These are the pink days. He sits on the obsidian parapet of the starscraper. They say you gotta take the blue with the brown and the grey but, he murmurs, the pink days are the best. His panting fades as he watches the sinking sun, floating in glittering, orange water. Wispy cinnamon swirls, lotus-pink, hover above the harbour as a layer of her golden cellophane superimposes with his hard, bright, dark eyes.

Half an hour ago, he’d thrashed with his emerald feathers to Twinkle Tower’s roof, “restricted” only to those without the stamina or those who care for the petty authority of little men. His rage had danced like chargrill flames and now, perching twenty-two kilometres on the observatory above Sydney, he can jump off. The rational, human drive to profit, however, dampens that sweaty impulse. Eyes sip a little longer after he almost tore the sinews of his shoulders. Toes inch across the polished, obsidian parapet as irises rove across the skyscrapers and hover cars, his subjects. He scoffs. All tiny, like the molecules of sweat jumping off his skin into the heat of the summer evening.

He inhales, ignoring momentarily the sauna in his chest, sunglitter in his eyes as he gazes at the calm, reflective water.

Self-discipline is rightly reserved for panoramas that rob you of air, literally and figuratively. His eyelids slide down like lazy rain droplets on a windshield as a zephyr kisses his cheeks, momentarily ruffling his hair. Balmy quietude without whirrs, without honking, without banal chatter.

He exhales.

Orbital muscles squeeze irises as he looks down again, where trees and plants cap the minute skyscrapers, resembling pixels in the fading, natural light. Dots and lines of artificial light, however, begin to glimmer; the red tail lights of hover cars and their golden eyes shoal like thick arteries along the megacity’s skyways and highways.

A silvery coin glows, burns, prints into the smouldering evening skin like a lucent tattoo. The silvery coin and the golden coin. Two halves that form his city’s money-pumping heart. Millions rise with the silvery coin to bank digital digits as millions sink with the golden coin to recharge. Then, as millions rise with the golden coin to bank digital digits, millions dissolve like wispy spirits into suburbia or their urban coops. Sydney sleeps as Sydney does, always, simultaneously, with one eye shut, one eye dilating on digits. He cares for the cycles of money cokers as much as he does for a window on a skyscraper. They exist.

He exists for a purpose.

Seven lights sail into the horizon, twinkling like a constellation over the Sydney Harbour, prompting a silent gasp. It doesn’t matter how many times he sees her; it’s like watching a plane fly overhead. You know the passengers are going to a somewhere of possibilities. There she goes, Immortal Spaceport, the patient dream, the three hundred trillion dollar black hole of Trade Zone nations. Ceylon ebony eyes flicker downwards, catching the pulsating sun as it washes the world with a layer of honeyed brilliance. Bright, ceylon ebony eyes hold their glare at the weak rays before darting back to the seven lights.

“ISP,” he murmurs. “One day.”  

The honeyed brilliance fades as skies and oceans emerge inside his head, shimmering like blue morpho butterflies. Clear streams swaying around seaweed and his ankles. He hears the roars of his people, roars that can drown any waterfall subsiding on his fading planet. He’ll give them 2.0. Unblinking eyes still sting from his dad’s glare when he told them his dream in the living room, and his chest seethes from the incessant, anxious murmurings of his mother but the fire of his passion shines fiercer than any fading, afternoon star.

“I’m going to be an exonaut,” he chants, “I’m going to be an exonaut. I’m going to be an exonaut.”  

He stretches his wings, puffed out with emerald feathers, the ones his dad bought for him. The ones his dad bought for him. Inside him, a sauna stirs again.

"I'm gonna be an exonaut no matter what they say.”

He sits on the obsidian parapet of the observatory amidst the pink blaze of sunset, dangling his feet over the edge. Gradually, his cheeks lose its bricky hardness, his jaw releases his compressed molars, and his breath, unintentionally held by his unthinking lungs, is emancipated.

The shop. His head’s swivelling left and right, feeling AC that he loves and hates on his arms. His feet snail and bounce and stagger along the aisle.  

Do you want that one? Eyes gloss over the latest nerve wings, feathers dancing like dream catchers in the artificial wind, glorified inside spotless glass cases, miserable and keen as puppies hoping to flee with new owners.

No, it's okay. He can hear the bitter tinge in his own voice.

We'll get that one.  

What! No, it's too expensive!

Thank you, his dad says to a rare human cashier.

On the muggy street, beside a gutter that smells like New York city, he hugs the man like he once saw in a movie, yet - almost instantaneously, instinctively - unclasps his arms awkwardly, as if stung by the unfamiliar move, though brimming with the right intention and courage. Wings with these emerald feathers cost fifteen thousand dollars more than carbon fibre ones and unfurl like you wouldn’t believe - in eighty g without a tear.

