Roof on the Lake
by Darby Harn
Another body drifts down the street, the skin all jelly and trailing off him in the water like ghost rags and you see interstate signs too, big, broad green ones. I-94, I-90, ADDISON ST. EXIT 1½ MILES. A woman in a red T-shirt down to her knees swims out to it from across the street on Pierce. You look at the man on the roof next door, scary old man, picking at the dry skin on the back of his neck. He shakes his head. The sign flips on her. The current takes her down into the fork of Damen and Milwaukee and she disappears and you inch a bit more up the roof. And yesterday you thought, it's a good thing the curbs are so damn high.
"Won't be long now," the man says, and you want to tell him to shut his mouth, just shut the hell up. Your grandmother said the same thing, yesterday. She sat in her recliner in front of the TV where she'd been since the stroke and there was no getting on the roof for her.
The scary old man laughs. "It's over."
Look off toward the rocket trail spreading out like gauze behind the towers, like little islands now, those dark, sharp volcanic bits sticking out of the ocean.
"That's how they do," he says. "Leavin' us all down here. They gonna lie and say we never existed."
That woman had the right idea. There might be some snack machines on the higher floors downtown, abandoned cafeterias or restaurants with their breathtaking views. A place to get out of the sun. If you could find something sturdy. Buoyant.
Big satellite dish comes floating down, probably off one of those big condos on Willow. It's like a bowl drifting down the street. Like a boat. You look at it, and then downtown. So far away. The Hancock burns out of control. You're going to have to get in the water soon anyway.
You scoot down off the roof and push through the sludge of trash and dead things and wet peels of skin like shaved ham out of the bag and crawl into the dish. You snatch a street sign out of the water DO NOT ENTER as the current sweeps you into the intersection. It's too long and too heavy but you don't have anything else so you put it back in the water and you look back at the man, to see his reaction.
He stands up and shouts, "Hey! Hey!"
Paddle harder, as if he could catch you. In the back of your head you know going into the city is going the wrong way, but where would you ever find a shore? It's an ocean you'd be crossing now. You watch the rocket arc overhead, up and up and boom, the lower half falls away and they're free.
Copyright © 2006 Darby Harn
Darby Harn graduated from the University of Iowa, and studied in the Irish Writing Program at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. His fiction appears or is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Shimmer, and the anthology Jigsaw Nation.