Revenge19 min read
A Rose, a Neighbor, and the Burned Music Flyer
ButterPicks12 views
I never expected a single rose to change everything.
"It’s a holiday," Frank said, voice greasy. "Why are you rushing home, Jaina?"
I kept my umbrella tight, rain slicing down in thin lines. The street smelled like oil and old noodles, and the city lights blurred beyond the windshield. He leaned forward, trying to touch my shoulder. I scooted away.
"Don't," I said. "Please."
He laughed, a wet sound. "You don’t need to be so cold. Come have dinner. We'll celebrate."
"I said no, Frank." I put the bag into my lap and pushed the car door open.
He grabbed the car handle. "Jaina, wait—"
I shut the door and ran.
I thought about the news, the headlines flashing through my phone all week. "Stay inside." "Don't walk alone." They were always wrong for me. My building was five minutes from the office. Everyone said living near work was smart. My rent said otherwise.
By the time I reached my block, Frank was already there, leaning at the curb with a single red rose between two stained fingers. He had followed me, despite the "stay inside" warnings. He had waited.
"Jaina," he called with a grin that should have made me gag. "Happy Qixi. Don't you want to accept a rose?"
"No," I said, voice small. "Please don't."
He half-whispered, half-commanded, "You look beautiful tonight. Let me treat you like—"
"I have a boyfriend," I blurted without thinking, and then I froze. I didn't.
A figure moved in the shadow under the stair. He stepped out like an actor taking his mark. Black cap, black jacket, low collar. He had a face that didn't fit the dark—clean cheekbones, narrow eyes that folded in a way that made his expression unreadable. He smelled faintly of smoke.
"She does," the man said.
I ducked behind him on instinct, breath sharp. "I do," I said to Frank, clinging to the stranger's sleeve. "He's my boyfriend. Don't come near me."
Frank's grin went thick with annoyance. "Really? Since when?"
"Since always," I lied.
"Fine," he spat, pushing me. "You’ll regret this." He walked off, leaving the wet rose on the ground like a dropped promise.
The man looked at me without surprise. "You're safe," he said.
I never learned his real name that night. For reasons I told myself later, I called him "the neighbor." Later still, when everything broke, he told me to call him Sage.
He stood too still to be comfortable, and yet he moved with a neatness that made me notice everything: the way he crushed out a cigarette on an old flyer pasted to the wall, the slow tilt of his head, the precise reservation in his voice.
"Thank you," I said. "I—"
"Go inside," Sage said. "Lock your door."
I did. I watched through the peephole as Frank drove away, muttering curses into his phone. I watched Sage walk back up the steps and slip into the darkness. I didn't sleep that night.
*
In the days that followed, I saw him when the weather turned sour. He appeared in the drizzle, at the corner next to the bakery, on the stair landing outside my door. He never smiled. When he did speak, his voice was small and cold.
"How come you always walk this way?" I asked once, following him for a few steps.
"You look safer when you're with someone," he said.
I laughed too loudly. "You sound like a compliment."
He didn't answer. A silence settled between us that was not quite empty.
The city was scared to breathe. A string of murders had found people out at night; the papers called the killer methodical. A woman strangled in her own home. A man stabbed in a dim alley. The pages were full of grief and thin details. They blamed strangers. I blamed the dark.
"Do you ever eat?" I tried to make conversation.
"No," he said.
"Why?" I pressed. I wanted small things—answers that made him human. He didn't give them.
*
There was a man at work who made that impossible.
"Jaina, you left this a mess," Frank said one evening, sitting across my desk with the sort of intimacy that scraped. "If it's incorrect, you fix it. Learn fast."
He leaned in until his breath fogged my cheek. "Let me help you out after hours. We can go have dinner. Just you and me."
"Frank, stop," I said.
He smirked. "You won't find a better mentor. You don't want to ruin your future for being 'too shy.'"
I left early from the building once. I ate a bowl of noodles at a corner shop, my shoulders finally relaxing. My phone shook with a text.
Frank: I see you. Wait. I want to talk.
My heart sped up. I scanned the street. The shadows seemed to tighten.
"Do you need help?" the noodle man asked, concerned.
"I'll be okay," I lied.
When I walked through the alley toward home, the roses on the balustrade scratched my cheek. A smear of wet soil left a mark near my mouth. I turned up the stair and smelled smoke.
