East Face, After Dark

They came back at twenty-one-ten because a form had asked them to become bats.

Tov said, “I hate the elegant hours.”

Rell said, “The dirt doesn’t.”

Spireward at night was a theatre. Pianos. Liability calls. A child asleep with a palm-print still on the glass from daylight.

Forty-one was clear. The woman ate noodles again. She had a client’s furniture and a private bowl.

She opened a vent an inch, not a privacy layer.

Rell cleaned.

The woman tapped. Rell clipped in and leaned close enough for glass-talk.

“I filed. I’m sorry I filed.”

“File the dirt next time.”

“I don’t know how to talk to work.”

“Start with hello and end with the building remained.”

Tov pretended to check a clip.

On forty-four a party mistook them for art and photographed the cradle. Rell turned her back. Photographs became ranking. Ranking became V-9s.

They finished the face.

On the roof Den Palo from Mutual was standing with two coffees like a man who had taken a wrong tram on purpose.

“I closed your tragedy box.”

“We don’t do tragedy. We do panes.”

He left the coffees. He left.

Tov said, “Clerks are getting sentimental. End times.”

Rell drank.

The city below was Glassmere’s kinder grid and the Foundry’s stubborn glow and a harbor that still had a tide.

She filed nothing.

The schedule said night.

The glass, honest, would be dirty again by Thursday.

That was not a disturbance.

That was a world.