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Percy was laying on his rickety old fire escape with his legs dangling below him.
He spent most of his time on the fire escape after his quest in the labyrinth. After his time with Calypso.
Though he couldn’t see it, he knew that the plant she had given him was behind him, caressing his hair.
He originally went outside to stargaze, like he did at camp or Ogygia but was quickly disappointed. It was a cloudy night and gray clouds covered almost the whole sky. It almost looked unreal and unsettling that something as vast as the sky could be muffled so easily.
Most city folk don’t realize it in their hurry to get from point A to point B, but clouds move very quickly when you stand still. If you focus enough you can almost feel the earth spinning under you. Clouds can dance in a way, changing shape and size all while spinning and spinning and spinning.
If he stared long enough he could imagine a night sky full of stars and rid of any clouds back at home in Costa Rica.
He doesn’t remember much of life back in Costa Rica. His mother had brought them to New York when he was a toddler. She told him stories of rain and wind instead of snow and hail in December, smiling sunsets, climbable trees that danced in the wind, laughing waves, and golden sand.
He didn’t understand what they would ever leave. It sounded like a fairy tale in Costa Rica
Percy took a bite out of the Hot Pocket he brought with him.
Oh, right.
He swallowed slowly, so as to not choke. That was a privilege they didn’t have in Costa Rica. Eating.
Like many in Costa Rica, he and his mom were poor. She used to be a housekeeper, cleaning entire houses for the few rich and earning barely enough money to feed a growing child and a mother.
He became a housekeeper too, when he was around 8 behind his mothers back to help with ridiculous New York rent (and to pay Gabe when he came home from school, it was better to have sore arms and a nose full of the stink of bleach than a bleeding back.) Percy stayed a housekeeper until he went to camp and later came home to an apartment filled with laughter and notebooks and Paul.
A breeze passed by and he shivered. His mom told him that Costa Dica was warm. Warmer than any New York summer could ever be.
He listened to the honking of cars, undistinguishable arguing, and loud Spanish music that he didn’t care to translate in his head. He still had problems with understanding Spanish even though it should’ve been his mother tongue.
He slowly sat up and rubbed his hands together to bring some warmth back into them. He had calluses and little scars on them as a result of hours of scrubbing and slipping on way too many wet floors.
He slipped back into his little room and watched a bright green car zoom by with unintelligible letters on its side.
He laid down in his soft bed and pulled the covers up.
That’s probably the only green thing I’ll see in this concrete jungle.