"Hey, you're back early!" Sage called from the corner. He looked like he hadn't left the spot.
"Hi," I said, and because the city had a way of sharpening fear, I confessed nothing about Frank.
"Why that route?" he asked.
I told him I had been in a hurry. Then I lied and said nothing about the text. He looked at me with thin curiosity.
"Watch yourself," he said. "Some people don't know when to stop."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"My name? Sage," he said finally. "Now go inside."
He left.
He was not normal. He was not ordinary. But he was my neighbor.
*
Work pushed me into a corner. They scheduled a team dinner for Qixi and decided anyone who refused was missing in action. I said I wouldn't go. I meant it. Then Frank found me by the office exit, clutching a single rose like proof of fate.
"Don't be rude," he insisted. "We are celebrating."
"Please, I told you—" I started.
"Stay. Just for a drink. Be civil."
I turned to leave. He blocked me.
"I asked you first. So answer me."
I stepped back and almost ran into Sage.
"I have a boyfriend already, Frank," I lied without planning it. "Move aside."
Frank's face curled. "Don't lie to me. I'm the one who's giving you a future."
Sage set one hand between us and said, in a voice that dropped like an anvil, "Stop."
I had expected him to say nothing. I had expected him to step away. Instead, he moved forward and put his hand on Frank's chest with the same casual force someone uses to close a door.
"You tell her to stay away," Sage said. "Now."
Frank's face went red. He pushed, punching up into Sage's jaw. Sage didn't flinch. He grabbed Frank, then squeezed the man's face like a fist paper-dolling the worst of him into silence. Frank grabbed at air, startled.
"You don't know what you've started," Frank hissed, and then he fled to his car, leaving the rose to be trampled under tires.
I cried until my lungs were sore. Sage's hand brushed my shoulder, brief and almost accidental.
"Don't," he said quietly.
"Thank you," I said. I meant it in the simplest way: a handful of words for a handful of seconds.
He only nodded and left.
*
"You're quitting? On such a small thing?" a coworker named Lena laughed when I walked away that week.
"It's not small," I told her.
"You're brave," she said.
"Brave?" I repeated. I was not brave. I was scared until being fired seemed less frightening than staying.
I walked home that night carrying a box of my things. The stairwell smelled like smoke. A burned advertisement slapped to the wall: STAR & MOON MUSIC—Grand Opening. Someone had rubbed out half the letters with a cigarette. It had been there for days. I had never thought about it that way before.
My phone buzzed. It was my mother. "Jaina, did you see the news? That piano shop—"
"I know," I said. Her voice trembled. "Mom, I'm fine."
"Are you staying with someone? Are you safe?"
"I'm okay."
She hesitated. "Your father will be back today. He called earlier. He—"
The words hit me like a stone. I had not wanted to hear his voice. He had been gone fifteen years. The calendar circled around the date like rust.
I slammed the door and sat on my steps, breathing hard, thinking of nothing and everything.
*
When he came to my door a few nights later, it was nearly midnight. He moved like a shadow that belonged to no time.
"You made cake?" Sage asked, raising an eyebrow.
"I made two slices," I said. "One for me, one for... I thought maybe you might come by."
He lingered for a long time at the door. "Do you want me to come in?"
I looked at him. "Yes."
He stepped inside like a guest who had already been invited years ago. He watched me with a patient, strange attention while I fumbled with plates and spoons.
"You don't have to sit with me," I muttered.
"I won't eat sugar," he said. "But I'll listen."
We ate in quiet. The city outside the thin windows seemed to wait.
"Do you have family?" I asked suddenly, afraid and needing to hear small things.
His face did something like a shutter. "I have a past."
"That's not an answer."
"It is for now." He said the word "now" like a small alarm bell.
"What's your birthday?"
He seemed to think it over and said, "I won't be here by then."
I laughed—nervous and bright and foolish. "What does that mean?"
He shrugged. "I move." He smiled then, for a blink. I kept that blink for days.
Before he left, he said softly, "Happy birthday."
I was thirty. He turned away and closed the door. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard him move down the hall, the muffled rustle of a cigarette crushed out on the burned music flyer.
*
Two days later the world shifted.
The morning news played like a bad chorus. The piano shop owner's death was on the front page. "Strangled in her own home," the anchor said. The camera cut to police cars, yellow tape, neighbors whispering.
