The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly. Sybil Lamb

      Ever after, the flying girl would roost on the phone poles and window ledges and fire escapes by Grack’s hot dog cart. When no one was buying hot dogs, Grack would look up and search all the roofs and windowsills for the girl who seemed convinced that she could fly. Sometimes she’d bounce from the roof on one side of the street to the other. Other times he’d see her almost hidden next to an air conditioner or nestled in the awning of a shop.

      One day, Grack honked his two AHOOGAH horns and rang his three bike bells until she looked his way. Then he made his cool-guy-eyebrows move and grinned.

      “Hey, I got too many hot dogs again this afternoon. Help me eat a few?” He said the first thing he could think of to get this weird, wild girl to hang out with a regular, nerdy hot dog guy like him.

      To his delight, she chirped, “Okay!” and launched-fell off the nearest roof, bounced off a store awning, floated over a parked car, and landed in a gleeful crouch on top of the closest trash can. She was all a jumble of motion that seemed like the routine of a clumsy, careless trapeze artist, except she didn’t have any ropes.

      Without discussion, the girl and Grack decided they should probably hang out every day from now on.

      The girl would drop out of the sky and stick around for brunch, lunch, snacks, and dinner. At first, they never talked about themselves. The girl would tell him about stuff she’d seen from up high, like a giant hats-and-guitars party in the courtyard of the burrito place, or the glow-in-the-dark Frisbee she’d found atop the ice cream shop. Grack would gossip about how he’d made hot dogs for a bunch of hip-hop stars and some big-deal sports guys, plus he knew a place with free video games as long as you kept buying milkshakes.

      He invited her to check out the video game milkshake place maybe? But she said she wasn’t really great with the indoors, and Grack didn’t argue ’cause he didn’t want to leave his hot dog bike alone for long anyways.

      And then someone would come along for a hot dog and the girl would tumble sideways up the nearest building like a tumbleweed that made a ninety-degree wrong turn.

      2

      THE WEIRDLY SPECIFIC MARKET

      The Weirdly Specific Market always had people coming and going, buying weirdly specific stuff at the market’s weirdly specific stores. Shoppers came to buy enough T-shirts to fill a whole truck or a new set of number buttons for their elevator. Or they went to the strange, dark underground club for eating cheese and looking at pictures. One store only sold bolts and screws, and one store only sold empty takeout containers. There was a specialty shoe–boot place that converted shoes into boots and vice versa. One store was made entirely of rooms of milk crates filled with stereo cables in an old, abandoned department store. The point was: everybody needs some kind of weirdly specific thing at some point. When they did, they came to the market.

      The market also had dozens of butchers, cheesers, and bakers. There was a grocer that sold rare, fancy purple and blue apples, and one where you could get a bag of 1,000 carrots for twenty bucks. There were dozens of ice cream and hot snack carts, and Grack? Well, he was the most popular one, thanks to his Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu.

      Since Grack had been running a hot dog cart since before he could read, he had the experience to cleverly figure out that most people would stop and hang out, waiting to see what happens, if, say, they saw some bananas hijinks like a shoeless girl endangering herself by climbing up and jumping off roofs and street lamps and phone poles. Then, once she didn’t actually smash herself into the ground but instead kept on fluttering about like a featherless bird, most people would eventually look down and see the Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu, which was carefully designed so at least one dog appealed to someone’s particular vice, craving, or guilty pleasure.

      With the girl who wasn’t a bird around, people walked past Grack’s cart at half speed and then got even slower.

      His business doubled and kept increasing. Before long, regulars at the market had started saying stuff like:

      “Hey, let’s get hot dogs from that crazy bike cart with like 100 different kinds of dog. There’s a girl who’s always there and she was probably born and raised in a travelling circus, then abandoned here a few summers ago and adopted by pigeons. She hangs out on top of the traffic light and will jump off it and catch french fries in mid-air. One time, a guy bet her a corn dog that she couldn’t hop, skip, and jump herself to the top of the market water tower, so she took his hat and bounced crazily and carelessly twenty metres up the tower and almost plummeted onto the cement sidewalk a bunch of times. But then she stuck the hat on top like the water tower was wearing it. It’s still up there!”

      All the nearby punk rockers from the five-dollars-a-night hotel started called the girl Eggs after her one and only T-shirt that she always wore, all faded and torn up. It read, EGGS, and it was from a TV commercial recommending people eat two servings of eggs daily. She loved that shirt so much that if you tried to tell her chickens can’t fly, she’d just climb up the closest wall away from you.