http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMUSjmWIx7w
The song I was listening to was "Push" by Milosh, for some reason the gentle sweeping chimes reminded me of a cityscape, I envisioned a city at night, with quiet streets. As the pace of the song quickens I started to get these images coming to mind, someone running, maybe being chased? That final buildup and release, that apex "the push" brought to mind so many fleeting images and stories I just had to write something down. What if those three opening notes in the song could be integrated into the story somehow? I began to sculpt a world around this song, the three chiming notes of a curfew alert, the steady drum beat of a stranger darting across rooftops, the hollow echoing loneliness of an empty street, and the push, a revelation.
Here's what became of it.
Curfew
Chapter 1
This
city is a different place at night. The pristine white-walled concrete
sky-scrapers and boldly contrasted advertisements no longer hurt to look at.
The corporate color pallet of sterile whites and popping reds, yellows, and
greens were lulled into a subdued, docile twilight. The wet glassy streets
reflected the traffic light’s shift; a glossy streak of red sat atop shallow
black puddles. The long walks home from my night classes were the ones I
cherished the most. Probably the most romantic time of my life as well,
everything was ideal, and I had the night to myself. I would always make playlists with music for just the right mood on my DMP and listen
to them on the way home. The songs were usually ambient electronic songs,
really soft beats, soothing melodies and reverberating chimes, it was like
someone had turned water into an instrument. Police sirens way off in the
distance, probably in another district, seemed to blend seamlessly into the
song. I marveled in the color of the night, the boggy mist blending, blurring
and scattering lights, the quiet and calm. I couldn’t help but smile. I took my
headphones off as I came to the step of my apartment building, I could hear the
curfew tone ringing out down the streets.
“This
is a message from the Public Security Service, curfew will begin in twenty
minutes, the time is 9:40PM” Followed by those three toned chimes ‘Doo,doo, doo’
My sweatshirt clung to me as
I peeled it off in a foray of static; the warm dry sheets were there to catch
me. I turned on the TV, the blaring
color poured into the dark room. Super models appeared on screen with their
platinum shined hair and flawless smiles, but after the first five commercials
for Dangst: Age Reversing Skin Cream, I turned it off. I can hear the screech
of a saxophone from the neighbors across the street. I opened my window and
shouted up at him. “Hey man, that’s a noise violation, some of us are tryin’ to
sleep!” I heard the sirens from earlier, no longer waning in the distance, but
coming up the street. The noisy musician
quickly slammed his window shut, I did the same. I rested my eyes some more,
against the sound of the muted sirens and the tapping of rain against the roof.
The tapping grew louder and heavier, I went over to the window to see how badly
it was coming down, but it wasn’t. I opened the window again, to get a better
look- a dark figure and a pair of shoes slammed into my chest, knocking the
wind out of me. I staggered back into a
desk. A young woman tumbled over me and caught her fall as she landed on her
hands. Her face obscured by the darkness that clouded the room. I heard boots
stomping up the stairwell, orders shouting, rooms being checked.
“Shit,
is that PSec?!” I put my ear to the door.
“Mmm.” She starts toward the door way and stops for
an instant. With what seemed like a second thought she grabbed me by the wrist
and asked “How fast can you run?”
“Run?
What, you’re joking right, this is- I don’t have any shoes, you- who are you?!”
Before I can move another thought out of my
mouth she shoves me out the door and starts toward the stairs. I stumble into
the flashlight beams of 4 Public Security officers. “Freeze, PSec, don’t move!”
For a moment in time I felt I was caught in some paralyzing grasp of authority,
their lights and guns beating down on me. In a panicked surge of adrenaline I
broke for the stairs. I heard more officer’s boots stomp upwards after us. I
was in awe at how fast she cleared the distance from my room to the stairwell. She leapt from step to step like a deer, she
was so quick, even under the light I couldn’t make out her face.
Gasping for air I finally caught up
to her at the roof top, my lungs on fire, wheezing out mucus. “Maybe it’s been
a while since my last jog.” I struggle to catch my breath. “Well- do you have
some sort of get-away ride waiting for you?”
I couldn’t exactly see her face
clearly, but I heard a pleasant “Hmm”, her breath still steady as if she’d been
walking a snail’s pace. Without a word she turned and with a running start
leapt to the adjacent building. I sat there in disbelief, ready to just have
the officers arrest me. I stepped to the
ledge and looked down at the barren alley below; I imagined my face splattered
all across the pavement. I took a step back and attempted to get a running
start, as soon as I saw the ledge coming closer I lost my footing in a fit of
panic and veered off to the left. “Holy shit, no,no, no, we’re not doing this!”
She shrugged and began to hustle
towards the next building, I looked behind me to see the PSec officers
trampling down the door. Without a thought I sprinted and dove from one ledge
to the other, I hung in the air for a second, not thinking about falling short
of the ledge, or how easily I could lose my footing. I slid against the coarse textured
rooftop trying to catch my momentum whilst shredding the bare soles of my feet.
I looked up and saw that she was already on her way across the landscape of
rooftops, I tried to keep a steady pace, I stuttered at every ledge like a kid
dipping his feet in the deep end. The wind rushed through my face and I slammed
my abdomen right into the ledge of the next building, a brief instant of
crunching, invigorating pain,the shock of it almost made me lose my grip, but I
dug my fingers into the graveled rooftop, scraping skin from my hands, and
heaved my body over.
Going through the thought process,
in my head, none of it made sense to me. I was totally out of my element, but
it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before , running and diving from
rooftop to rooftop, over balconies and
up fire escapes, it may sound cliché but I’d never felt so alive. The wind whipping
through my hair created a vacuum of sound, everything was quiet and still, I
could hear the sound of my footsteps, the sound of the final curfew chiming, its’
tone more soothing now, weaving through the empty streets. In the moment I
could only describe it as pure momentum. I had forgotten about the pain, my
fear of heights or the officers chasing me with guns. The more I let go and let the momentum take
control, the easier I moved. That
momentum kept me going, like a high or an energy boost, not like adrenaline but
not in an anxious fight or flight kind of way this was much more calm, much
more certain, like a wave ebbing and flowing with my movements; this was pure
freedom, pure life.
