I awoke in the sweltering heat with a massive headache. The headache was a symptom of a violent hangover. I pulled on a pair of shorts and grabbed my crumpled red pack of smokes. I opened it and squinted. Through my brain fog, I noted the absence of a lighter. With a sigh, I began the hunt for a spark, and I found three before finding one with fluid in it. I had upended a half dozen empty or near-empty beer cans during the search. I ignored them as I tapped the worn lighter against my palm. The Scorpio artwork wrap was torn halfway off, revealing the opaque white of the lighter beneath. I left my apartment and headed off to the roof, wondering absently if I knew any Scorpios.
I took the stairs two at a time, my untied shoelaces clicking with each footfall. Once I had made it to the roof, I sighed. The heat was worse here. The noon-time sun had baked the brick building all morning, and now the air shimmered around me as I lit a cigarette. It was bent, but not broken. I released the foul inhale with a sigh and palmed my forehead. Already it was slick with sweat. Taking another drag, I moved to the edge and looked down at the street below.
The traffic looked horrendous, and I became aware of the terrible honking. My skull-matter shrieked at me, and I began to retreat from the edge. My foot caught, however, and I looked down at my shoelace. It was caught under my other shoe. Irritated, I tried to yank the lace free, but instead I lost my balance. I pinwheeled my arms, but I still fell forward. Panic exploded within my head, blotting out even the pain from the hangover.
As the top floor of the building flew past me, my eyes met with those of the attractive redhead that worked at the diner down the street. I noted that she was wearing only a short, green bathrobe, loosely tied. Under normal circumstances, I would have found this arousing… but today I had much more pressing issues at hand. Her eyes were wide as her hand zoomed to her mouth. She was moving incredibly slowly. I realized then that I was also.
The first time I had met her had been several weeks back. I was walking downstairs to smoke. It had been raining heavily, and it was still chilly in the end of spring. Her hair had been shiny-wet, and I had opened my mouth to say excuse me, but nothing came out. Her beauty had stunned and silenced me. I had flattened against the stairwell wall and averted my eyes, blushing as she passed.
I fell past her window, time still seeming to pass quite slowly. The building had five floors. Idly, I wondered if I was to pass my window. For a second (Millisecond? Nanosecond? Hour?) I tried to consider the side of the building I had fallen from. There was a person at this next window, however, that shocked me as I caught sight of her. It was the redhead again. She seemed less shocked to see me this time. Her eyes seemed… amused? Maybe that wasn’t quite it. Her robe also looked different. Looser? More open? I gasped when I realized it. Her left shoulder and breast were bare. A tiny, curved bar gleamed silver on either side of her dainty nipple.
Miranda. That was the name on her name tag. I had eaten at the diner she worked at a time or two, always too shy to really talk to her. I spied her name tag from my table but avoided staring at her. I wondered why I had never tried to talk to her.
My fall continued. I fell past her and thought about how strange a day this was. I also wondered if the fall would kill me, or just paralyze me. I shrugged the thought off, reminding myself that I would find out soon enough. It was a comfortable, noncommittal sort of acceptance. Or rather, apathy. Didn’t much matter, in the end. I fell to the next window and was less surprised, this time, to find Miranda staring at me again. What was surprising, however, was that the bathrobe was gone entirely. Her nipples were both pierced, I noted. I also noticed a little tattoo by her left hipbone, just above an enticing pink set of lacey panties. Then I looked at her face. She was cackling.
Her silent cackles chilled me. She passed from my view slowly, closing her eyes toward the end and literally guffawing. My mind attacked me as I tried to process all of this. I had fallen. Miranda had been in all three windows that gravity had guided me past, and she had been different all three times. She had been in different stages of undress and had expressed different reactions to my appearance. Clearly, I was losing my mind.
My fall brought me once again past her window. This time she was pressed hard against the glass. Her tits were flattened against the glass, with her bars creating little air pockets. She wore her panties in this one still, but there was no laughter on her face. Instead, she gave me a wide-eyed glare that was just as chilling.
I was perplexed, and for the first time I realized that the pain of my hangover had been gone since the fall began. I moved past this window and felt my fall accelerate. I noticed the air rushing past me for the first time as well. It no longer felt hot out to me.
The next window displayed Miranda pressed up against the glass again, but this time her arms were also against the glass, curled up and out. Her fingers were splayed, and her lips were parted slightly. Her stare was intense… almost hungry. I fell faster.
The next window showed her to me again, almost in the same state except that her mouth was opened wider and her panties were gone, revealing a neatly trimmed bush over a dainty set of lips. The strangeness of the day stole my arousal, unfortunately. My speed increased.
A similar image greeted me at the next window. Her mouth was wider, almost contorted into a scream of rage. I looked into her eyes and thought that they seemed… oddly far apart. Also, her irises looked like a green that was too vibrant. I didn’t have long to look, though, for I was falling very quickly now. I should have hit the ground by now. I thought.
My speed increased steadily now, turning the windows into the pages of a flipbook. I watched as her mouth opened to an inhuman size, then kept opening. Sharp teeth sank into the edges of the pit that was her mouth. I watched her arms flail against the glass in slow motion. I watched her eyes change color, size, and shape. They darted through the rainbow and shifted shape until they resembled black slits in her faces. They were like horrifying cuts, gleaming black against her pale white skin.
After this window, my speed dropped dramatically. I coasted gently past an empty window. Then another. And another. I slowed more, feeling almost like a feather on a windless day. I peered into the next window. Miranda stood far back, still nude. Suddenly, she pushed off her wall, and her face morphed. Her skin lightened to the color of sun-bleached bone and her mouth dropped open again. Her sharp teeth came out, crooked and bloodstained. Her eyes narrowed into black slits and she rushed toward me. Her speed shocked me more than any of her bodily changes, and before I knew it, she had thrown herself through the glass. Her teeth ripped into my bare chest as broken glass pelted me. She put her arms around me. I felt her nails dig in. A feral growl rose in her as she tore a chunk out of me and spit it to the side. She laughed in victory and dug in again. And again. And again. And we fell, past windows I could no longer see. Thank God for that.
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