The second day of rain in the early summer. Through the apartment windows, Christian hears diesel engine downshifts. Car tire puddle splashes. Squeaky brakes coming to a slow stop. The sounds as the world shuttles itself through a gray, rainy dawn.

He is rushing-rushing-rushing, but unable to make up time. Even as he spins around his apartment, a piece of him is still dragging, fighting the pressure to go to work on time. 
Christian looks at the street below to check the weather. The sidewalks are dotted in open umbrellas. They look like blood cells moving in the vascular pathways of the city. They flow in currents: an eddy near the bus stop, a tidepool at the intersection, a dam burst as a light turns green.

Rain hits the side of the building in pulses. Christian’s heart, in the safety of his ribcage, listens and tries to time its own beats to the rhythm. But the rainfall varies, and his heart is constant, so at best it can only time two beats.

Meanwhile, Christian is on his own diversion: he’s picturing his 10-year-old self, Chrissy, on the couch, watching this 30-something man put on socks at the kitchen table.

“Yeah, yeah,” Christian whispers.

Chrissy shrugs and picks at the lint on the couch. “It’s just so boring,” Chrissy says, “It's not what I thought. I thought it’d be more fun.”

“It’s fun sometimes. But you have to pay for the fun, so you have to do a lot of not-fun stuff too.”

“I wanted a dog.”

“Me too,” Christian says, knotting his left shoe.

 

Three loud knocks by the window scare Christian from his daydream.

Christian looks up and rushes to the window to inspect it. He puts his face closer to the glass. No cracks. No marks. Strange. The knocks were so sharp, he thought for sure there would be some damage.

Three more knocks. Right in front of his nose. Then a blast of fog on the window, a gray circle that expands rapidly then disappears.

Christian stumbles back from the glass, his adrenaline dizzying, his heartbeat in his ears. He’s confused, scared, and just as he catches his breath, he notices the clock on his cable box.

He’s late for the bus.

He grabs his bag and rushes out of his apartment. The stairwell echoes with the sounds of his breath and his quick footsteps. Then he blasts out of the side door of his building.

The rain is cooler than the ground, so clouds of steam float in places of stillness—in a parking lot, over a patch of grass, down a dark alley. Christian pretends he’s walking through a cloud, floating high above this street, suspended between the earth and the stars. He takes a deep breath, feeling the damp air fill his lungs.

As he raises his umbrella to let a woman by, a gust of wind tugs the umbrella from his hand and sends it scraping across the sidewalk. Christian races after it, but it tumbles in the wind.

He feels the rain pelting his jacket as he runs, the raindrops sinking through his hair and onto his scalp. After an awkward chase, he catches his umbrella.

 

Christian finds himself standing in an alley, surrounded by brick and cobblestone and the ghostly forms of steel fire escapes.

As he raises his umbrella, the rain subsides. Curious, Christian raises and lowers his umbrella twice. The rain responds. He tests it again. Open: the rain slows. Closed: the rain picks up.

“It’s a trick!”

Christian looks down the alley, and then spins to look behind him. He sees no one.

“Made you look!”

Christian feels a chill as a drop of rain slides down the back of his neck. He hears a rustling noise above his head, and watches a dark footprint press into the top of his umbrella.

Christian shakes the umbrella, lowers it, and then snaps it shut.

It’s a woman. She’s standing in the middle of the fog with Christian, smiling at him, shaking the rain from her hands.

“That was close,” she says. “I almost fell.”

“I’m sorry,” Christian replies. “I didn't know you were up there.”

“That’s a fair point. I can see you’re a little frightened,” she says. “So, I’m sorry for that.”

The woman stares at Christian. She’s athletic, built strong, in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, yet she moves lightly, like a dancer. She’s barefoot, and looks weathered and sun-freckled, like she’s finished a decade backpacking through Africa, Death Valley, or the outback—somewhere close to the sun, with warm wind and tough locals.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asks.

Christian squints in confusion. He’d immediately assumed he didn't know her. His brain shifts from superficial reflection to a deep inspection of memory. He catches a glimmer: more a feeling than a scene. Like a song, a season, or wisp of smoke.

“Come on, you’re close,” she says, smiling and tilting her head.

His mind floats around the glimmer, hovering in hope of a sharp, sudden detail. Maybe a dream? Yes, a recurring dream. A walk through a playground with orange leaves falling like rain. A bike ride through a forest on a crisp spring morning. A hopscotch afternoon along a tidepool coastline. A dream about adventure.

“Petra.”

Petra nods and laughs. Then she hugs him. It’s then that Christian realizes it’s raining everywhere, but not on them.

"I was worried you'd forgotten," she laughs. She pushes him away to inspect him. "You look old! All grown up, with your tucked-in shirt and shiny belt."

"I'm not old! This is just what I wear to work.” Christian tugs at his shirt, and sucks in his spare tire a bit. “Maybe I got a little old. You look a little older too, but you move the same. Where have you been?”

“Everywhere, Christian!” Petra says.

She tells him of life on the wind, free runs over ocean swells, the way she learned to glide through the thin oxygen of craggy mountaintops. The smells and dizziness of the streets of India, the silence of snowy Alaskan nights, the wavy-sharp heat of desert sand. The people are the same everywhere, she tells him.

"They may eat different foods or live in different houses, but most of them are worried about the same things, Christian. They touch each other in the quiet moments when they need to know. They laugh so hard they can't breathe. They cry when they're so full they burst."

She grabs his hand and leaps toward a fire escape. Christian floats with her, though his legs are awkward in the air, unlike Petra's, which are controlled and powerful.

