Read Melody Burning for Free Online

workers. They would be looking for him.
    Had Melody told them? Were the police coming?
    He shrank back from the edge and moved toward his tiny space on top of the elevator control shack, a tool storage shed just four feet high and nine long that had not been pulled off after construction was completed.
    As he climbed the side of the shack, he saw one of the doors to the roof slowly open. For an instant, he was transfixed. Disbelieving. He quickly jumped down and in three strides concealed himself behind the shack, back where the water towers hissed and the bats lived.
    A figure came out into the middle of the roof and stood. It was all in white, a woman, her back to him. The wind blew the thin white gown around her.
    Then she turned a little, and a shock as powerful as lightning went through him. It was Melody.
    She walked straight ahead, going toward the edge that dropped down to the building’s marquee and front entrance. As she got closer to the edge, she walked faster. And now she spread her arms out and let the wind blow her white gown back, and he saw her body in its perfection outlined against the glow of the city. He knew that she was perfect and of the high world, and he was not perfect, hardly a person at all.
    Her voice rose, magic in the night. She was singing a song he’d heard her working on.
    “So not free, so not free, when will you come and take me? So not free, so not free, where is the love I need? So not free, so not free . . .”
    She bent over and the words went away, and she was sobbing into her hands.
    He wanted to help her so much that he actually reached out and took a few steps toward her.
    She straightened up and went even closer to the edge. She was right against the railing now, and he was thinking that she must not get up on it, that she was not like him; she didn’t know how to climb and balance. She raised a leg, and he almost moaned aloud.
    Then she leaned forward. If she went just a few more inches, she was going to topple over the edge.
    She held her hands to her head and uttered the saddest cry he’d ever heard in his life.
    She bent forward further. Her thighs were tight against the rail.
    No!
    She stood very still now, her hands at her sides as she looked to where the moon hung low. Every inch of his body and every whisper of his soul made him want to run to her and put his arms around her fragile waist and draw her back from the edge. But if he surprised her, she would lose her footing.
    Now she sang again, her voice climbing the tower of the air, pealing through the wind as if there was no wind. “So not free, so not free, please come for me, please come for me. Unlock the perfect prison of my life, make me new, make me true, ’cause I’m so not free, so not free.”
    The words moved him to his core, and he felt their meaning, the eternal sense of loss that is at the center of every human heart, and he thought they were the truest words he had ever known, a cry to the night and the moon to come and unlock the prison of life.
    Again she swayed, and once again she raised her arms. He could see her naked form in the thin robe, outlined by the moonlight.
    He thought if he ran fast enough, he could maybe grab her from behind and pull her back, then throw himself to one side among the air-conditioning equipment to her left. Once he was up under there, he would somehow make his way to the other side of the roof, where there was more than one place to slip away into the building and be gone.
    Sure, but what if he missed? Or was too slow? If she heard him coming? It was just too dangerous to even try.
    He stepped back into the shadows of the elevator shack and cried out as loud as he could, “So not free, so not free!”
    She froze. It looked as if she was riveted to the rail.
    He bit his tongue almost to bleeding, then covered his mouth with his hands. He stood as still as a statue.
    Suddenly she whirled around. Her eyes were glaring, her lips twisted with pure hate—it was like the