Snowden could tell that Piper wasn't even trying to imagine. She was too busy walking away toward the door. He jumped forward after her, regretted that the action just made her turn and start running. "Piper, it's me, relax, just stay, we have to talk about this," Snowden said, but Piper just started screaming, "No!" back at him, yanking her arm away violently every time he tried to hold it.
When Piper got to the door, Snowden couldn't bring himself to slam it. He couldn't bring himself to do anything more, either. As Piper flew out into the hall, Snowden remembered her naked, on top of him, what her hair looked like as she leaned forward to kiss his mouth, what it tasted like when she did. It was a shame that it would all end like this, Snowden was thinking as he watched her literally run away from him.
Snowden wasn't expecting Horus to pop out from the shadows of the hall any more than Piper was. But there Horus appeared in all his destructive brilliance, ready and eager to change everything.
As Piper got to the stairs, Horus came from behind her, in motion. He must have been hiding in one of the other doorways the whole time, Snowden figured that out later, when there was time. His shoulder forward, his head down, Horus slammed into Piper Goines's unprepared spine, her body folding backward like a fortune cookie from the force. Standing in his doorway, Snowden watched Piper hit the metal railing from the momentum, saw how in that instant she tried to lean her torso away from the void. Horus took his two thick hands to her two soft ankles and lifted her up and over like he was dumping a wheelbarrow. Piper cleared the railing as smoothly as if she wanted to. Snowden never even got to see her face again, just a blur of limbs and clothing as she grabbed at the air. Then she was gone. That quickly. Horus leaned over the ledge to watch her land.
If Piper made a sound falling down to the lobby five stories below, Snowden didn't hear it. He was too busy lunging forward to the last place she was standing, firmly grabbing the railing that she'd failed to. Piper was already lying still on the ground so far below by the time Snowden arrived to help her.
It wasn't that bad, is what Snowden said to himself to contradict the horror he was feeling. She didn't suffer the terror of the whole drop, surely she hit her head in the narrow stairway before she got that far. It's a shame that had to happen. Dear God it's a shame, that it had to, that it had to happen. An unspeakable tragedy, that this was a necessity. To ensure that Horus, who appeared beside him with a hand firmly on Snowden's shoulder, didn't attempt a repeat performance, Snowden repeated those thoughts aloud for him.
"It's a damn shame," Horus agreed, looking down, a direction Snowden looked purposefully away from. "A fine-looking woman like that one."
"They already know, don't they? You were sent to back me up, in case I didn't do it, weren't you?" Snowden asked him. Horus kept looking down at the body but started squeezing Snowden's shoulder so hard that it hurt.
"First of all, I'm not no one's 'backup,' OK? I done told you about that shit before. Think of my role in this venture as more 'quality control' if you want a name for it. Second of all, it ain't always about you, is it? See, that right there is the man I'm supposed to be overseeing." Horus pointed below.
Snowden forced himself to look down in the direction of the corpse once more and this time saw Bobby standing over it. The faintest of hopes fluttered through him and he thought Bobby would reach down for a pulse and find one and just as suddenly as things turned morbid they would spring back to being merely bleak again, but looking down at the body's anatomically impossible position, Snowden wasn't surprised Bobby didn't bother with the formality. Nor that Bobby should look straight up with the anger and pain distorting his face as they did. So many exhaustive trials Snowden had undergone since arriving in Harlem this last year, so many elaborate tests of moral fortitude and determination, but none more demanding than just meeting Bobby's stare without flinching.
Even after Bobby ran off, Snowden kept looking down because there was no turning away or back anymore. All the fear, the revulsion, the guilt, and disgust bubbling within him at the distant sight of Piper's broken body, Snowden identified, named as the price for Utopia. Doors on other apartments started opening, other heads poked out into the stairway just as his did, but Snowden forced himself to keep looking, to acknowledge the price before continuing.
OF SHRIMP AND OTHER SMALL BAIT
A YEAR CAN go by rather quickly when you're busy. exactly 365 days after their first Horizon meeting, the winner of the Second Chance Program's leadership challenge was announced, and Cedric Snowden Jr. accepted gracefully. No balloons, no cake or streamers, just a firm handshake from a former congressman and a date for the press conference when, on site, the keys to the prized brownstone would be handed over. "If it doesn't happen in front of cameras," Marks chuckled away Snowden's reservations, "then it doesn't exist." In the end, the competition was far from stiff. Bobby hadn't shown up for work or answered his phone in the two weeks since the incident, and Horus was Horus, so the choice was rather obvious. Snowden felt proud anyway, took it as an honor because he felt he'd earned the right to.
Cedric Snowden tried to think about this honor as much as he could, about the responsibility of watching over the new recruits in the year to come, of overseeing their evolution into the men of Horizon. Cedric Snowden like to think about this because he found that when he wasn't, he was thinking about Piper Goines instead, a subject he drifted to even more despite a concerted effort not to. In Snowden's waking moments in the days before Piper's funeral, it was the image of her disappearing so easily over the railing that had captivated him. Snowden thought bloop every time he remembered it, as if attaching a cartoon sound effect would minimize the impact for both of them. Bloop.
At night, asleep, the image Snowden was haunted by was altogether different, though equally singular. It was Piper Goines falling down the stairway wearing a long flowing white dress, endless folds flapping. It was the type of dress Snowden doubted the real Piper would wear even if you gave it to her. In the dream, Snowden's view was centered on her as she fell down, the dirty tenement stairs a blur for both of them. Eventually his own vantage would halt and Piper's body would go flying below it, upon which point Snowden would kick himself awake as quickly as possible. The dream tended to come to him in those transitory moments at the beginning and end of sleep, leaving Snowden unsure if he was just imagining it, an uncertainty that led to Snowden rejecting his closet hideout for his well-lit bedroom instead.
The vision continued until the funeral, a bleak, silent affair even for its kind. The event created new images of Piper to replace all the others, surprisingly pleasant ones fueled mostly by the childhood pictures arranged as a collage before Piper's closed casket. Snowden had feared meeting the famed Abigail Goines of Piper's tales, but the woman up at the front pew was so drugged that Snowden doubted she knew that he or most of the other guests were there, even as she nodded and smiled at them.
People pointed at him, the last one to see her alive, the fateful friend with the fourth-floor walkup, yet nothing more came of it. But why should it, Snowden kept reminding himself. It was an accident.
Snowden kept looking over his shoulder, up into the rafters of the Episcopalian church, for Bobby Finley to arrive and declare differently, but the skinny man never appeared.