Escape

ESCAPE

A man chilled on an old rusted iron fire escape in Providence, Rhode Island, gazing into the streets only two stories below him. The man’s tattooed arms lead down to his hands one of which was holding a pen. A pad of paper was resting on his lap. A joint was in his other hand. He lifted it to his lips and leisurely puffed. The man held the smoke in for a long while and then let it out with ease. As he did, the smoke encircled the air and slowly disappeared as it floated up above and out of sight. A jacket barely cushioned the man and his pad as he sat on the iron slats of his fire escape writing and puffing—a half dozen scribbled pages, lettering squished in and was printed sideways some of which read: 

On the fire escape across the way might have been a mirror image at one time or another; but if that was true it wasn’t any longer. A person sat on a beat up fire escape on the third floor. Her peach and hot pink color clothes were slightly grimy, in tatters, and she also held a pen; though, it was hollowed out and held between her lips. The pen was connected to an old, beat up soda bottle as she wrote in her mind with the smoke that trailed out from her nose, and her mouth, and her homemade pipe. Her thoughts disappeared as quickly and quietly as the smoke, which, encircled her head; and, like the man across the way, the smoke, too, disappeared as it floated in the same direction. Perhaps the wind also carried her invisible words up above and out of sight.

A short distance below in his squad car was a police officer. He observed; but, for whatever reason, at the time, he did not particularly care. He was a beat cop with not much drive on this night—as stark and rigid as they come.

A few groups of teens swaggered down the street one group on one side and the other headed in the opposite direction on the opposite side. They were wild and rowdy and unaware of the people on the fire escapes as they passed underneath them. They merely continued on with all of their rowdiness about them and paid no mind to their surroundings—police included.

Beyond the fire escapes in both directions there were similar houses lined up and down the block with an occasional car that passed by; the street ran straight and the cross roads could be seen for a few blocks on; but, then, was tapered out of view for the street became curved right where the abandoned factories began. Along the way, as in all inner cities, there was a never ending row of telephone poles that stretched along with the street, every now and again one would jut out with some anomaly from a car hitting it or perhaps just because it was created that way. The sound of traffic, gunshots, and music could be heard in the not so far off distance.

Around one of the corners, down an otherwise unnoticeable alleyway, was a group of overly talented graffiti artists—spraying away their cares onto the grimy canvas alleyway walls and junky artifacts that were strewn about. Spray cans were on the ground, the caps off and carelessly thrown to the ground, and the fingers of the artists were stained with paint. A man stood peering around the corner, on the lookout for cops, his right hand resting on his piece. He did not move. The two people on the fire escapes remained. The man kept still and barely moved but for his pen. The girl on the fire escape stared into the open air like a gargoyle overlooking it all but seeing nothing. The cop still sat and stared into his computer and then glanced around. He was holding a cell phone to his ear but didn’t seem to be speaking at that moment.

The man who wrote was nearing or just surpassing his 30s. He grew up in the city but was determined not to make it all he knew. His name was Dimiour Gikos but he was known as D’jour around the city. He was tattooed, and when he wasn’t sitting, he was tall and walked briskly. Underneath his Yankees hat his hair reached out from the roots and down in braids so sharp that it seemed as if they would never become frazzled or frizzed out. D’jour’s face was not oval it was more elongated yet proportionately correct with beautiful hazel eyes. He was clean-shaven at the moment but was known to wear a goatee or sometimes a line beard. He was a writer of stories who depended on his surroundings and experiences to write. After all, one can only write about what he knows or what he can imagine; yet, what he imagines is based on what he knows.

Across the way, the lady began to stir; she was no longer still. Her name was Eley Theria. Once, people simply called her Ellie; but anyone that knew her was long faded from her life by now. Possibly the only people who knew her name now was D’jour and the postman. He had received junk mail for the building across the street on a semi-regular basis—mostly writer renewal notices and furniture advertisements.

Ellie had finished her score and was annoyed that there was no more of what she both loved and despised. She reached in her pocket and found an empty candy wrapper, which she gently pushed off the fire escape and then she cried lowly and mutably. She drew away a brown paper towel that was partially under her leg, which she had been sitting on. With it, she wiped her face and nose, opened the paper towel up again and tossed that off as well. She watched it float down.

Ellie swiveled on her slightly soiled peach colored pants and attempted to get up. She made it half way and then sat back down facing the opposite direction. Her stirring had alerted D’jour for all but an instant and then he flipped the paper and begun another page of writing. He imagined her life and things that she had been through to get to this low point. He pictured that there was some hope and some steps in her life that she would take to pull herself up.

As he wrote Ellie reached up, grabbed onto her rusty fire escape, and pulled herself towards the railing—she leaned over the side and looked down at the people swaggering over the cracks and lines in the pavement below. Her arms, which leaned upon the rail of the fire escape, seemed lanky and long almost as if they could reach out for a star and actually grab one. The rusty fire escape was the only thing holding Ellie out in mid-air among the stars; it squeaked with age as the woman leaned—the bottom of her forearms now stained with rust. Her face was old yet she was young. She looked at the smoke trailing off in the distance dissipating into the sky. A bat flying past caught her eye and it too had grown smaller and appeared to dissipate into the night. Ellie then looked out and up at the stars and imagined things that she never wrote down and are now of no consequence.

