Spindling
Harvey and Leslie went up to the roof. It was a hot, windy day, and they thought it would be nice to be up there by themselves, lie back in lawn chairs, drink chilled champagne from a water bottle, and read.
The stairs were heavy with a musty attic aroma. Harvey carried his lawn chair in a large duffel bag over his shoulder as he made his way up. He saw the place where a door should be at the top of the stairs. There wasn’t a door there. There was just a blast of rectangular sunlight from the door frame, which blinded him when he saw it. He thought about UV rays and that warped, nauseated, cheated feeling he used to get at the beach when he’d lie out in the sun too long.
Leslie closed the bottom door that led to the stairs from the building‘s 3rd floor units.
“Don’t latch it,” Harvey called back. “Let’s not accidentally get locked up here.” He grumbled, more to himself than to her.
“I won’t,” Leslie said back. She fixed the lock so it wouldn’t close over the clasp. It made a dinging sound that reminded her of tin be crinkled under a printing press. “I’m coming,” She said. She said, “It’s so dark down here,” as she stepped up the concrete stairs into the attic room’s dust and mold.
“It’s lighter up here,” he said. “Come on up.” He was standing on the edge of the door-less doorframe with the sun behind him, lighting up all around him, silhouetting the outline of his body. It made Leslie think of a mild crucifixion, whatever that meant. It was just something that popped into her head. Everything was more or less miffed, in her experience, when it came to conflated explanations for what went on in her head.
Leslie thought, “I’ll just mosey on up there.”
The roof was crackling with blinding sun. Harvey’s shoes crunched over the hard gravel-like tarry substance that was laid in sheets on the building’s flat roof. He moved insouciantly, yet with a deliberate gait, setting the chair down and spreading out the plastic legs like you might a tent.
“I think this here is right above us, this spot,” he called back.
“Yeah.” Leslie was trailing behind with her chair in a duffel bag over an arm. “Where those pipes are sticking up. Those are our vents, probably.” She thought she might’ve been breathing too hard for the…
