The Intro

The roof has lifted another 2, maybe 3 centimetres, she said to herself staring out of the window at the building right across from her framed, paned, yellowed point of view. It was Friday and instead of chirping birds that fluttered by the trees, she was greeted with the mellow quiet of a rainy summer’s day. The smokers sat outside. No matter how often she told them to quit before their toes - or more of them - or worse - had to come off, they’d sit outside. The clouds of thick-ish grey smoke subsided in the air before that building. The one where the roof was lifting.

She’d only noticed it recently, for all the years she’d worked here. But it was undeniable now, even to her ever-doubtful mind. The roof had lifted. At first, it was barely noticeable at all - a slight dent that she mistook for her own crooked vision. Then, a dark slit appearing between the red-bricked tiles at the very top of the building and the brown-on-brown stained walls that hid an interior unbeknown to her. She’d tried to ask about the building, as subtly as she could, in case she was going crazy, but no one seemed to know what it was or what it was used for. A residential place? A funeral home? Maybe it had stood empty for the past year or so after a gruesome murder took away its living inhabitant? She could only imagine what or who would reside in a house with a lifting roof. She looked at it again. This time, she tried to peer through the white-rimmed windows, three of which adorned the wall below the roof. But all she could see were bright-laced curtains in the lower sitting pair of windows. A blackness darker than her phone screen, blacker even that the mirroring layer of milk-less coffee that was emitting its heat to the air as she continued staring, was seeping out of the very top window.

The roof had lifted.

And in the space between streamed out a clear, gas-like thickness. Like when you pressed down on a lighter without igniting the flame. For a moment, she wondered whether it was radiation - waves of it just wiggling through the air - unnoticed until babies would be born without heads. The invisible fog was creeping down the stained front, collecting itself on the sills of the three white-rimmed windows, for a moment at least, before it came spilling over the edges and now more rapidly descended to the ground.

She wondered if maybe it was flammable and whether the ever-steady ebb and flow of the smokers’ crowd would fall victim to a large blaze as they’d set it off with their cigarettes. In a few moments she ought to know. She briefly thought about alarming someone - or everyone, maybe. This could be a serious gas leak after all. But nobody seemed worried, if they even noticed. The passersby walked in and out of the hospital, dressed in baby-blue shirts and almost blindingly white pants that were always too wide around the ankles and as a result bulged up above the shoes. With their careless feet they’d trampled the gas beneath them, only for it to escape through the sides right before the explosive impact was bound to set off the chain of catastrophe. Maybe it was toxic, she thought. Inhale too much of it with too little oxygen to counter and it would choke you from the inside of your own cells - much like carbon monoxide or cyanide. Cyanide was her favourite, because it made her feel special for being able to notice its distinctive smell of bitter almonds. Not everyone could. She wondered if the gas that was now spreading its ever-growing limbs across the asphalt and climbing onto the smokers’ benches had a scent. She imagined it to smell like dampened dust, like when you run your cleaning cloth over a corner that hasn’t seen the light of day in months, maybe years. But it likely didn’t smell at all, which made it all the more dangerous, she thought.

It started twisting up the poles of the bike stands outside her yellowed pane, its vines reaching in the air and while most were falling like dying leaves in autumn, some would stay to build a bridge. A bridge in the sky - a stairway to heaven? It was a reference to its own deadliness. The bridge strengthened and the gas thickened to almost gain visibility - in just a moment from now everyone would be able to see that a bridge of some sort has formed in the sky - and would indubitably ask questions that only she knew the answers to. But she wouldn’t tell them.

She took off her glasses instead. The world appeared less yellow now. The sound of something shattering rose from below. She reached toward the railing that had now formed at the sides of the invisible bridge, to try and feel it. She pictured it soft, almost gooey, with an element of slippery wetness, an uncomfortable one. Like drying blood, thick blood dripping from the veins of a dying woman. One that contained the proof that would show her impending death in black letters on white, fluorescent screen. She’d taken blood like that earlier in the day. Then, she'd pressed her curiously wandering finger to a drop of that blood, which came spilling out of the vein when she removed her needle. She wished to feel this sensation again and leapt forward, clinging to the gas bridge. But all she did feel, and all she would feel was her own skull cracking on the pavement below.