The bat that seemed to have dissipated did not come back, but Ellie shifted her gaze and looked for it in the spot where she last saw it. The streetlights remained on though, and she slowly altered her line of sight and affixed her gaze on those instead. They seemed to give off streams of light in a downward direction, which ultimately pooled at the base of the pole for lack of room to cast any further.

He heard the sound of creaking metal gazed over at the woman because, although it echoed slightly off the surrounding buildings, it certainly came from Ellie’s direction. She seemed oblivious to the noise—or just didn’t care. She gazed on and D’jour wrote it off as he wrote on. After a few moments he heard it again. This time it was louder and as he looked over at the woman, from her body language, she seemed to have heard it too. She stirred slightly and went back to leaning and staring into the city night. A third time his ear caught the creak of the metal and he realized it had to have been from the fire escape across the way.

D’jour then thought about her life and he wrote some more. The light from the city reached up and dulled the star’s shine. That was the problem with the city it was harder to see the stars. But they were still there—the stars. And he still wrote.

“What if the metal gives way and she were to fall?” He thought as he wrote and he heard the sound again. Then he dismissed the idea as being ludicrous but thought twice. “It would be wonderful story for writing. Would she be able to hold on to the metal as it slowly bent and eased its way down to the point where he could rush to grab her? Could he make it to her on time? Would he even have to? She could make that.” He imagined the sound that was being made could lead him to write a great story; and so he wrote:

Suddenly, the sound of the metal made a horrible grinding noise and bent away from the house as if it had the intent on letting her down as gently as possible.Ellie held on tight and screamed—she knew that the rusty iron welding had given way and thought she would die. Her arms felt as though they had stretched enough to reach those stars she had stared at for so long. The stinging pain that she felt from the rusted metal on the palms of her hands was poignant and shot through to her lanky arms reaching her shoulders. As Ellie screamed the creaking metal platform bent with a sort of stiff ease down far enough to the street where she could let go. It seemed to her like it was happening in slow motion.

Ellie’s homemade pipe had fallen with her and out of the folds in her shirt a crumpled up cigarette cellophane with her drugs. She thought she had smoked the last of it but was too high to realize otherwise. Ellie was happy for a moment until she heard the piercing sound of the squad car roll up beside her. Her fear drove her to scramble and run grabbing the cellophane but leaving the pipe. The pipe could be made again from remnants held within garbage cans. As she ran one shoe fell off and she pounded the city pavement with one bare heel and a dull pain that was virtually unnoticeable crept up Ellie’s leg like an inchworm on a leaf. She was barely conscious of it as she ran on a slight downgrade and with a sharp left through the freshly spray painted yet still filth ally. She had no thought penetrate her mind except to just keep running. She needed to get away from everything—the sounds, the smells, the city itself—just run. Ellie dodged her way through alleys and side streets, backyards and business lots.

For an instant, she was unaware of how fast she was and that she had eluded the police officer. She hopped a fence and caught her arm on the sharpness of the chain-link fence. Ellie held up her hand and blood flowed in a steady stream down to her elbow. She examined the wound, made a feeble attempt to pinch it closed, and gave up deciding instead to walk on to nowhere in particular.

As the night climbed on in hours towards the turning point of the day Ellie’s bloody arm dried and she was now in the city park. The trees grew thicker before her eyes and they waved as if cheering her on for a battle well fought. She picked at the dried blood and peeled it away bit by bit as if it were a skin to be shed. She took her fingers, pinched the scratch, and endured the discomfort so more blood could drip out--and she had blown on it to dry and peel away again. Her arm throbbed but it did not hurt as much as her heart pounded, and it was something for her to do. She was positioned limply on a tree-enclosed embankment breathing heavy still from that night’s event. Ellie’s body was telling her to stay—so for the moment she did.

She led the flow of the freshly forming blood droplets with her fingernail down her arm in the opposite direction. As it dripped she blew on it some more. She suddenly felt eyes converging on her; it was some type of night animal; though, it was more afraid of her, her heart beat faster and Ellie took a huge gasp of air into her chest. She felt as though the high was gone and now it was only her with her normal yet somehow dulled out awareness. She was nowhere near as sharp as she should have been but she felt otherwise. Some power in her being drove her to get up and move on away from that creature and that embankment. She saw its eyes and it was almost as if she could tell what the animal was thinking—but she really couldn’t. Ellie felt a breeze upon her back as she walked away and swore she heard the animal’s footsteps patter off in the other direction.

