Work Text:
Recently I was unexpectedly dreadfully ill, and essentially confined to bed for many days. It's a strange sort of existence, alternating randomly in a sleep-wake-sleep cycle. There I rediscovered a place on the edge of dreaming. I don't go there every time, but visit often enough that even I remember.
●●●●
The sky is lumpen grey, the buildings and rooftops are grey; I can see them on tiptoe through the filmed windows here on the 17th floor. I'm smaller here, more wiry yet softer, and unformed, almost larval. I shuffle bare feet across wooden parquetry, gritty with traces of settled smog and windblown ash from the Buddhist temple crematoria upwind; my soles blacken daily despite my mother's chiding.
I walk slowly through the kitchen over dingy grey tile, onto the open back balcony. The domestic maid is out running errands at the market in Klong Toey, and I am not interrupted by her mother-hen squawk as I scale tied bundles of yellowing newspapers, to carefully sit on top of the washing machine. My perch is higher than the parapet, and I can easily see out and over and down without difficulty, as far as the streaky smog allows.
It's a chaotic vertical maze of grubby storeys in a thousand peeling pixel shades, lazily spinning air conditioning units weeping long black mascara streaks of condensate, matching dapple-white dynastic pigeon stipple. Scattered colour is rife but faded airborne jetsam – broken fuschia joss sticks and burnt-edged remnants of propiatory gold-leaf paper cartwheel past. Tiny, dusty, jasmine-draped spirit houses, dizzyingly and ubiquitously perch atop window ledges and water tanks.
This high above the street, the raucous anthill buzz of commerce is muted to a hollow roar, punctuated by tinny horns of traffic tiny as grains of sugar, and filtered through the ambient rattle of air conditioning fans. The blood-warm gusts caught captive in these canyons eddy upward in crazed helices. Wisps tug free from my sensible juvenile bob, strands catching on rose-quartz plastic frames and stubby lashes. The harsh breezes are redolent of burning propane, wet leaves, overripe fruit, and the fecund humidity of the nearby Chao Phrya.
I inhale deeply of this soupy, wild air, and clutch the rough edged concrete with small blunt fingers. Clambering slowly, I straighten atop the washing machine, smudged feet just touching the balcony railing, palms almost flat on the ceiling. The skirling winds tug at the frayed edges of my faded pyjamas, frilling upward for long moments.
A tentative smile wakes jerkily on my lips. I take a small, neat step forward. Off the washing machine, blind toes clenching on the cool steel railing.
Then another – a larger step.
Down.
Down is strangely quiet. As if, having finally matched speed with the furious winds, there is no longer any need for roaring or bluster.
Pigeons explode soundlessly past my face in the fall. Storeys blur upwards and past like the teeth of a zipper, and my pyjama cuffs flutter madly, fit to tear free. The grey cloudscape seems to flatten like a great granite door. Midair, I turn lazily from curled on my back like a washing cat, to belly-down, my back bowed in a gentle arch.
Parchment-pale arms stretch out to the sides, buffeting and juddering at terminal velocity. The sugar-crystal cars below are thumbnail sized, and I can now almost hear them.
My hands uncurl like fern fronds, anticipation sparking in eyes the depthless umbrous sienna red of tea gone cool or forgotten forest pools.
The headlong plunge downward and doomward shifts to a different vector curve, a hair-fine crescent-moon cut.
Asymptotic with a raspy, hissed tearing that is felt, not heard.
A blade-sharp arc, up.
Cruciform silhouette against the pearIscale clouds, piercing past the glassy sky.