Rhapsody in the City

The tinny voices of news broadcasts float over the dry evening air. Their outputs melding together in an electrical babble, resounding somewhere seemingly far off, somewhere in the distance. Helicopters swarm the skies, with their reinforced bottoms that ting every so often, trying to get a glimpse. They are completely inexplicable, the focus of this tumult. Whilst all around them the media furore is at fever pitch, building up and then dying down to the tune of some disembodied conductor. News reports flying around the city of a couple atop a city centre building.

He brushed her arm gently, the way you would to warm someone up who felt the cold. But she wasn’t cold, or afraid or hesitant. They stood in mutual appreciation, in complete rapture.

‘So’ she said, cautiously, punctuated by the careful adjustment of her lips ‘what happens now?’ She turned her eyes away. In the ensuing silence her eyes raised diffidently to meet his, big and enquiring. As she raised her head her lips parted slightly, ready for the ensuing reply. But nothing came.

Instead they just stood there, taking comfort in each other’s proximity. The lights and the street and the life far below them blurred into some fantastical fairground ride, circling around and around. And they just stood there, allowing the rhapsody of the city to rise above them.

The wind whirled around them and the rain poured down, soaking them to the bone. The sun burnt their faces and scorched their arms. And still they stood, in perfect solitude with each other. There was not a flicker of movement, a gasp of emotion or a single sign that anyone else mattered. A fire danced in each of their eyes, as they burnt into each other, intense and powerful and still. The very air around them was whipped up into a veritable frenzy. Somewhere, far off in the distance, a little girl stood crying.