She looked at the tree line in front of her and could see car lights breaking through; the highway was on the other side. She could see the trees waving in front of the all these headlights and could almost make out the shape of each individual branch. They were holding the cars on the highway. That was their purpose tonight—to cheer her on, protect her from view, and hold the cars on the highway. Ellie turned to the left and viewed lights flickering off and on. She decided to sit and watch for a while. It was as if she were watching a dance. The shades of shadows flickered back and forth and she could make out lightening bugs dancing along to the beat of the shadows. She closed her eyes and remembered the view from the fire escape. It could not even come close in awe to Roger Williams Park at night.

She got up and walked semi-cautiously as she kept switching her view from the tree-lined highway to where she was headed in front of her. There, further on, stood the ‘Temple to Music,’ small in the distance and silent and serene in the moon-soaked darkness. As she walked closer to the ‘Temple to Music’ it grew larger with every step, and Ellie noticed columns simultaneously poked out and rose up from the night air. In the calm lake behind the temple ripples softly rolled at an angle. The lightening bugs speckled the tree-lined horizon and that line of trees behind the lake was soaking in the dull glow from the city lights. Ellie thought of the beauty of the world she was missing and longed for change.

Unexpectedly D’jour, still on the fire escape, heard something within earshot that pulled him up and out of his writings. It was a horrible metal creaking—magnified tenfold from the last creak. As he looked around and across to the other fire escape he noticed it was pulling away from the building. It was far away but closer in that instant as to allow him to hone his sight to the panic on Ellie’s face and the worry in her eyes. The bolts had pulled out of the wall. Her face was riddled with lines that were now deeper than he ever noticed they were; and all that she had worried about in the past was nothing compared to this moment.

The first jolt of the fire escape had caused Ellie to be paralyzed with fear; the next caused her to loose her footing and tumble over holding on to the rusted metal with her grime encrusted fingertips. Her help me scream echoed off of the buildings and down the street catching the ear of the graffiti artists. To them her call was like a sick cat crying at the top of its lungs. The sound reverberated down the alley and through their ears with a sharpness the penetrated their deepest being, giving chill-bumps to the even the bravest one in their team.

Although he was no expert, D’jour knew the outcome of the situation if Ellie were to fall. Within seconds, the police officer called in the emergency and was under the woman calmly shouting to her to hold on. The officer tried the front door but it was locked. He called up again for the woman not to let go and help was on the way.

D’jour noticed Ellie held on tight—as tight as she could, as split seconds mounted into seconds and a crowd gathered around her. The clanging of the ladder of the fire escape echoed in the ears of all who were near, in awe, and gasping; the escape ladder was being pulled down to the ground by the spray-painters from the alley. One had sat on the others shoulders to reach it. D’jour heard that sound and thought Ellie must feel the vibrations in her palms, fingers, and fingertips. Fingerprints of red and yellow stained the rusted, bottom rung where the ladder was grabbed to pull down. The officer pushed everyone back and refused to let them on the ladder citing it was far too dangerous and called again for backup in a slightly more panicked tone. Some of them protested but most listened for the moment.

As D’jour rushed in his window, through his apartment, and down the dark light-lacking stairwell he felt his heart pounding and lungs pulsating.

In the same moments D’jour was hammering down the stairs and he imagined a million thoughts about Ellie. How she felt her palms give way to just her fingers and tips; she was slowly slipping. She wrenched her head this way and that and saw all the people gathering below her. He thought she wondered why she heard sirens but didn’t see any flashing lights coming from either direction because in her mind she had been there forever. Thoughts were racing through his mind about her thoughts and actions. How her legs stopped flailing almost the moment she flipped over and just seemed to have hung like dead weight. How she would change her life after this ordeal.

Meanwhile, the spray-painting crew was at it again; they were attempting to climb the fire escape ladder to rescue her. The officer pulled out his tazer on the growing rowdy crowd and demanded they step back.

D’jour felt himself winded and crushed as people pointed. The buildings, the fire escape, the people, they were all distorted, like looking at a Monet that is touching one’s nose—This was what he saw as his head, heart, and lungs all pounded in rhythm. It was as if he, himself, were in one of those paintings looking into another. He made his way through the crowd that grew to an enormous density in just a few short moments. There were double the police officers there now and they noticed him barreling through the crowd; they attempted to head him off. He dodged them as the crowd shifted. He swiveled around to the spray-painting crew and attempted to assist them in another rescue attempt. They were half way up the escape when suddenly, D’jour snapped out of his thoughts as he emerged from his front door and looked up.

Ellie was gone from the fire escape. She was in mid-fall and struck an air conditioning unit before hitting the ground with a thud. He was no longer in his mind thinking his thoughts and writing them. He was thoughtless, motionless, wordless, and breathless all at once. And as D’jour stood there a single tear rolled down his cheek. He saw her body twisted and broken lying lifelessly in a pool of blood just a few feet in front of him. All his fanciful writings could not change the fact that Eley Theria was now dead. 

*NOTE: Eley Theria is a play on the Greek word: eleutheria, which carries the literal meaning of "freedom."