Miri stayed at Liam’s house the night before, and Liam’s the only one with a car, so he drove Miri home in the morning while I slept in. I‘ve started sleeping on the floor in Liam’s room since I’ve been staying at his house. I remember hearing the rustling of backpacks and things being put into them, the softened closing of doors and drawers, hushed voices, water running briefly upstairs. Morning light carries a lot of chlorophyll from the maples in Liam’s yard and gives most of the room a soft, green hue. I sat up and watched the shadows of leaves sweeping the dusty carpet.
Miri must have thought they had woken me up, because she apologized when she saw me. She was silhouetted in the window and it looked at first like her hair was short again like it was when we started hanging out in the cafeteria, but it must have just been the way it fell. She said she just had to get some clothes and sketches for stuff we were going to add to the Wishing Well, then they were coming right back. I rubbed my face. I was still half asleep or something.
Once we were finally inside the abandoned part of the business park again, we noticed a ladder for the first time. It was in a dead end, off to the right in the second hall where we usually hung a left, so of course we never saw it. The hatch at the top wasn’t even locked.
I climbed up to the roof where it was all bright again. Miri followed and then called down to Liam but he was out of earshot, so we just started across the roof to see what the view was like. For some reason, there were seagulls all over the place, maybe even a hundred of them. I ran toward them and they would take off in an awkward flutter, squawking. They would fly around like a tornado above the roof and settle back down on air-conditioning units farther away from us. I threw them some of a granola bar as a sort of apology but they just fought over it and that made me feel worse.
Miri started painting them on the roof, there was a pretty big area that was free of any machinery. She did simple V-shaped birds at first, walking backwards as she sprayed, and then started giving them more features, like eyes and beaks, as she went. The closest ones were completely stylized with facial expressions. I started painting some too and soon we depicted a towering flock of them. Finally, she spray-painted a human figure throwing food up to them, dwarfed by their mass. I looked over the depiction of myself, mostly green and featureless expect for the squiggly hair and the backpack. Liam poked his head up through the hatch and said something but we were a little too far off to hear. Then I signed the tag “MUCK! 2006” with hard serifs pointing in at the bottom of the “M,” like they were trying to keep the tag dug into the roof there forever.
