(PS THOME: As you can see, I kept some of your edits and left the others. :P Enjoy!)


The city at night is like a neon anthill. Disembodied headlights race through tunnels carved by the slow dependability of time. Most inhabitants of the city are inside by 11:00—either at home, at work, or at a bar. Only a few stay out and roam the dusty sidewalks that connect the vast web of soup kitchens and arcades. One rises above the rest, not by fame or by potential, but simply by the primitive ingenuity of a ladder. This boy—he’s still in junior high, you see—never returns the acknowledging nods of fingerless bums and never responds to the ladies with their plastic bags and shopping carts full of scavenged treasures who stop to offer him their hospitality. Night, for him, comes alone. He doesn’t hear the squawking, buzzing cars and he doesn’t see the flickering neon signs that advertise “Girls, girls, girls!” or “Beer All Nite!” From the moment he leaves his semi-suburban home, this boy is engulfed in a sea of suspended emptiness. And every night he makes the treacherous journey to this ladder on this lonely bridge.

This night is not unlike the others, and neither was the day. He makes his way leisurely up the ladder, his hands rubbing loose flakes of rusty red paint with each rung. Soon the paint will be gone and the ladder will stand naked like Jack’s beanstalk stripped of its leaves, a bare monolith in the low jungle of dance clubs and office buildings. Once he reaches the top, he lays down to stare at the blur that’s made up of city smog, lights, and a light misty rain. He lets his awareness drift on while his body stops, suspended countless lengths above the glaring invasiveness of the streetlamps. His mind pushes onward, peeking into windows and doors of quiet apartments that are filled with the shifting glow of television and nightlights. He quietly observes the families and false unities as they twist and evolve into something much darker than night. He lets his consciousness explore his awareness, and dissolves into the atmosphere.

For a while he floats around, taking in the vastness of the world around him. He eventually returns to his obligatory husk. He would much prefer to be a star or a sea or an emotion, but he’s stuck as a boy.

He stands up on the highest point of the suspension bridge, higher than everyone else in the city. He looks down and surveys the mess of flashlights and lighters bobbing up and down in a sea of tainted stars—his home. Smiling dimly, he spreads his wings and prepares for flight. His feet move in an awkward pattern, first sideways and then backwards, and eventually he begins to spin. The boy becomes a merry-go-round of colored confusion as his smile grows to a grin and his grin becomes a laugh. He twirls around his little ballroom in the sky, carefree and full of life. He’s dancing on metal, on rust, and on the web spun from the fears and questions of the human race. Then he’s dancing on air, rejoicing in the lack of pressure. He tumbles but continues dancing until the silence drowns him out.

Interesting, but umm, did he just kill himself in the end?

Indeed.
Well, Most of the corrections on there were made by other people.
I mainly just left the story alone and went stright into the review. I guess everyone else just didn't wanta seem left out and tried thier hardest to find a correction to make before approving my review and handing it off to the next link in the chain.

I don't really know how that system works. :/ But I noticed that some of the edits were helpful and others didn't really make sense to me. So it works!

Whatcha think of my random title? I think it's better than what I was calling it before.

Well, I'm trying to make it make sense.
But I still have some questions as to why it's called that. : P

Here's a secret: I just picked random words that had a nice rhythm and a nice sound. That's how I title most of my stuff. I'm bad at titles. Other wise it would've been called something like "The City" or "The Boy" or "Boy who jumps off of a bridge."

Nice!...very nice! I always love everything you right, you are so good at it...

Ohhhhh.
I like "the boy who jumps off a birdge."

Ehh, that's too long of a title, (if a title is too long, it's proven to fail, not really, but that's how I see it, you just need a nice short and sweet title that sortof hints at what the story is about, without revealing too much) how about. . .uhh. . .I hate coming up with titles. Still can't decide a title for some of the stuff I'm writing. Anyway how about Melancholy Life? Ehh no that doesn't quite fit this, oh well, it's still well done, and the original title is just fine anyway. Though the Intution part kinda doesn't make sense. . .still whatever way of choosing a title works for you

The original title I gave it was "Blegh it is so icky."

Yeah, Floating Intuition is way better than that. . .