The rain tasted wrong.
Wet asphalt under one cheek.
Water pooling beneath his ribs.
Jonah’s first coherent thought was not am I dying or what happened but this rain tastes like the second-cheapest beer I ever drank.
Milwaukee’s Best.
A party at Rita’s place three years back.
The asphalt smelled like fryer oil and wet cardboard, and somewhere to his left a radio was running.
Alley.
Brick.
A dumpster with one wheel off the ground.
A paper cup two feet from his nose, white, stamped in brown block letters: GRIDDY’S DONUTS.
Griddy’s.
Nothing broken when Jonah sat up.
Nothing bleeding, no car on top of him.
There had been a car.
A Toronto crosswalk on a yellow, the rideshare doing forty, brakes shrieking and then silence and now this alley, this wrong-tasting rain, this cup in a font from a screen.
The radio.
A man’s voice, clipped, mid-Atlantic, the cadence of a eulogy: “Hargreeves, industrialist and noted eccentric, was found dead in his home early this morning.
He was seventy-six.
Sir Reginald is survived by seven adopted children, several of whom achieved fame in childhood as”
Jonah’s hand found the brick wall.
Legs worked.
The dispatch khakis were gone replaced by jeans he didn’t own, a jacket he’d never bought.
Rain came into the alley at a slant, the radio voice said Hargreeves again, and a kid ran past the mouth of the alley holding a knife.
The kid was maybe seventeen, Black, wearing a domino mask and a black tactical vest stitched together from three different Goodwill finds.
Sprinting.
The knife in his hand was curved, old, the kind of blade that belonged in a museum or an action movie, and the kid took the corner at a full run and was gone.
Diego.
Jonah said the name out loud.
“Diego.”
His voice worked.
The rain kept coming.
The radio kept talking.
A man stumbled into the alley from the street, breathing hard, one hand pressed to his side.
The man was white, mid-thirties, wearing a cheap wool coat and cheaper boots.
A revolver hung in his right hand.
Their eyes met.
“You,” the man said.
He raised the gun.
His hand shook.
“You saw the kid.
Where’d he go.”
Jonah counted exits.
One: the street the man had come from.
Two: the alley ran through to the next block, a service door halfway down.
Three: a fire escape, but the ladder was up.
The man was between Jonah and exit one.
Exit two was thirty feet.
“I didn’t see anyone,” Jonah said.
He kept his voice low.
Eight-step de-escalation.
Step one: don’t escalate.
“I’m just here.
I’m not part of this.”
“Bullshit.” The man’s hand steadied.
“I saw you looking.
You saw him.
You tell me where he went or I put one in your leg and you tell me anyway.”
The radio: “a private funeral is planned for”
Six shots in a revolver.
Maybe five left if the kid had made him fire one.
Finger on the trigger.
Two blocks out, a Bradford PD cruiser was already wheeling closer gunfire here meant uniforms in ninety seconds.
The Walgreens script fired in Jonah’s brain: de-escalate, comply, survive.
But the mouth moved on its own.
“I heard a rumor that your gun jammed.”
The man blinked.
“What?”
The gun clicked.
The man pulled the trigger.
The hammer dropped.
Nothing.
Click.
Click.
The man stared at the gun like it had grown teeth.
Jonah moved.
Exit two.
Thirty feet.
The service door came and went before the man tried the trigger a fourth time rain hitting his face, a loading zone behind a Chinese restaurant, legs still pumping, brain three steps behind the body driving them.
I heard a rumor.
A dumpster that smelled like five-spice and rotting bok choy caught his weight.
Hands on knees.
Breathing.
The rain came down.
Radio gone, man gone, street empty.
His sister’s name was
He reached for it.
The name was right there, it had been right there, the older one, the one who had sent him the birthday card last year with the twenty-dollar Starbucks gift card he’d never used, the one who
The space where the name had been was blank.
Not forgotten.
Not misplaced.
Blank.
Smooth like a photo deleted from a folder, the gap already closed.
A sister existed.
Older.
She had sent him a card.
But the name was gone.
The face was gone.
When Jonah reached for her voice, all that came back was static.
Jonah opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
“Maya,” he said.
The name came from nowhere.
He said it again.
“Maya.”
It didn’t fit.
It sat in his mouth like a word in the wrong language.
He had a sister.
Her name was not Maya.
Her name was
Gone.
A phone came out of the jacket pocket.
Not his phone.
A Nokia brick, the kind his grandfather had owned in 2005.
The screen said September 29.
The year was right.
The city, according to the ancient GPS, was not Toronto.
Bradford.
Pennsylvania.
Rain.
Dumpster.
Hands his hands.
The jacket was not his jacket.
The jeans were not his jeans.
The phone was not his phone.
The space in his head where his sister’s name had been was not a space that had existed yesterday.
“Okay,” he said then again in Spanish, under his breath, Marisol’s trick for when the world got too big.
“Vale.
Vale.
Está bien.”
Bradford, Pennsylvania.
Reginald Hargreeves dead.
A kid in a domino mask sprinting past with a museum knife.
Rain that tasted like Milwaukee’s Best.
One rumor spoken, one gun jammed, one sister’s name burned out of his skull and the cold flat certainty, born of four seasons of a Netflix show watched during the third pandemic lockdown, of exactly which world this was.
The Umbrella Academy.
Season one.
Funeral week.
And the kit the thing he had just used, the rumor he had just spoken was not a dream.
Jonah sat down on the wet asphalt behind the Chinese restaurant.
Head in hands.
No tears came.
That reflex had shut off somewhere around the Walgreens second-shift supervisor training a numbness earned, not chosen, and nothing to be proud of.
He sat.
The rain came down.
Somewhere two blocks over, a siren started.
After a long time, he stood up.
Pockets first.
Wallet: not his, someone named Jonah Vega, New York license, sixty-three dollars cash.
Keys: apartment keys, no address.
A receipt: Griddy’s Donuts, two days old, coffee and a maple bar.
Walking.
Head down.
Counting doors in Spanish uno, dos, tres.
At the fourth door the number matched the key, and inside, the apartment was small and empty and smelled like no one, and there was a notebook on the kitchen table.
The notebook was blank.
Jonah sat down.
Opened the notebook.
Found a pen in a drawer and wrote, in his own handwriting, on the first page:
My sister’s name was
The pen stopped.
The line stared back.
No ending came.
Next page.
New entry:
I heard a rumor that your gun jammed.
The gun jammed.
I forgot her.
The notebook closed.
Jonah sat at the table in the apartment that was not his, in the city that was not his, in the body that was his, and watched the rain come down outside the window until the rain stopped meaning anything at all.
The funeral was in three days.
He had work to do.