At first, you see him as a silhouette against the moon. A dark parenthesis in the silver night. Your first instinct is to shout, but your voice catches in your throat because the question is not what is he doing? but how did he get there? There is no ladder against the gutter. No scaffolding. No tree close enough to the wall. He simply is , as if the roof exhaled him from its own tiles—a golem of clay and slate.

And in that mirror, you catch yourself looking back.

You run to the parapet, heart fracturing. You look down. There is nothing. No body on the pavement. No blood. Only the wet gleam of streetlights on cobblestones and a single tile, dislodged, spinning in slow circles before it comes to rest.

The stranger on the roof was never there. Or rather: he was never not there. He is the vertigo that lives inside every home, the crack in the domestic spell, the reminder that the house is not a fortress but a poem—and poems have trapdoors.

Then he steps backward off the edge.