I read online until my fingers cramped. An anonymous poster linked three recent murders to another unsolved case from fifteen years ago—the case my father had been part of. My head slid.
My father, Mikhail Cox, had been in prison for crimes I'd been told about like facts. They called him guilty in the printed papers I had read as a child. They wrote about ruined people. But the post suggested something else: that the new killings were revenge, targeted at people involved in the old crime.
I swallowed a cold glass of fear.
I tried to keep busy. I made pastries to sell at the square to earn money. The city smelled of rain and oil. The square lights blinked like tired eyes. I laid out my bakery goods and watched ghosts pass.
On my birthday evening, I boiled beans and made pie. I set a slice aside with my name scratched on a napkin. I waited by the door. I had pinned so many hopes on small human things that it had become almost dangerous.
My phone rang.
"Hi, sweetie," a voice croaked. "It's dad."
My throat closed. I answered.
"Jaina? How are you?"
My hands shook. "Fine."
"Listen, Nelson invited me—"
The name hit like a brick: Nelson Martinelli. He was a man who mattered: chairman of the Martinelli Chemical plant. A man who smoked in glass offices and wore suits that cut light. The same man who had been in the background of my childhood as someone my father had met. The name sounded like an old bruise.
"You're meeting him?" I asked.
"He's celebrating today. He wants me to come. He called me by mistake." He laughed weakly. "I might get something to help you. A little money—"
My voice got loud. "Don't go."
"What is wrong with you? It's your birthday—"
"Don't go," I repeated, because something cold had set in my chest, and it was not only fear.
He couldn't hear me. The line cut.
I was a disaster of motion. I called everyone. The police. The emergency number. "Someone is going to Nelson Martinelli's plant," I cried. "He invited my father. Tell them to evacuate!"
"Do you know the address?" they asked, dry and machine-like.
"Martinelli Chemical, Plant Two—" I rattled the address. They asked the usual questions like a ritual. I told them everything I could.
I ran.
I took a cab and told the driver to go as fast as he would. My lungs burned, my feet hurt. At the gate there were men in suits and security. My father stood on a platform with his shaking hands, a smile like someone who didn't believe he could take up space.
My voice cracked: "Dad!"
Before I could cross the crowd, a distant hum rose, a machine sound like a wasp. A drone—a tiny black insect with a metal heart—flicked over the crowd.
"Run!" someone screamed.
I saw a shadow rise. Cars and suits became motion and then everything became thunder.
I don't remember falling. I remember the smell—chemical sweet and metal. It felt like drowning in sunlight.
When I woke up later, the ground had a taste of iron. People were screaming. There were bodies. The headlines on the air said seven dead, dozens hurt. Nelson Martinelli was among the dead.
I heard someone call my name and saw a man in a uniform with hard, tired eyes. He pinned a badge on his chest—Carsen Walter.
"You are hurt," he said. "Can you tell me what happened?"
I tried to explain. My words were gray paper in the storm.
"Someone called. Someone said the plant would be bombed."
I thought of Sage. I thought of the burned flyer. I thought of the way he had crushed out cigarette butts. I thought of the city that had swallowed story upon story until nothing was true.
*
They arrested him soon after.
Sage—Sage Kovalev—was not dead. He had been a ghost from the start. He had a hidden name, a hidden life, and a slow, dangerous plan.
I saw him on the evening the police brought him in. They pushed him in like a question they weren't sure how to ask. He sat in the interrogation room like a man inside a box.
"You are Sage Kovalev?" Carsen asked.
He answered with an even calm. "Yes."
"We have evidence," Carsen said. "We have drone footage. Eyewitness accounts."
Sage looked at me through the glass. His expression didn't change. He reached for a cigarette in a way that suggested habit and then stopped.
"Why?" I demanded across the room. "Why the killings? Why Martinelli?"
He said nothing at first. Then he spoke like someone reading a letter aloud.
"My mother was a teacher," he said. "She was hurt. She was…used by men who smiled in the sun. People who left rifts where there should have been homes. The life we lose becomes the life we must take back."
"You killed innocent people," I shouted. "You killed mothers, fathers—"
"They were parts of the same machine," he said. "They fed on the weak and closed their eyes."
"You killed my father," I said. "You killed him."
