She was done; she was out of here. Ryan could look after himself anyways. He was a grown man. She had too much money for this place. She didn't have to stay here, where any of her neighbors could be the one leaving her messages or following her on the street at night. It wasn't that she was scared. It just wasn't worth it anymore. There was a whole world out there. There were an infinite number of places she could live. She would move to London. London had numerous art museums and excellent current artists as well. And the people speak English there. France and Italy had enough art, but she would have to learn a whole new language to create a new life there. She would miss Ollie, she really would. She hadn't yet asked him to come with her, but she was sure he wouldn't want to just pick up and leave. Actually, she hadn't even told him she was leaving. He would probably be upset, especially since her flight would leave in only a week. Oh, well, he could come with her or not. She was as good as gone. What had happened was this: Last night she had made the mistake of taking the stairs to her apartment. She had heard the footsteps behind her when she was on the 8th floor. Despite herself she had sped up, pulling out her keys ans almost jogging up the last few floors. As the stairwell door shut behind her, she thought she heard someone say her name. She was in her apartment in less than a minute with the door shut firmly behind her. She leaned against it, breathing hard and looked around her dark apartment. No one. She felt the envelope against the back of her heel as it was shoved under the door. She spun around and looked out of the peep hole. Someone in jeans and a black hooded sweat shirt was walking away hurridly. Clio threw her purse on the flor, shoved her keys into her pocket, grabbed the first object she could find (which happened to be a large umbrella), pulled open the door and ran out after the figure. Whoever it was recognized her intentions. They started running without looking back. She followed all the way down to the street level. They exited the building through the front door, right past the sleeping security guard. She was by the stairs when the front doors closed behind him or her. By the time she reached the street as well, they were nowhere to be seen. The commotion from earlier when the street had been blocked by ambulances had been cleared away (poor little kid; yet another reason she didn't belong here) but there was still no sign of the hooded figure she had been chasing. She returned slowly inside and took the elevator back upstairs. When she got back inside her apartment, she picked up the envelope off the floor and slid out the single photo it contained. The photo was of her cat; written at the bottom of the picture in black permanent marker were the words: WATCH OUT. She started packing that night. Nightwitch stayed inside from then on.

The envelope slid under her door. She ran to it, jerked it open just as the elevator door dinged closed. Dman. How did he (or she, she supposed) get in here? They did have a secrutiy gaurd, afterall. She returned to her apartment and picked up the off the floor. This was the third note of this sort that she had recievd. The envelope contained two things. One was a photocopy of the lease to her store. The other was a photograph of her. It was taken at an odd angle. In the picture, she as frowning, holding a large bag of rice on her left hip and a can of tomato sauce in her right hand It was taken yesterday, she could tell. She remembered that trip to the grocery store. She hadn't noticed anyone following her or anyone suspicious at all. This was getting out of hand.

At the exact moment that the wind shifts, blowing the clouds suddenly in a northeasternly direction, our heroine is sitting cross legged on top of her counter. She is listening. She pinches clear glass marble s between her fingers, stretches her arm out over the edge of the four foot precipice, asnd carefully releases the transparent sphere. As they strike the cement floor, each marble makes a distinctive sound, subtly different, like the shape of a snowflake or the lines of a fingerprint. It depends on the part of the floor they strike, the individual density of the square centimeter of concrete, and the marble itself, whether or not the marble is an exact sphere or covered in tiny imperfections. There is no point in watching this. She is not going anywhere for a while.
Later... If skipping were a sport, Clio would play professionally. The concrete stings her bare feet as she makes her way to her brother's store. She has nothing what-so-ever to do this morning, she is in an excellent mood, and she has had an idea. If she had been an easy to frighten being, like a white tailed deer in the morning mist, she might have thought twice about this, this venture out of the safety of her alarm protected, florally scented fortress of a store. (It might have been easy to break into, but at least the police would appear immediately as soon as the perimeter was breached.) It seemed no one was around today; this only seemed to encourage her original impressions. But no matter, she knew it was all in her head. She continued on her way the thrift store. Maybe she could kill some time looking for clothes while at this third location...

