Several ways to think about a fifth floor walk-up
A fifth floor fire escape yields the perfect people-watching vantage. You can discern the pattern on a guy’s shirt but not the stains on it; you can observe the fact that a woman is wearing toenail polish without parsing her bunions.
The front seat contents of cars are visible, and interesting parts of conversations are often audible. Pleasant cooking smells make their way up but the stink of melting garbage mainly stays streetbound.
Then there’s the building across the street with the bald woman, the kid flying paper airplanes, the vegetables drying out on the ledge and the girl who sits and stares out creepily until you realize that a tiny laptop actually rests in the window sill and the creepy stare is directed not at you, on the fire escape, but at Facebook.