He blinked slowly, like a man seeing the world through a thin veil. "He wasn't supposed to die," he said. "Not like that."
I felt the ground tilt. "What do you mean?"
He told a story as a man might tell the weather. He had watched for years. He had read names and followed the old case file. He told how the old crime—our town's old wound—had never healed. He told how men lived and prospered while their sins multiplied like mold.
"Revenge is laundry," he said. "You wash and you hang and you watch it dry in the sun. But some stains need fire."
I couldn't answer that.
He wasn't remorseful. He wasn't cruel. He was steady and precise as a blade.
*
The trial was a theater built from grief.
Carsen Walter stood at a lectern and spoke to a bank of cameras. "We pieced the case together with old footage and new forensics. He staged explosions. He hid in plain sight."
Sage kept his head bowed. There were rooms and rooms of reporters. The public gathered outside the courthouse in the way that people gather to watch weather change—compelled and helpless.
At the end of the first day, a reporter pressed a microphone to his lips. "Sage, why did you do it?"
He looked out at the crowd with something small and almost human in his eyes. "Justice," he said, like a clock striking.
I don't know why that moment made everyone gasp, but they did: men leaned forward, women covered mouths, cameras clicked like a hive. His voice ricocheted.
"Justice," he said again. "I've waited a long time."
When the evidence came forward, it turned like a knife. A tape emerged—old footage from a motel room camera that no one had known existed. The motel owner had kept it under a loose floorboard out of fear and shame. He turned it in the day after the plant exploded.
The tape told a different story.
It showed men and a woman in a room. It showed a struggle that people had misread as a darker thing; it showed my father running in to stop it. It showed him being threatened and then taking the blame—a man covering the guilt of others because he didn't want the truth to destroy the rest of a child. It showed the cowardice and complicity of men whose faces could never hold the daylight.
When the tape played in court, it was like a thunderclap. The room filled with a sound like breath being sucked out of lungs.
Nelson Martinelli watched with a face that turned the color of old paper.
"You lied," a woman shouted from the gallery. "You built your company on others' bones."
Nelson stood. "It's not—" he tried to say.
But the court had already seen him with his own hands, his own hesitations. He looked small in the glow of the display, a man who had eaten too much and then gasped.
The hotel owner—Broderick Amin—stood in the doorway and watched himself for the first time. He had hidden the tape from fear of being dragged into the old scandal; now he could no longer hide. He told the court everything, voice shaking as a child might confess a stolen cookie.
"At first I feared the police," he said. "I feared what would happen. I kept the tape. I couldn't live with it."
The courtroom was a bowl filled with faces. Some were scarred by memory; others were blank. Cameras panned. Outside, a mass of people pressed to see who would be punished, who would be asked to bow.
And then Nelson Martinelli's punishment began.
It began not with a sentence or a gavel but with a thousand small gestures. He had always been a man of public image. He had paid for banquets and donated to festivals. He had smiles that took pictures and gifts that erased rumor. The court dissolved those smiles like sugar.
"Nelson Martinelli," Carsen said into the microphone on the courthouse steps as the verdict aired live. "You profited from silence. You took someone's life."
Nelson's face drained. He opened his mouth and then closed it.
"Who among you will stand with him?" shouted a woman from the crowd. She had a scar across her hand, the kind of mark that comes from working and surviving. People began to shout other names and call out the wrongs they had long swallowed.
They carried placards. The news vans hummed. The courthouse steps became a stage where accusation unfolded without end.
Nelson tried to speak, practiced words like "mistake" and "regret." But the crowd had been waiting a long time to hear truth, and the air had been poisoned with grief.
"Say it," a man demanded. "Say what you did."
He tried. "I'm sorry," he said, voice cracking. "I'm—"
"Too late," someone cried, and then a wave of voices took the space like a wind.
The journalists asked him questions. Kids with cameras asked him why he had let ruin happen. A television anchor asked him directly if he had used his influence to silence the motel owner. He managed a half-hearted denial, but his face told the real story. It folded as if under pressure. People around him took videos and posted them. His company sent out bland press releases, but the heat of the crowd had already opened a new kind of fire.
Nelson's breakdown was not one cinematic fall. It was a slow, shameful erosion: a board of directors resigned; investors severed ties; the bank froze accounts. Statues were toppled—not by violence but by the quiet removal of name plaques and donated chairs. He watched as charity checks were returned and as the governors who once smiled with him turned away.