Water dripped from the 13th floor's fire escape onto Clio's head. Droplets rolled down the side of her face as she stared down through the metal at the street below her. As she watched, a young man stuck his head out of a window only a few floors below her. He quinted up at her through the rain; he looked tired. Without even waving, he puled his head back inside his window and shut it. She wasn't sure what his name was. This didn't surprise her. She wasn't actually sure what many of her neighbors were called. They all seemed a bit strange and poor. The only person in her building she associated with was her brother, and he even seemed a bit too much like these people for her taste. She would probably look must saner if she had something to be smoking while sitting out here. It would give her a reason to be sitting in the rain; people understood that smoking inside would make one's apartment smell. Or perhaps just an umbrella would do. Normally at this time of day she would be at work. After the other night, however, she had decided to take a little break from work to catch up on her painting. A gallery had looked at some of her work a few weeks ago and was thinking about having her as part of an exhibit about young artists in the city. The break in had given her the perfect excuse to close down for a week without anyone getting mad at her for falling having to cancel their orders. It was all a lie, of course. Nothing had actually been stolen. The shop had only been ransacked. Everything was torn apart and sifted through, but none of it had taken more than a day to clean up. The police weren't sure why the perpetrator had bothered to break in in the first place. They figured that he or she had probably been interrupted in the middle of the act and had had to leave before taking anything. The thing that had seemed oddest to her, though, was that whoever it was hadn't even touched the cash register, but the contents of her filing cabinet were spread across the shop floor. She dismissed this thought. It was clearly paranoid. The popsicle she was eating tasted like rain. Mm, blue raspberry and water... She sucked the last of the ice off of the wooden stick and dropped it straight down through the metal grille of the fire escape before climbing back into her apartment through the window. She shook water onto her carpet and left wet footprints in the shag fibers as the crossed the room to check on the drying status of her painting.

It was finally 7 pm. Clio flipped the sign on the front door of her shop so that “Closed” could be read from the street. It had been a long, busy day. The delivery service portion of her business had been overwhelmed. She usually didn’t have to leave the shop for deliveries herself, but today she had been forced to descend into the SMARTA station herself, balancing huge buckets and boxes carefully so as not to spill the array of red roses, pink carnations, and white lilies onto the grime covered concrete of the subway steps. Once she finished locking up the register and pulling down the metal grille that covered the front of the store, Clio left through the back, setting the security alarm as she went. She crawled through the hole in the vacant lot next to her shop. She had cut that hole herself last year with a large pair of wire cutters she had borrowed from her brother. She was walking towards the street when she noticed that the vacant lot was, in fact, no longer vacant. Her face broke into a grimace of revulsion. “Will stuff while you wait!” proclaimed the sign that dangled from around the neck of a bright orange taxidermied cat. As she passed the front of the booth, the young woman running it smiled and beckoned her over. She smiled back but hurried on down the street as quickly as she could. The booth worried her. Hopefully the woman only taxidermied on request….

. . . . .

She entered the small coffee shop just as a gust of wind swept down the block. Her hair blew across her face, covering her eyes and causing the grocery bags that hung from the fingers of her left hand to twist and cut off her circulation. The wind was cold. She was glad she had gone by her apartment to change into jeans before she ventured out to complete her part of the preparations. When she reached the counter, her order was taken by a pretty woman in a strikingly red shirt. Pulling out her wallet from her purse, Clio searched for the extra quarters she was always meaning to spend. She smiled and apologized as she handed the woman several dollars in change, but the woman did not return her smile.

. . . . .

She was almost asleep when she heard the knock on the door. She pushed herself of the couch and rubbed her eyes as she walked to the door. She checked the peep hole for security's sake, but it was who she was expecting. She hadn't asked him to come; he had simply volunteered. She pushed the deadbolt back. She greeted Ollie warmly, inviting him into the kitchen. She handed him one of the now cold to-go coffees and a mug and pointed him to the microwave. It would be a long night. He suggested they watch a movie to pass the time.

. . . . .