The sauna in his chest melts, jetes, sighs away like water droplets in a summer breeze. Family, the samsara, a cycle of angry moments evaporating before returning in a trillion, searing raindrops, before evaporating away again, before returning…

His stomach rumbles. What’s Ingot doing? No doubt cuffing on a blinding, grossly big Rolex and heading to the city to drown himself in Hennessy… Does he want to eat? His tongue recalls a double broccobeef cheeseburger…

“Snap it, Lily. No selfie,” he says. A dot of green light blinks rapidly from his watch.

Feet cross the obsidian parapet’s edge, suspended over Everestian cumulus clouds. Lungs quiver, swell, suck air. The wings are going to unfurl, he chants. The wings are going to unfurl. The wings are going to unfurl. Rapid blinking.

"Nitrogen levels."

"Zero."

"Traffic?"

"Peak."

"Too bad for them."

"Be careful, please. Shouldn’t you wear the oxygen helmet?"

A soft scoff. A soft, take-on-the-world scoff.

"Get it on video."

He relaxes and sleeps face-first off Twinkle Tower.

*

Angel twilight roars as bully gravity yanks him from the rapidly shrinking roof. His body loses control and his heart mini-guns his ribcage but his hyperfocused eyes lock onto the now caramelised skyscrapers and red dots and gold dots and harbour. A warm gale smothers his face but he’d rather this than rasping inside a Gentex helmet. Corridors of black dots haven’t formed yet. Good, good. He gradually teases the alien pressures of freefall out of his body, and inhales. Closing his eyes, he pirouettes head first towards the city, free unlike a terrestrial ballerina, reaching a blurring spin with his legs before slowing, stalling but still streaking towards dwarf skyscrapers. Sunlight suffuses his fair eyelids, glowing orange from inside. He can hear Seventeen D minor and he listens for a while against the howling wind.

His eyes bloom. Watercolour orange glistens and floods his world, orchid clouds softening its glare. He and the sun, two falling stars. Falling, he and the sun, two free souls. He plummets past a grey skysifter, leaving it to vacuum the stratosphere in solitude. They remind him of flying turtles.

"Entering the troposphere," says Lily dispassionately.

Fourteen fifteen sixteen. Come on. Twenty-seven twenty-eight did he miscalculate? Thirty - a trillion runway lights jump out of dusk. No, he didn’t. A trillion dots switch Sydney on like an airport, capturing teal atolls and chrysanthemums and auroras and poppies and too many shades that he lacks the knowledge to describe, turning his irises into psychedelic light art.

His whoop katanas the darkening expanse.

*

"How far from the ground!" he bellows.

"Six thousand metres!"

In the distance, a tall space lift glints, the similarly obsidian edifice scattering refractive twilight rays. His toes scrunch, shooting comet tails out of his boots, thrusting back his neck. The sky god’s groan is lost in the hurricane of his own creation.

"Seven hundred kilometres per hou-”

Tears wriggle down his cheeks and zoom into the air. Light dots are becoming balls.  

"hundred and fifty metres -... what... doi-... dep-... now... J-"

feels like he’s swallowing a rock his hair flutters like inflatable men hover cars are expanding -

"Eight-"

A canopy of green feathers blooms. He gasps, imagining his wings severing from his scapulas. The angel-like figure appears to bounce off air, so violently do his wings chop outwards.  

"Watch out!"

He falls into oncoming lances of gold, reacts; it's years of lunch times and evenings spent darting over the school field with a wingball - his wings tuck in as he rolls sharply, hounded by the horn of a hover car on King Georges. A furious scream pursues him around a skyscraper, flying past a bright Maccas pill ad before it collides into his manic whoop.

*

Steam shrouds him. Stretching his neck in whorls in the bathing pool of Amber House, home, he feels what is probably a pinched nerve. You’re a hooligan. And an idiot. He reclines, exhaling, and submerging his chin, drowning in the blinding headlights over and over. What if there had been kids inside that hover car?

He spasms for a microsecond as if blood’s lapping his chin, not warm water. Drowsy eyes flicking open, he glances around, gasping, splashes echoing. Familiar steam obscures the familiar, spacious, cream-tiled walls. Ambient lights rain from the ceiling. Anguished ripples nova away from the wingless angel, towards a mound of emerald feathers sprawling on the black, marble floor. Lily, the cybernetic assistant who inhabits his watch, lies on her side. Watch out! What if she hadn’t shouted? What if she’d glitched?

Imagining Dad’s face in front of a pile of bloody feathers which he had bought for him is enough for his teeth to clench. Mum’s face as she stands in front of a corpse - or worse, a radish.

The nanocrete moulds a soft depression behind his head, resting it slightly above water level. Virtual likes aren’t worth criminal records or cremation or retardation. Eyelids flutter uneasily as if roaming a restless dream. The honeyed harbour. The floating star. The wrathful, flaming eyes of the hover car.

It must never happen again, he chants. It must never happen again. It must never happen again.

‍

Hayden Yung © 2025

Editing Acknowledgements
Joyce Yuan
Ishak Issa