The whole night had been a sweaty ordeal. Philip had tossed and turned in a disgusting blanket of humidity. Gone up and walked aimlessly around the apartment like a lost tourist. Back to bed, back up — back to bed, back up. Cockroaches, fatter than the guy down at the corner store, had been running around like crazy things from a novel by Kafka. He had smoked cigarettes, had a few sips of Easy Jesus, but was still a damn restless soul trapped in hell.

The day before, they had come to kill some doves on his roof. It was this guy, a neighbor that he didn’t know all that well, that had them up there, caged in some kind of an ugly looking wooden construction. Why the guy had them, nobody knows. Maybe to make duck-soup or perhaps to send a message to some eighties metal-freak in New Jersey, so that they in return could send a message back to him? People was weird, and sometimes they did the weirdest shit. 

Earlier, the same yesterday morning, he had found a secret hideaway while cooking some hot dogs with white beans. He had just stepped a bit awkwardly and had noticed that the wooden plank was sort of loose. He pulled a butter knife from the drawer and easily removed the it; the plank was kind of short. In the hole that appeared were some hidden items: a doll with needles stuck in it, an almost burnt down candle, a few dead insects, a piece of paper with something written on it that he couldn’t make out what it said — Voodoo wasn’t his first language. 

There were other people living with him in this Brooklyn, L-Train stop. One of them was a young girl that must have been sent by a church of demons to cause trouble. She had some kind of condition that made her walk across the old wooden plank like a possessed person. On top of that, she always wore her Dr. Martens boots that never seemed to off her feet. She was a good soldier — forth and back, forth and back in her empty war. There were other people living there as well. They all had their tiny bedrooms without windows downstairs — but the thing that always drove him insane was her nightly marches. How far was she going, really? At times he could have gone up and smack her in the face, but he was a nice guy and never did. 

At two o’ clock in the morning James arrived. He was one of the other roommates living in the apartment. James worked as a bartender down at place called the Trash Bar at Bedford Avenue, and he always came home drunk as a skunk — sometimes with a girl, sometimes with just a bottle. James was the kind of a guy that stood in the kitchen all day long, making dishes of hearts, livers and lungs, but ended the shift with plenty of straight shots on the house. 

Phillip joined him upstairs, since sleep was already a long forbidden tale of resignation. They had drinks and talked away like brothers normally do: “She is fucking awesome dude!” They smoked home-rolled tobacco and was laughing away like only fools in the early hours of a Monday morning could do. They were still, sort of, kind of awake at around ten in the morning when Phillip decided to take a hike and reach the roof. 

Up on the roof one could see Manhattan in the background. The Empire State building. The new towers — everything. It looked like a neckless of diamonds with some rubies and topazes scattered here and there. Phillip walked onto the roof and onto feathers of the dead doves. The sun was bold as a machine gun, and the humidity was a suffocating, wet monster. He picked up a hand full of feathers, while taking another sip of Easy Jesus. He then climbed up on the edge, sat down with his legs dangling in the air — and looked down at the people walking in-and-out of the grocery store below. They all looked so small and insignificant from his bird perspective. 

He jumped — and moments before his body smashed into the asphalt he got wings.