She knocked again on the door, louder this time. “Ryan! Wake up!” No answer. “You said you would help us!” She raised her hand to knock again. The door opened suddenly. A very sleepy Ryan stood in the doorway. He peered into the gloom of the hallway. Ollie was leaning against the opposite wall and tiredly watching the action. A small gym bag sat at his feet. “It’s tonight, is it? I thought we were doing this tomorrow.” Clio groaned and dropped her head into her hands. “Alright, alright, give me a minute…” Clio smiled.

. . . . .

The tenants of Washington Heights rarely used this door. She had carefully observed it for two weeks to make sure of this fact. The saw made a horrible shrieking noise as it cut through the thick metal of the ground floor door. Clio worried that someone would hear, but the only night guard was asleep in the small entrance way all the way on the other side of the building. Still, Ollie stood guard at the end of the hallway, just in case. Clio stood staring in front of the window while the saw whirred on next to her. She thought for a second she saw a flash of movement but gave it up to her imagination after watching for a few more minutes. The noise stopped. “Alright, now you can do the rest,” Ryan said, standing.

. . . . .

The elevator door slid open. Ollie and Clio stumbled sleepily into the hallway, Clio digging in her bag for her keys. She looked up when she heard a voice. “Ma’am, is this your apartment?” A policeman stood directly in front of her door. “Yes it is. Is there a problem?” “There’s been a break-in at a shop down the street. Grow Towards the Sun. The alarm system was triggered. You're the owner, correct?”

Clio Ford, Apt. 1215

It irritated her how she had to always keep the window open. It was often cold or rainy, and she didn’t like either of those weather conditions to get into her living room. But then, those weather conditions were exactly why the window to the fire escape always stayed open at least five inches. If it was cold and she shut the window, her baby could freeze to death or decide he didn’t love her anymore. And if it was raining, he could drown in a large puddle or move in with someone else, someone with the capabilities to install an official cat door, and, of course, decide he didn’t love her anymore. All of those things would be tragic. As it was, the humidity from the morning’s rain was ruining her canvas. The paint would never dry. She would never be able to paint next layer and never be able to successfully run out of blue paint and be forced to purchase more. Oh well, she would have to just risk having her apartment catch fire. The blue was that important. She picked up her easel and all her supplies and carefully transferred them into her bedroom, where she shut the door and turned the space heater on high to rid the room of the damp. Someday, she would actually follow through with the plan she had come up with to fix it all. Someday (night really), she would actually get up when her alarm woke her a four in the morning and go install the cat door in the back door of her building when no one would notice her doing it. She had tools and a plan all ready and hopefully her practice on the piece of spare wood in the back of Ollie’s shop would pay off. Although, craft wood was probably not as strong over all as backdoor-of-an-apartment-building-in-a-sketchy-neighborhood wood would be. Actually, she could go check on that. Shutting her bedroom door behind her, she grabbed her iPod from the counter, put the earphones in her ears, stuck the iPod in the waistband of her long skirt, grabbed her keys, and walked out of the apartment barefoot. The elevator took its usual ten years to reach her floor. When it did come, she stepped carefully around the suspicious looking dark spots on the floor and pressed the ground floor button. The elevator dinged when it reached the lobby. She snuck carefully past the elevator bank she had just emerged from and down the hall that lead to the back of the building. She had to make sure no one could see her; if they did, they might be able to guess it was her that had cut the hole in their backdoor. But then, they would probably be able to guess anyway, seeing as she was the only resident that contained so much crazy for their cat. Damn it, the door was metal! There was no way she could cut through that. Well, maybe Ollie knew how… No, that didn’t make sense. Art supply clerks don’t know anything about sawing through metal quietly in the middle of the night. She was confusing him with someone who worked in a hardware store. Her brother might know, though, even if Ollie wouldn’t. He could do most anything. And, of course, he owned enough large, sharp things that one of them would be bound to work. Suddenly, through the window, she spotted her cat. She pulled the backdoor open and called for him. “Nightwitch! Come here Nightwitch!” He bounded up to her immediately, and she scooped him up in her arms.