Concrete Prophecies

The Krylon can was half empty and my fingers were numb, but the wall was talking to me and I couldn't stop listening.

Four in the morning on the number 4 line, Hunts Point, and I was balanced on the narrow ledge of the platform's far end where the light didn't reach, painting the side of an idle train car. It was a dead train, parked for the night, and that made it mine. The whole yard was mine at this hour. Nobody came down here except the rats and the guys who slept under the overpass, and they didn't care about a fifteen-year-old girl with paint under her nails and a hoodie pulled up over her braids.

I'd started with the sky. That's where every piece begins for me. Not the letters, not the tags. The sky behind them. And tonight the sky wanted to burn. Orange bleeding into red bleeding into a purple so dark it was almost black, like the whole horizon was a bruise healing wrong. I didn't plan it. I never plan the sky. It just comes out of the can the way it needs to, and I follow.

My breath fogged in front of my face. February in the Bronx doesn't play. The cold had crawled through my sneakers an hour ago and set up camp in my bones, but I had maybe twenty minutes of paint left and I wasn't leaving until the can was dead.

The train shuddered. Not moving. Just that idle hum they make when they're resting, like some big animal breathing in its sleep.

"You gonna finish that or just stand there admiring your work?"

I didn't turn around. I knew the voice. Marcus, seventeen, tall as a lamppost and twice as skinny, with a duffel bag full of cans and a permanent smirk. He climbed up on the ledge next to me, and the whole platform groaned like it was tired of holding us both.

"I'm thinking," I said.

"Thinking about what? How fine you are?"

"Thinking about how I'm gonna push you off this ledge if you don't shut up."

He laughed, low and easy. Marcus never took anything serious, which is probably why we got along. Everybody else in this neighborhood walked around like the world was sitting on their chest. Marcus walked around like he was doing the world a favor by showing up.

He looked at the wall. The burning sky. The half-finished letters underneath, the P and the H and the O of my tag, PHOENIX, rising from the flames like it was being born out of them.

"That's different," he said. The smirk dropped off his face, which was how I knew he meant it.

"Different how?"

"Different like I don't know what it is." He tilted his head. "What's it supposed to be?"

I didn't answer because I didn't know. The image had been sitting behind my eyes for three days, pushing at the back of my skull, and tonight it finally pushed its way out. A sky on fire. A city burning. And the bird rising anyway.

"Just a piece," I said.

"Just a piece," he repeated, like he didn't believe me. He pulled a can from his bag, shook it, and started working the far end of the car, filling in an old tag that somebody else had left half-done. We worked in silence for a while. That's the thing about painting with somebody. You don't have to talk. The cans do the talking. The hiss and rattle of the ball bearing, the spray, the smell of aerosol thick enough to make your head light.

I finished the bird. Gave it wings that stretched across the whole car, feathers made of flame, eyes that looked straight out at whoever was standing on the platform. It was the best thing I'd ever done. I knew it the way you know anything true. Not in your head. In your gut, in your hands, in the ache in your shoulder from reaching up too high for too long.

Marcus came back and stood next to me. We looked at it together.

"Damn," he said.

"Yeah."

"You know what's crazy? It looks like it's moving."

It did. The flames, the wings, the sky. The whole thing had a motion to it, like if you blinked you'd miss the bird taking off. I don't know how I did that. I've been painting since I was eleven, since my abuela gave me my first can of spray paint and told me to make something beautiful out of a world that wasn't, and I've never made anything that looked alive before.

A train horn sounded in the distance. The 5:10, first one of the morning, coming down the line from the north.

"We gotta go," Marcus said.

"I know."

We climbed down. I capped my can and shoved it in my backpack, and we walked out through the hole in the fence behind the platform, the one that everybody knew about and nobody fixed. The sky in the east was starting to do what I'd painted. Orange and red and purple, bleeding into each other.

I didn't think anything of it. I swear to God I didn't.

---

I got home at five-thirty. My mother was on the couch with the TV on and her eyes closed, still in her scrubs from the night shift at Montefiore. She worked doubles three days a week and slept in pieces the rest of the time, and the apartment always smelled like hospital soap and the café con leche she made before she crashed.

I took off my sneakers at the door so I wouldn't wake her. Walked past her, quiet as a cat, and stopped in the kitchen to drink water straight from the tap, my hand cupped under the stream.

"School in two hours," she said without opening her eyes.

"I know."

"You were out painting."

"I know."

She didn't say anything else. She never did. My mother had given up on the lectures around the time I turned thirteen, when she figured out that telling me no was just another way of telling me to go. She'd rather have me out painting than out doing half the things the other kids on our block were doing. That's what she told me once, anyway, back when she still told me things.

I went to my room and lay down on top of my covers with my clothes still on. The ceiling had a water stain shaped like Florida, and I stared at it until my eyes burned.

I dreamed about the bird. Not the one I painted. The real one. Fire coming off its wings, lighting up the whole night sky, and somewhere below it a city that looked like mine, but wrong. Streets I knew, but empty. Buildings I'd walked past a thousand times, but broken. And the bird kept flying, kept burning, and I kept running underneath it, trying to keep up, trying to see where it was leading me.

I woke up to the sound of the TV.

---

My mother was standing in front of it, still in her scrubs, one hand pressed flat against her mouth. The picture on the screen was shaky, the way it gets when the news chopper is too far away and the cameraman is zooming in from a bad angle. Smoke. A lot of it. Black and thick and pouring up from something that used to be a train car.

I sat up. My mouth was dry.

"...derailment on the number 4 line near Hunts Point Avenue," the anchor was saying. "The train struck a barrier near the end of the platform and derailed. Early reports indicate at least three cars involved. Emergency crews are on the scene."

I got up. Walked to the TV. Stood next to my mother and watched the smoke rise, and felt something cold and heavy settle into my stomach, like a stone dropped into deep water.

The camera panned. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to see the side of one of the cars, the one that hadn't been crushed, the one still standing, and on its side, half covered in soot and fire and somebody else's blood, was a bird with wings made of flame, rising from a burning sky.

My bird. My sky. My piece, the one I'd painted six hours ago, the one that hadn't existed when that train pulled out of the yard.

My mother turned to me. Her face was doing something I'd never seen it do before. Not angry. Not scared. Something worse than both.

"Was that you?" she said.

And I couldn't answer. Because I didn't know. Because I'd painted a burning sky on the side of a train that was supposed to sit in the yard all night, and now that train was on fire, and the sky I'd painted was the sky on the news.

Because I'd made something beautiful out of a world that wasn't, and now the world was making it true.

I looked at my hands. They still smelled like paint.