"I don't remember how," he mumbles.

"What's there to remember? You just run."

And suddenly they're on the steel staircase, Christian's feet clanging as he chases Petra toward the roof.

 

In the din of her laughter, his heart is pounding against his ribcage, fueled by the sudden rush of adrenaline. It is alien and surreal, this abrupt return to youth. He is out of breath early, and his legs are burning, but his body responds to his demands.

He realizes: he is moving again. Running to the roof of a high rise in a rainstorm. Rinsing off a layer of rust and dirt. Sending air to the deepest passageways in his lungs. Remembering the feeling of flight.

Soon, they are standing on the edge of the building, staring out into a sea of sharp glass corners and chipped patches of brick and stucco. The fog veils the buildings in the distance—giant and silent forms waiting in the haze.

“It’s like the center of everything,” he says, between breaths. “A clearing in the forest. A field.”

“Fields are temporary,” Petra says. “One day small saplings, little pioneers, sprout from the ground and race to the sun. Soon other plants can thrive in their shade.”

Christian pictures trees bursting through the rooftops. Moss and dirt covering the ruins of the city. Vines twisting around exposed rebar. Honeysuckle hiding chain link.

“You’re in the clearing,” Petra adds. “Do you think you’re more a sapling, or a worker ant? There’s no shame in either.”

“I’m an ant,” Christian answers. “When I was little, I think I wanted to be the pioneer. A white streak against a blue sky, rocketing toward the light. But I think I belong on the ground now.”

“Maybe," says Petra. "Are you ready again?"

Before Christian can respond, Petra leaps onto a ledge and walks out on a bundle of wires. She does a handstand while Christian catches up.

Soon they are running again—rooftop to rooftop, puddle to puddle—weaving their way along the city canopy. Whenever Christian stumbles, Petra is there to prop him up again. He follows her along drain pipes and clotheslines and antennas, between the raindrops, and through clouds and mist.

When they stop next, Christian no longer recognizes where he is. The rain has stopped, and the orange sun is rolling down the sky. They’re sitting on the backs of two gargoyles when Petra asks, “Did you miss this?”

Christian nods. “It feels good to run again, to feel like my insides are going to burst out of me,” he says. He swings his legs, and taps the gargoyle’s flank as if to spur him to life.

Petra looks at him and smiles. “We could leave here, you know. I could take you to see the things at the edges of the world.”

Christian stops swinging his legs.

“I know you didn't want to before, but maybe now, right? I saw you talking to yourself this morning. I saw you in the window. I knocked to wake you up.”

“You scared me,” Christian says, watching the treetops dance in a park below.

“We could go. I could take you. I know you don’t sleep well,” Petra continues. “I’ve seen you staring at the light on the ceiling, next to your girl—”

“Her name is Nora.”

“...next to Nora. But I can help you. You’ll run till your legs ache and you’ll have no choice but to sleep. You’ll lose your breath in the thin air on mountain trails, but I will help you catch it again. I will pick you up when you fall.”

Christian lifts his eyes to Petra’s. He sees her smile, mischievous, urging, and sincere.

"I can't," he replies.

“But you could,” she says.

“I could have. Maybe,” Christian says. He’s staring west, toward the bones of a building. Far below, construction workers, in reflective vests and yellow hardhats, speckle the area. Some of the workers move slowly along the building’s exposed steel girders. From where Christian and Petra are seated, the scene is silent, and for a moment, they can’t tell if the crew is erecting the building or demolishing it. Then they see a crane slowly raise another girder from the ground.

“I’m a groundling. We’re not made to soar above. We build up,” Christian says, nodding at the scene below. “From high above, it’s hard to know growth from decay. It takes time. Maybe it won’t be clear for a long time still, but Nora and I are building our tower. We’re climbing to the sun. We’ll only know how we did at the end.”

Petra leans forward and rests her chin on her gargoyle’s head. She looks out at the horizon, now aflame with the citrus shades of the sunset. She closes her eyes and nods.

“Well I hope I see you up here again,” she says, standing. She pulls Christian’s umbrella from her back pocket, opens it, and then pirouettes on a satellite dish. “Just singin’ in the rain,” she says, turning to Christian. “Ready?” She flips the umbrella, catches it by its point, and offers the handle to Christian.

Christian stops dusting off his pants and grabs the handle of the umbrella. “Ready.”

“Then hold on.”

Suddenly Christian is spiraling toward the ground below. The wind fills his ears and his cheeks. He does not scream as he tumbles; he breathes and tries to find a point on which to focus. He looks up. Petra is a silhouette against a bright blue sky, streaked in mauve and salmon. She is watching him fall and waving with both hands. Christian spins away, and his umbrella catches on the wind, pulling his arm hard into the air.

Just like that, Christian is standing in the alley, in the rainy morning, drenched from chasing his umbrella. He turns, expecting to see Petra again, but she is gone.

Christian looks up at his umbrella and watches as Petra’s footprint rinses away. Then he spins on the ball of his foot. In the gritty scraping sound filling the alleyway, Christian smiles and hums a song from childhood.

From high above, Petra watches Christian’s umbrella drift slowly to the end of the alley. It pauses when it reaches the river of other umbrellas traveling through the dawn. Petra smiles when Christian turns against the current. She watches his umbrella until it turns down another street, and then she disappears into the morning.

Image Credits:

• "Umbrella Day" by Gregory Bastien is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
• "canalside church, stone gargoyle" by byronv2 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
• "Scary Alley..." by Alex Cheek is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0