A Short Fall by Jack O'Grady

A man stood on the rooftop of his 20-floor apartment building, knowing himself to be full of borders. He had ridden the train home from work an hour before, bound to the track and from the tunnels by steel, bound from other riders by skin he thought impermeable and a skull that itself kept all his thoughts bound into an arrangement he could point to and say, with confidence, “here I am.” Fresh air had drawn him up here to the roof, and the city skyline stayed him. Some wind was passing over the night and dragging all the lights into each other. He squinted to try and push the buildings back into their silhouettes, leaned against the railing as though he might catch the attention of bricks and empty windows. He knew this was not right. In fact he knew every neighborhood, each lump and skip in the city’s contours, enjoyed pointing out to visitors which streets bounded what others, how they could divide up the urban body along the proper borders. Leaning against the railing, he thought his eyes must just be tired. 

It was raining on the rooftop, water pooled beneath his old sneakers’ smooth-worn soles. 

A man fell from the rooftop of his 20-floor apartment building, slipped over the railing by accident. It took his body fewer than four seconds to reach the ground. The report filed half an hour later bound his last moments into those four seconds via dead on impact. City sidewalk transformed those pieces he considered only a part of himself into a mixture that was all of him at once. He could not be separated out again; they delivered him to the end in a bag. Down in the earth a worm fed on some tattered piece of him and tasted mineral nutrition scraped off the sidewalk where his four-second fall had terminated. 

It was raining on the rooftop, distant streetlights painted a neon memory of the sun on each passing droplet.

A man’s body fell from the rooftop of his 20-floor apartment building. The body passed four seconds before it hit the ground. Within that body, the man had made a mind he thought ended against its skull. This mind knows it is falling, imagines its dissolution and rejects the only boundary it can say to be real now that wind is rushing by so vicious that grainy city air slides through skin and grinds against bones. Thoughts catch in the rush and cling to a last, gravitational idea; an image to hold them taught before they snap, hurtle helplessly past the skull and into open air. The man is falling focused on the skyline. It unfolds to swallow him. All is so melted by motion that he cannot separate light from wind from city, cannot find the borders to right these shattered silhouettes, but instead finds himself persisting in the unintended forever of that attempt. The city is a substance, he swims into it. 

It is raining on the rooftop four seconds after a man fell over the railing. Folks are gathering in shock on the sidewalk. The man is still falling. The body is being collected and identified. The man is still falling. The rooftop is closed indefinitely. The man is still falling. A worm extends its wriggling life on the mineral residue of his flesh. A flower blooms well-fed by his grave. The man swims forever over concrete and glass and glow, boundless in this moment imagined between one mind and a city caught swirling in the wind.

Jack O'Grady is currently writing from Toronto, but grew up writing from Maryland. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before deciding that going back to school for a Masters in Information was a splendid idea. Most of his work is focused on translating vulnerable experiences with nature and time into stories that strive to question our conception of either. The hope is to soften genre and structure into something like a soup, warm and nourishing. The results have been published in Backwards Trajectory, Ghost City Review, Masque & Spectacle, Beneath the Garden and Worm Moon Archive.