We find Liv hammering away at her game. Chasing pixel thieves and bumping into pink hearts to recover her life bar. She was good friends with Sunny and she’s alone a lot now. I don’t know much of her story.

  I’m surprised to find Zosi’s already arrived, dangling his legs into the night below. White curls fluorescent under the flickering lightbulb. An agitated winged-thing circles it and clinks against the glass until it finally disappears from space and time.

    “I brought you some candy from the shop.” Rose sits by her and Liv puts the game away quietly. “This one changes your eye-colour and there’s a chance this one might make you levitate.”

    “Are you staying to see the fireworks?” She asks eagerly and her tiny glasses slip down her nose. She unwraps the psychedelically-coloured candy and quickly reads the message inside before it fades to white.

    “I hadn’t thought about it,” Alexei lies and we throw a glance his way.

  The candy stretches out her cheek like a hoarding chipmunk. She lifts a few centimetres off the wooden flooring and starts laughing. I listen to her little voice fill the treehouse and the rowdy racket building outside fades into the background.

                                                                …

  We sit above the barren hill-side. The night is forgiving with its cool wind. Even so, the rock and sand beneath radiate all the ingurgitated heat. Clusters of people shapes below us. Strings of lights hang in the vineyard. Someone plays a drawling tune on the harmonica. Cold beer, cold beer, a moving yell proclaims.

  The mountains warp a trick against the horizon with their opaque darkness. Mighty silhouettes against the skyline. Brighter stars peek through the crowding clouds because this place hasn’t dreamed up skyscrapers just yet. Chances are, it never will.

  St. Michael’s is just that kind of place.

  Zosi gives his lighter a brisk shake and the ensuing flame glows red against his mouth.

    “I have to talk to you,” I tell him.

  He nods. His eyes move to the great distances. I wonder what it’s like for him. To wake up in that oasis. Green and gentle and sunlit. The silence of the stone-white monastery walls. The rustle and the fragrance of the orange trees. I wonder what it’s like to leave it all behind.

  My mind whirrs as it spins for meaning, and whenever I catch myself trying to put two and two together, I grapple with the human toil for purpose. Once I start down this merry road, I have to butt heads with the theory of evolution and natural selection. I have to battle the complex human psyche. I have to deal with afterlife. Survival bores and terrifies me simultaneously. I don’t feel like it.

  I feel defeated.

  Maybe I’m jealous because I have no secret to ponder. Nothing to hide or to protect. I have nothing to burn for. The barriers stand more or less open to me. By some genetic combination or universal migraine, I parted immaterial blinds and got a glimpse of the beyond. But I don’t matter. I’m just a nameless narrator, that’s all.

    “There they go, there they go!” Dandy lifts his arm swiftly and points upwards - his finger aimed right at the universe above our heads.

  Laughter and the shuffle of feet as the kids scramble and hold on to their baseball caps. And there they go, indeed. The colours burst apart and they’re bright slivers of prism. I watch the fiery needles cascade down in a hypnotic and strange slow motion. They don’t have time to fade before other tightly-packed plastic rockets ascend and spit out their gun-powder guts. They mesh and overlap and my eyes struggle against the unison of sheen and glimmer.

  St. Michael's could be anywhere. It could be the desert freedom of wild Arizona or the blood-red Australian outback. It could be on the holy shores of Greece under the shade of rustling palm-trees. It could be a tiny, tiny Eastern European town. It could be in a snowy valley sunken in between the snow-covered Himalayans. It could be somewhere along the iridescent African coastline, hugged by parting rock.

  But it’s right here. And it’s nowhere at all.

  It’s everything put together. Liv’s smile is smeared in a dash of dark fuchsia. I’d felt it in the restlessness back home. I felt it when I walked through St. Michael Square. And now I feel it in all of us. The boiling bubbling shift under our feet. The gnawing under the layers of what is. The anxious softness that fills me when I clench my teeth.

    “Sometimes omens find you, philosopher,” the harpies say sharply and vengefully in my ears, flying around my head like I’m some dizzy cartoon character.

  All the harpies I’ve damned in the Becker’s solution. They’re never my allies and they’re never my enemies. Their little sing-song voices sound like buzzing under the booming sky. They warn and they mock and they laugh.

  Not quite the mad prophets of doomsday, filling grey city streets with their cries and their pleas. Not quite the mutiny of Alexander’s army. The baseless tingling fear of premonition. The sinking muscles right before some great and fundamental collapse.

  We look up as we do most of the time. St. Michael’s is a secret in the palm of the world. And the world is on the verge of swallowing it whole.