Days on the Outside

Maya woke to the city’s soft, persistent breathing. Dawn came as a watercolor smear through translucent curtains—a pale band of light that made the coffee tin glow like a small, impudent moon. She padded across the kitchen tiles in socks that had once been white, set the kettle on, and listened to the building settle: pipes clanking like distant typewriters, a bicycle bell folding into a dog’s long sigh. Outside, a vendor three blocks down was already shouting the day’s special, which on Tuesdays was a flat, sesame-covered morning cake that people folded and ate like sandwiches. The thought of it made Maya smile in the tiny, private way she kept for herself and reach for the harness by the door.

Her rigging bag looked like a syllabus for a sensible life. Carabiners gleamed in rows, a coil of static rope sat neat as a pretzel, and a leather glove smelled faintly of engine grease and old lemon soap. She checked each knot as if the knots were minor, private ceremonies: a figure-eight on a bite, a safety hitch with the tail flaked twice, a stopper knot tucked away like a shy child. It was ritual and habit and comfort. When you could trust the knots, you could start to trust a neighborhood.

Ruth’s windowsill geranium—Ruth had named it “Beauregard,” pronouncing it with a sour little aristocratic sniff—was the first thing Maya saw when she pushed open the stair door to the roof. The plant leaned toward the east, as if stretching for a sunrise that kept being fashionably late. Ruth was already there, wrapped in a cardigan that had swallowed two decades, arranging small pots like a captain aligning his fleet.

"You’re a punctual force of nature," Ruth called without turning, which was Ruth’s way of saying hello and reminding Maya that she knew everything before it happened.

Maya smiled and hooked her bag over one shoulder. "And you are a horticultural tyrant, as ever. Has Beauregard forgiven you for last week’s fertilizer experiment?"

Ruth huffed a laugh that tasted of cloves. "He’s sulking elegantly. I left a tiny umbrella on the sill because the rain makes him dramatic. Don’t look at me like that—plants have temperaments here."

The umbrella was absurd—a tiny paper canopy stuck in the soil like an offering to something the geranium resented—and it made Maya chuckle. She liked the absurdities. They were like little handholds when the city tilted.

She clipped in, checked her left-hand belay twice and her right hand once more, and drew a breath that tasted like metal and early coffee. Below, a tram rattled past and someone in a sixth-floor window banged a spoon against porcelain, a domestic drum to announce the day. Maya threaded the rigging through the rooftop anchor—an industrious bit of iron kept company by a cluster of pigeon droppings—and lowered herself over the edge. The building dropped away with a polite hiss and the whole world condensed into a strip of windows and brick and the far blue of the river.

On the face of the building, glass flashed like a river full of small, indifferent moons. Maya moved down the façade with a practiced economy: hips pivoted, heels braced, shoulder blades aligning like puzzle pieces, fingers finding the narrow ledge whenever she needed a moment to readjust. She could tell where a window had been kissed by a careless crew because the smear pattern would be wrong, the drag of a squeegee too rushed. Details mattered. Details kept you alive.