Birthday Read Free

up to the roof on their own initiative, she'd have to do something to draw attention to herself, to bring somebody up.
    Maybe passersby would look up if something came falling out of the sky.
    Is there anything I can throw!
    She stretched out her arms and felt around above her head until she found a few chunks of concrete. She picked one up and examined it. It was about the size of her thumb. It was just a little piece of old concrete from the crumbling wall; even if it happened to hit somebody in the head it probably wouldn't cause serious injury.
    Mai had been on the track team in middle school and high school, as a sprinter, and she had confidence in her athletic ability. She'd been able to throw a softball farther than almost anybody in her class. But she'd never tried throwing from her current position before—flat on her back. The only feasible motion was to swing her right arm in an arc from her head toward her feet; it meant there was only one direction in which she could toss the concrete. If she couldn't get it over the railing at the edge of the rooftop, the whole thing would be a waste of effort.
    The sun was descending into the west. She realized that if she was going to try this, she should do it in day-light when there would be a maximum number of people walking by. She flung the piece of concrete into the air.
    It immediately disappeared from sight, swallowed up soundlessly by the sky.
    She was astonished how little of the world she could see. Her entire world was that narrow strip of sky. The ease with which the concrete had disappeared made her wonder if the place she was in really connected to the world below.
    She felt around again and this time found a four-inch length of iron pipe. Big enough and heavy enough, she thought, to carry farther than the fragment of concrete. On the other hand, if it hit someone in the head it could do considerable damage.
    She wanted to minimize the pipe's potential to do injury. She also wanted to lend it some trace of herself, to make it seem like a message.
    She fished in her pockets for a scrap of cloth. A handkerchief would do—anything, really. If she could tie something to the pipe, then whoever found it would be less likely to think it had simply fallen at random.
    But she had no handkerchief in her pockets. She tried to tear off a piece of her sweatshirt, a bit of the hem of her jumper, to no avail. She closed her eyes to think of her options, and an idea came to her. The odder the item attached to the pipe, the more attention it would elicit.
    She'd take off her panties and tie them to the pipe.
    She'd have one chance. If she screwed it up, that would be it. But her only fear at the moment was that getting them off her legs might hurt too much.
    She slowly hiked up her skirt and felt around in the area of her hipbone. Her skin was bare. She should have encountered the elastic band of her underwear, but all her fingernails found was her own skin. She felt all around but couldn't locate her panties.
    What the.. ? I'm not wearing any underwear!
    This was not normal for her. She'd never gone out in public wearing nothing under her clothes.
    She raised her head and craned her neck to a painful angle in order to get a glimpse of her groin, but her dis-tended belly was in the way. She had to judge by feel. At the very moment she realized she really wasn't wearing any underwear, her arm felt something moving inside her abdomen.
    It felt precisely like a baby stirring in her womb. But then she remembered that she was still a virgin, and her consciousness threatened to recede again. Her puzzle-ment as to why she wasn't wearing panties gave way instantly: what was this in her womb?
    She could see part of her belly now, peeking out of her rolled-up skirt. It was swollen, but it was also moving, changing shape before her eyes, in response to pressure from within.
    She remembered a scene from a movie she'd seen years ago. The sheer abnormality of her situation chilled Mai to her