New and Unrelated.

"This is a blackout. Don't let it go to waste"
Foo Fighters

He lunged and missed and knew he was finished. The only thing that saved him was the shitty roofing, probably mis-laid by some drunk in the late 1950's, forgotten by everybody until this very moment now, when Gerry King tripped on it. He'd lunged too hard, and now he was going over the side, off of the roof of his father's apt complex. It was of seven Ger might have inherited someday if it wasn't for the fact it looked like he was going to die.

And then he wasn't. He tripped on that sticky shingle, and Instead of flying clear of the roof, hit the three-foot brick escarpment at his midsection. For an instant he rejoiced in his mind, thinking the physics of the event had fallen in his favor...

He was wrong.

He'd bounced forward, off the rail like a heavy stone off tumbling of a jetty. He was going to fall.

***

Mort Coolidge hated Gerry King. Hated him meanly and actively. Had hated him for a very long time. Today though, the hatred had passed into something else. A new phase with a new method had been enacted. Coolidge would inform Gerry King of this in person, just before shooting him in the face. He grabbed his keys, and the pearl- gripped Colt Anaconda his partner had given him for his fortieth birthday. He left his cell, his badge, and his service Smith and Wesson on his kitchen table. He and Gerry King would be on the roof less than ten minutes later with the Colt left behind downstairs next to a half full bottle of Johnny walker blue and two glasses.

***

It was just seconds before the pain loosed King's grip. His wiry frame flew the wall at 170 pounds. Then he'd managed to grab and find purchase at the edge of the roof. Gravity countered by bringing centrifugal force to bear, crushing Gerry's forearm just above the elbow, applying massive sudden force on a fulcrum where there was no joint. King barely had time to feature his new circumstance before reflex opened his clutch and sent him totally, finally, over the edge.

**

Coolidge wheeled aside at just the last second, but he hadn't noticed the wall. He turned quick to face the next charge and instead found only empty space where his enemy should have been. Empty space, and a very low wall.

***

He was Alive. What's more, he never lost consciousness.


He'd whipsawed over as his desperate grab snagged the inside coping of the wall. When his body-weight came to rest, it threatened to snap his arm above the wrist. Before that happened, Gerry King had let go. Instinct from the pain. He never remembered the fall.

***

It had been - he would tell people later- like sleeping without dreaming. An unnatural feeling of losing the sense of time, and just not being, until - boom - you are again.

There's no way to tell how long or what the fuck. He was like a drunk, sleeping off a king- shit bender in a standpipe. Gerry woke up not remembering the act of having gone to sleep. It was a blink. A blip. A spec of time marked only by the act of closing his eyes and opening them up again. In that blip, universes had been realized and gone extinct. Seasons had passed and passed again. Markets had collapsed and languished and restarted again. The world had lived, and continued, and adjusted in all it's gratuitous motion. A billion things had been and become and ceased to be. When Gerry King closed his eyes after falling from the roof of his own building at 415 Windmill Ct., it had been December, 1998. When he opened them again it was January 2013 and everything he'd known had changed.