Three thick, black strokes. Wings, a body, and it was done.
She saw it on a woman’s t-shirt. Another was on a badge ribbon. One was stamped on a plastic cup someone had dropped by the escalator.
Stef noticed it because of her dad.
She’d been ten. Maybe eleven. They were watching one of their shows.
On the screen, a man in a gray uniform stopped at a door. Drew the bird in chalk. Then he walked on.
“What’s that for?” She’d asked.
“It means the place is safe.”
At the hotel, there was a sticker of it next to the elevator call button.
Stef reached out to touch it.
“Bird up.”
Stef turned around.
A woman in red armor pointed at the little bird.
“Sorry?”
“Bird up.”
The woman grinned, then touched two fingers to her nose, then flicked them away in a vague flapping motion.
Stef copied her, feeling sheepish.
The woman nodded and stepped into the elevator.
Someone else did it on the third floor.
And two men in capes on the tenth.
The elevator doors opened onto another ring of concrete, carpet and chrome. There were groups at the railings above. Floor after floor. Mostly in costumes. Wings. Helmets. Glowing swords.
The bird hung from someone’s railing on a bedsheet.
Someone else had painted it in green onto an already bent cardboard shield.
Stef caught up with the woman in the red armor. “Is it from that show?”
“What show?”
“The bird thing.”
“Oh.” She looked up at the bedsheet flag. “Some people started doing it a few years ago. I dunno where it came from.”
“That’s all?”
“Pretty much.”
The woman shrugged.
“First con, right?”
Later that night, Stef stood outside her room, at the railing on twenty-two.
The atrium dropped away beneath her. The height took her breath a little bit. And the stream of colors and costumes moving through the lobby far below.
People were moving around all the balconies. Small at a distance. She saw a bird on a backpack. There was one taped onto a hotel-room door.
Another and another.
Stef took a badge ribbon out of her pocket and went into her room for a pen. She scrawled the three black strokes.
Then she went back outside and tied the ribbon to the railing.
Across the void, someone saw.
Two fingers to the nose, and away.
Wings spread.
A story from the Static Drift universe.
Article photo by me - available on Unsplash.