnt exist.
h.s.