Kian poked his head out onto the fire escape. Fourteen stories up, there was enough a breeze to warrant a hoodie, weatherman's lies be damned. And sure enough, there sat Kelly, three quarters a way into her cigarette and looking out towards the west, where golden fireflies chased each other down the highway.
"You making up stories again?" Kian asked, waiting only a few seconds for an answer that wouldn't come. "I've got some water for tea if you want some."
"No thanks," said Kelly without so much as a turn in her shoulders.
Kian leaned out the window and took in a deep breath. Asphalt, faint traces of burnt rubber. In the mornings it often smelled of soap from someone doing laundry in the building next, and in most evenings it reeked of hobo piss, but now there was but clean, clean city stink. "Think one of them's ours?" he asked, looking out towards the highway.
"Probably."
"You've got yourself all froze up with worry, love. Come inside. Have some tea. It's Earl Grey."
Kelly shifted to her other hip, leaning on her knee. "You ever think about how complex this whole thing is? What do you think—ten thousand cars go by an hour. Twenty thousand, maybe? Forty if we count the other direction? Each of them got one, two, four people in them. Getting off work, going to work, going on a long trip—
"—Delivering drugs to a couple miscreants in a high rise so they spread them out to the incorruptible youth and use the funds to pay back their student loans in an unspeakably predatory system that milks them for all their worth and forces them to enter into unsavory contracts in the newest class of economic slavery..." Kian interjected. "Are you going to tell me about 'the system' again? And how we're all a tiny part in the great cosmic hooplah? Because I'd really rather you had some tea."
Kelly broke her gaze with the highway then, turning just enough for Kian to see that the look on her face could pass for a smile in some circles.
"You really are scared," Kian said. "Aren't you?"
"Scared?" Kelly's eyebrows lifted. "No. We've done this before. I'm just amazed at how easy it all comes together. It's not just the number—it's how billions...trillions of people every day all just agree to not kill each other. Not a single person on the highway today, or yesterday, or any day before that suddenly decided 'I'm going to pull hard left on the wheel.'."
"That'd be a really inefficient way to go, I'd think." Kian pointed out.
"Still. Doesn't have to be on the highway. Doesn't have to be a hard left. They all just agree to work together. Someone out there is headed this way. I think of where he came from. Where what he's carrying came from. I think of where it'll go from here, and how at some point it has to pass through this apartment. There are countless unspoken negotiations that must go off without a hitch in order for this world to function—and we all just accept that they happen."
"And you have to accept some tea. It's going to get cold."
"What time is it?" Kelly asked.
"We are..." Kian poked his head back inside. "Just shy of midnight."
Kelly rolled onto her knees and crawled back to the window. "They're late," she muttered, climbing inside before closing the window behind her.
I don't have the biggest or best music library by far, but the song I "drew" is "Midnight in a Perfect World" by DJ Shadow