Every Day Is A Good Day Track

Fabian sat in the old rooftop chair that still bore the marks of a hundred failed canvases. Streaks of ultramarine, umber, titanium white, some places where the paint had hardened into glossy ridges. He never cleaned it. It felt honest, the accumulation of a thousand indecisions layered over time.

The rooftop was cracked concrete, an uneven plane above the city's endless murmur. Evening pressed in like a fever. The September air in Cairo held no memory of coolness. It was thick, still hot from the sun's unrepentant weight, and carried the blunt edge of diesel fumes, open kitchen fires and sweating stone.

He let it in. Breathed deep. Felt the entire city vibrating under his skin.

A cat screamed somewhere nearby. Urgent, territorial, ancient. Another answered. A call to prayer unspooled from a distant loudspeaker, its modulated cry echoing off rooftops like grief sent into orbit. Cars honked in that particular, impatient rhythm unique to Cairo. Chaos coded into language. A child shouted, or maybe laughed. It was hard to tell. Sound blurred into sound.

Fabian didn't move. He absorbed it all.

And then...

Something shifted. A breeze. Subtle. Insubstantial. But wrong.

Not desert wind. Not the heat-stirred air of rooftops and human friction.

Cool. Clean.

He blinked. Straightened.

It wasn't possible. But it was happening.

The air tasted northern. Like pine bark and wet lichen. Like a silence that had shape.

A Scandinavian September, not imagined but present. Carried in the breeze like a whisper that had wandered too far south. Under it, faintly, water. Not the Nile. More like Rotterdam. But colder.

Fabian shivered. His skin prickled. The heat was still there, but underneath it, another layer was moving. Breathing. Touching him.

He stood up too quickly. Convinced he might faint. Went inside. Not out of fear, but calibration.

His senses had fractured for a moment. Opened a door they weren't supposed to.

***

Linn walked without looking up. Her boots knew the path. It curved gently between wet stones and slender trees. The forest here had already begun to shift. Leaves just starting to lose their grip. A subtle golden fatigue in the green.

She had come from the memorial grove in Järfälla, where the ashes of her late partner had been scattered years ago. Not in ceremony. Just quietly. Just one hand releasing another into the wind.

She wasn't grieving anymore. Grief had passed. Not vanished, but folded itself into her daily logic. A line in the code. A known value.

Her mind, now, was elsewhere. Ordered. Clinical.

Get back to Linköping. Pick up the freelance contract from that firm in Gothenburg. Finish the threat model audit before Thursday. Respond to the invite for the panel in Solna. Email back Zhao about the invoice. Cancel the subscription she hadn't used in eight months. Check on Grace who hadn't replied in a while. Schedule blood test.

The forest let her think like this. Efficiently. The trees didn't ask questions.

But then...

She slowed.

A chill slid into her spine like a memory she didn't recognize. Not cold from air. Cold from inside. Like the body remembering a season it hadn't reached yet.

Her breath clouded for a moment, impossibly.

The forest remained unchanged. Quiet. Still. But the light had shifted, just barely. A sudden hollowness to the sky. A crow called once in the distance. Not menacing. But declarative.

She didn't like it. Her fingers clenched inside her coat pockets.

She picked up her pace. Didn't run. Just moved faster. Like something unseen had started to unlace the logic she'd built around herself.

***

Elin drifted alongside the Motala Ström in Norrköping, her boots rhythmic against the path slick with post-rain gloss. The water moved with that steady, industrial quietness. Bridges above, ripples below, the memory of machines in the current.

In her ears, the soft lilt of ambient music looped. Layers of piano, synthesized wind, field recordings of moss being walked on. It held her steady. A private soundscape. Kept her heart from accelerating too much.

She hadn't been anxious lately. Just raw. Like all her nerves were just below the skin.

Still, the walk was grounding. And she welcomed grounding. She needed it.

Until...

A flash. A flicker. Something peripheral, barely there.

She startled. Paused. Checked her phone.

No messages. No notifications. No missed calls.

She pulled the headphones down to her shoulders. The world returned with full texture. Distant tram rattle, a dog bark, a laugh from across the river.

And then she saw it.

In the puddle just ahead, oil-sheened, catching the orange-grey sky in folds, a reflection.

Not hers. Not possible.

Someone was standing close. Almost beside her.

But she was alone.

She turned, quickly. No one.

Still, she didn't feel fear. It didn't feel wrong.

It felt like being witnessed.

Like something vast and slow had bent toward her. Not to threaten, but to notice.

She exhaled.

And for reasons she didn't understand, she smiled.