This is my first piece of Flash Fiction.
Bananas
Kal spent much time on the roof, near the fire escape. The home was a two cubic meter sleep pod three floors down in the tenement. Up here, at night, the town was alive, and the sky was big. You could look down on the Holo ads and their neon colors glaring out on the streets below. Snatches of proximity triggered a sales pitch set off by the homeless shuffling by, who don’t have the credit to buy any of the stuff being pushed at them.
Kal’s roof was a story taller than the building across the street. It was the movement that caught Kal’s eye. A slight figure, skinny like a teen, dressed in black. It, or they, started on a further roof and leaped from the shadow of a chimney stack onto the roof across the street, its tiles slick with recent rain and reflecting all the colors of the lights of the town. That jump must have been five or six meters across a side street.
The dark figure walked the thin roof ridge, barely ten centimeters wide, wet with the rain, and slick tiles dropping away on both sides. It almost looked like they were having fun or showing off. No one should be that confident.
Halfway along the right ridge, they stopped. Below them was a dormer window, its little pitched roof jutting out toward Kal’s tenement block. The figure slid, or maybe surfed, down the tiles from the ridge to the top of the dormer. They walked along to the very edge, before squatting down and then sitting on the very edge of the tiles.
Kal could see now that it was a teenage girl. She was no more than seven or eight meters away and two meters below him, just across the void of the street between them. Kal hadn’t moved, and she hadn’t seen him sitting still in the dark.
The window below their girl’s legs was dark. It was old, a sash window made of four smaller panes; behind the glass were grey curtains obscuring the room.
The girl turned and lowered her legs to the sill, and then let them take her weight. Holding the edge of the tiles with one hand, she squatted down on the thing ledge outside the window.
Kal could not see what she did, but seconds later, the bottom half of the window slid up, and the girl gave a little bounce with her legs. She slid inside the room legs first. It was elegant and silent. Kal could not look away.
The girl’s hand parted the drapes and slid the window shut before stepping aside and out of sight.
Twenty seconds, thirty seconds, the girl appears at the drapes, parting them to slide the window up. She bobs down again and then reappears, holding a handful of bananas, the ads in the street below picking out their bright yellow skins.
Behind the girl, a bigger figure appears—a man—but it is hard to make out in the dark room.
The girl twists slightly to get one leg out the window first and then bends to get her head and shoulder out.
The figure in the dark room moves slowly closer.
The girl reaches up and puts the bananas on the roof’s edge above the dormer.
Then, the figure in the room rushes forward. The girl is thrown out into space above the street with a shove. She twists in the air onto her back, facing the window from which she was just thrown. Kal sees the shock on her face.
She starts to fall.
She hits the street, but the sounds of the ads playing and rain on the roof around Kal mask the sound.
The figure at the window, a big-built man who appears to sleep naked, reaches up, slams the sash window shut, and draws the drape.
Above, the bananas sit on the edge of the roof, abandoned.
It has been years since Kal had a real banana that didn’t come from a packet mix.