Rooftop Run

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By Alaa Gaafary

She left everything behind and ran. They were after her, they had seen her somewhere, somehow—it wasn’t too hard—selling flowers, chasing her cousins down the cobblestone alleys, bartering furiously with the gypsies in the open-air markets, throwing mud-pies with the children at the docks. And she had felt their presence, walking home one afternoon. Their eyes reached a bit further than their grasping arms, their long lean shadows morphing their figures into monstrously gigantic proportions.

As sunset glanced off the window panes and whitewashed walls of the town, the light worked in her favor; she was used to every corner and crook and swerve, and didn’t need to see where she was going—let the sun blind those behind her, the men and women tracking her, the child-snatchers who targeted her now as they’d targeted countless souls before her. As they were commonly called, the Takers.

They were closer now; the little girl didn’t have to hear slapping steps and huffed breath to know. Years of running in the streets to escape roaring store-owners and hair-pulling children-at-arms had conditioned her to running with endurance, but her child’s limbs were half the size of an adult’s and so every leap was half in span.

There was no other option. She scuttled up the nearest gutter, shimmying up like a spider, and reached the roof only a little out of breath. Without glancing back she continued running and leaping between the neighboring roofs, scaling like a golden monkey until her skin and hair and clothes were swallowed by the sun and she was invisible.

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