On the day of his public reckoning, he stood on the courthouse steps facing a sea of faces. He tried to hold the microphone, but his hands shook. People recorded him, broadcast him, mocked him in the exact language he'd used for years—declaring himself a man above others, a pillar.
"People," Nelson said at last, voice small. "I am sorry."
A thousand voices answered with mockery and grief. Phones lifted and streamed the moment live. A line of survivors stood like a broken fence, and one by one they told stories of the little deaths they had lived because of men like him.
One woman stepped forward and spat in his direction. The crowd gasped. He flinched and tried to wipe it away. Cameras captured everything. A feed went viral in seconds.
"You should have spoken," someone shouted. "You could have saved people."
Nelson's face crumpled like paper in rain. "Please," he begged, a sudden child lost among strangers. "I'll give you money. I'll name buildings. Please—"
"Money can't stitch skin," the woman said. "It unravels."
He fell to his knees. For the first time, cameras showed him not as power but as a man who could not trade his way out of the past. He clawed for forgiveness as if it were a thing that could be salvaged from the mud.
Witnesses recorded the scene: the once-powerful man begging, the children of his victims watching through the press barricade, the survivors refusing his pleas.
As the court concluded and the judge read sentences that would be carried on paper for years, the public punishment continued beyond law. The town, which had once applauded his speeches, now named his company in contempt. Businesses removed his portrait. Where he had built foundations, people scraped off the plaques.
It was messy. It was public. It was humiliating. It was more than paper on the wall; it was the unmaking of a myth.
Sage watched the court from a separate room, eyes empty but not satisfied. "It wasn't for him," he said quietly when Carsen asked about his feelings. "It was for the ones who couldn't speak."
Carsen studied him. "And what about you? Does this ease anything?"
Sage looked at the floor. "Nothing eases, detective."
*
Frank Nichols had his own public moment, smaller and sharp. After I left the office, his name spread through social feeds. Someone recorded the shove at the parking lot. The video showed him being manhandled by an unknown neighbor and then fleeing like a cartoon villain. The clip had millions of repeats fastened to scorn.
At the office the next week, our new manager stood at the door with a stack of printed notices. "Effective today," she told everyone, "Frank Nichols has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation." People clapped with the soft sounds of relief.
He tried to argue on camera and in emails. He begged for his job. The company terminated him in a week. The cafeteria—where men had once looked the other way—now refused to let him sit. He attempted to apologize on social media. Comments filled it with laughter and disgust.
One day he stood in the lobby with roses, like a stage prop, and tried to tell a line of people how sorry he was. The security guard insisted he leave. People recorded him in his broken suit and put the footage online. The man who had thought himself untouchable discovered that shame travels faster than money. He had no more influence.
Two punishments, both public, both different: one a civic unmaking, one a social folding. Both were satisfying in the pale way of justice.
*
As for Broderick Amin, the motel owner, his punishment was quieter and yet cut deep. He stepped into the police station voluntarily with the tape folded in his hands like a confession. The police escorted him into an interrogation, and he wept openly.
"I hid it out of fear," he said. "I can't live with it."
The prosecutor filed charges for obstruction. He was escorted out into a crowd that watched him as if he carried open wounds. He apologized to the families in court, and even his apology was wrapped in shame. He was sentenced to community service and fined. He stood in the square to speak to children about responsibility, a small penance for a large silence.
*
Sage Kovalev's punishment was not the public shaming the others underwent. His case moved through a different current. The legal wheels turned and turned. He was tried, found guilty, and condemned. The judge read the sentence with a voice like gravel. In the end, the law closed over him like a lid.
But there was something else inside him that broke before the gavel could finish. When he learned about the motel footage, when he learned that my father had not been the monster he'd long imagined, something like a crack opened inside him. It was not vindication. It was a new, darker sorrow.
He had spent years building a machine of wrath—maps, explosives, hidden drones—until he convinced himself he was an instrument of balance. The truth collapsed his architecture.
Sage looked at photos of the motel tape as if at a ghost. He began to cry.
"He thought he was right," Carsen told me after. "But the moment he knew the truth—that innocent men had taken blame for others—he unraveled."
