The Balcony

She's out on the balcony because the flat is too quiet for the inside of her head. Below, a stray dog decides something is worth barking at, then changes its mind halfway through. The railing is cold enough that she notices it, then doesn't.

Her phone is face-down on the ledge, screen already dark, the way it's been for the last twenty minutes since she typed call you tomorrow, promise into her father's chat and didn't send it. Tomorrow will be exactly as full as today was. She already knows that much.

Three floors down, someone is dragging a gas cylinder across the ground, that specific metal-on-stone sound, and for a second it's the same sound from twenty years ago, a different building, and she can't tell if she's remembering it or just remembering that she used to remember it.

A light comes on in the flat directly across the gap between buildings — someone else awake, someone else not sleeping for their own reasons — and goes off again almost immediately, like they thought better of being seen.

She picks the phone back up. Doesn't call. Doesn't delete the message either. Just moves it from the draft into nowhere, back onto the home screen, where it will sit until it doesn't.

The dog starts up again, more convinced this time. She lets it, listens until it loses interest on its own, the way it always does.

Somewhere past the water tanks, a train she can't see sounds its horn once, long, and she thinks — not for the first time — that of all the sounds in this city, that's the one that has never once meant anything for her. And still she waits for it to finish before she goes back in.