In the holding cell, after the cameras and testimony had gone home, Sage sat on the bench and put his head in his hands. For a long time he said nothing. Then he whispered something like an apology that reached no one.
"I'm sorry," he murmured. "I thought I was giving back what was stolen. I was wrong."
The doors clanged and in the newsrooms, people debated whether the law could carry the weight of a life destroyed by vengeance. Some incensed voices called for death. Some called for study. For my part, my rage had hollowed. The city wiped its face and tried to breathe.
Carsen sat with me in my kitchen for tea. He was a man who had seen too many times how messy truth could be.
"You wanted to protect your father," he said, turning the cup between his hands like a coin. "You tried to stop him from going to that plant."
"I tried," I said. "But I couldn't stop the explosion. I couldn't stop them all."
He looked at me with the sort of tired kindness that does not heal but helps. "What would you have done if you knew?"
"I don't know." The answer was small. "I don't know if anything would have been different."
*
Months later, the town tried to knit itself back together. Martinelli Chemicals folded like a paper boat and then sank under the weight of lawsuits. The board resigned. Statues were removed. The piano school never reopened. The burned flyer faded into the wall and then was peeled down in a last attempt at cleanliness.
My father—Mikhail Cox—had been exonerated by the motel tape. It came too late. He had died in the explosion, and the law could not breathe him back into being. The court read his name as an innocent man instead of the guilty one printed on old sheets. The piece of paper that once bound him to shame was ripped up and returned, but it could not bring him back to me.
I sat with my mother on the day the state announced the new findings. We sat together in a small apartment with a kettle between us like a small, thankless lighthouse.
"At least it's the truth," she said. "At least his name is cleared."
I opened my mouth to argue that names do not undo ash. Then I closed it. There were too many funerals already.
Sage was sentenced. Broderick paid for his silence with a fine and community service. Frank Nichols lost a job and, with it, the easy access he'd used like an entitlement.
Nelson Martinelli had been forced from his pedestal. He tried to speak again and again into the void, but the world now knew a different history. It ate his donations and returned his money with interest.
As for me, I moved. I left the building on the top floor that had been a harbor and a cage. I left the city where the burned flyer had been crushed by a cigarette and where my neighbor had once smashed a rose under a car tire.
Before I left, I wrote a small note and slipped it under the door where Sage had once listened. It said, simply, "I forgive you. But not because I forgot. Because I don't want to carry your weight."
He never replied.
*
I took with me the memory of small things. The cake I had made for my birthday. The way his hand had brushed my shoulder once and done nothing else. The burned Star & Moon Music flyer. The smell of smoke that lingered like a secret.
In the new city, I worked in a kitchen and learned how to coax sugar into shapes that did not break too easily. I made pastries and sold them on a warm bench. People came and bought things and left. Sometimes they returned to say hello. Sometimes they said nothing.
One night, a man in a dark coat sat on the other end of the bench and watched me shape an almond tart.
"Do you remember a burned flyer?" he asked, voice low.
I smiled without turning. "I remember a lot of burned things."
He laughed, small and honest. "I used to crush cigarettes on paper like that."
"Why?"
"Old habit," he said. "Old grief."
We sat in silence. The city beyond the bench hummed with a different kind of tired.
"Do you ever think about what would have happened if you had stayed?" he asked.
"All the time," I said. "Some ways the city is kinder now. Some ways it's worse."
He kept his eyes on his hands. "I used to think revenge would be a light. It wasn't."
"What was it, then?" I asked.
"A weight," he said. "A stone that you tie to your chest to keep warm because you think it might be your only heat."
I looked at him.
He looked like someone who had been forgiven in a way that did not erase what he'd done.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked.
"I forgave," I said. "But forgiving is not forgetting. I'm learning to make room for both."
He nodded, like someone had given him a map.
I folded the tart into its box and reached for his hand. He took it like he had been waiting.
"Happy whatever-you-call-it," I said.
He smiled a little, and the smile was not the one he had for the city at large. It was small and private, the kind that might hold.
We ate the tart like two people keeping time with cold spoons.
Outside, someone dropped a scrap of paper. It twirled in the wind like a small burned flag and landed near the gutter. I watched it and thought of the Star & Moon Music flyer and the night a cigarette had changed the course of everything.
The city breathes. People bruise. The rest of us try to keep from being crushed.
I kept my eyes open.
The End
— Thank you for reading —