I wrote this today in about 3 hours.

The glowing red LED lights next to his face kindly informed him that he was late for work.
Wonderful, Orr Landeaux thought to himself as he threw himself off the bed. He walked to the bathroom and fumbled for the light switch. Normally this was not needed; the bathroom had a window facing east and in the morning the room was blinding. Not so today. Slate covered the sky, solid and uniform. And not moving.
Orr looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes, usually blue, decided to match the sky outside. Bracing himself against the sink, he leaned closer to the mirror. The gray orbs, tinged with red from running thoughts that wore a man out while he slept, seemed distant. They belonged outside to the flat sky.
Orr shook his head rapidly, trying to clear out the thoughts from the night and morning before. All this seemed to do was splatter them, tainting surfaces with partial memories and hazy images. His walls now a fractal reminder of everything. Jackson Pollack smiled at him from the toilet.
Determined to wash this off, Orr plunged into his shower. Hot on, cold off. His flesh was turning red, but sensation was starting to creep back into his numb mind, and for this he was grateful. A reflection of the clock off of the bathroom mirror and through the shower curtain made him sigh. As needed as this peeling was, he had to get going.
I have to get going, he said grabbing a towel and drying off. He stopped, and again looked in the mirror, and studied his mouth as he said it repeatedly, each syllable taking longer to pronounce than the one before.
I have to get going.
I. Have. To. Get. Going.
Going.
A smile danced across his face. He really did have to get going. He realized this. No stagnation today. No sitting. Moving. There will be moving.
The idea of simply doing and being in motion pleased him greatly. He walked over to his closet and looked inside. Black slacks, gray slacks, brown slacks. Brown shirts, grey shirts, white shirts. All of them stifling, muted - but it was his business attire. Resigned, he removed a pair of black slacks and a gray shirt when the sky shot out on a hanger. He had forgotten about this shirt. Bright blue. Bought on a whim a year ago, and never worn for fear of breaking the unspoken dress code at work.
But today he was moving. And he didn’t really care. He grabbed the blue shirt and noted happily that it didn’t need ironing. He put it on, along with the black slacks, black dress shoes and black socks. He contemplated brewing the usual coffee, but decided there was no time, he had to move, so he settled for orange juice instead.
Out the door he stepped, into the hall, down the elevator, past the doorman, and onto the gray concrete of the city. Work was ten blocks away. He was late, he should take a cab. But today was not a day for sitting, it was a day for moving. It was a day for blue shirts and orange juice.
So he started walking on gray concrete into a gray horizon. Down the mirrored halls of the city the buildings captured the gray, wallowed in it. Smeared it over their pillars and windows.
After a block, Orr felt a small prick at the base of his back. He paid it no mind, he was moving. And nothing was going to make him slow down. The small pain quickly faded, and he sped up a minute amount.
A minute later, the same sensation. A small prick at his back. But it too faded, leaving Orr with nothing but a faster pace.
This happened eight more times before the end of the third block, and now Orr was moving almost at a jog.
Another two blocks and seventeen more pricks, seventeen more slight increases in speed. A slight run.
Twenty-eight more pricks by the end of the seventh block had Orr moving swiftly, running, deftly dodging other pedestrians and the occasional dog. This was phenomenal, he exclaimed. He was moving faster, and faster. Effortlessly. He couldn’t understand why no one else was running on this gray day, no one else was moving. Nothing but a sea of gray and black and brown raincoats and trench coats trudging.
Oh well, their loss. I’m moving.
At the end of the tenth block, after forty-one more slight pricks, after forty-one more slight increases in speed, he was moving impossibly fast. He had no intentions of stopping at his office now, he simply blew past it. He had never ran this fast in his life, and he wasn’t even tiring. Faster, faster, faster, until he realized he no longer heard the rasping of his shoes on the concrete.
He looked down as his legs pumped furiously a few inches from the ground.
This makes no sense, Orr thought. Flying? I can’t fly.
But there he was, traversing rapidly over the ground, and slowly but surely rising into the sky.
As he ascended over the street and between the pillars of gray, he caught a flash of blue out of the corner of his eye. Looking to his left, Orr realized it was his blue shirt that defied the uniform color of the buildings, ground, and clouds; a bright patch of sky rising to the heavens and obscuring the clouds.
He laughed to himself at the thought of a blue patch of sky reversing the order of things and hiding clouds.
It was then that he saw his back in the reflection. Covered in small, fluttering birds.
Birds. About one hundred, all beating their wings in unison, beaks stuck firmly in his shirt.
Orr broke into a huge grin at the absurdity of the moment. All of the birds, in search of a blue sky in the midst of all this gray, had flown into the back of his shirt and stuck. Pushing him. Moving him. They did not realize they were in a shirt; they were just following the endless blue sky they saw before them. The sky they longed for on gray days.
Higher and higher Orr rose, soaring until he was well above the city. Looking down, he studied the veins and arteries of people and traffic, reveling in the sight.
Downtown traffic was in a snarl as it always was. Traffic crawled, and people hurried from one gray building to one yellow car and from one yellow car to another gray building with disturbing frequency.
Orr then realized something. Downtown just wasn’t moving. People followed their work paths, their routines whittled down for maximum efficiency - living lives that would make Taylor smile. Every movement with a purpose, everything broken down into its simplest component. For the first time, Orr pitied the workers.
Watching his former self below began to depress Orr, so he looked to the east and studied the mountains. There, on a winding road, he spotted an orange U-Haul truck silently gliding on the desolate road.
Now there, he thought, was moving. Packing up, moving out, starting again.
Orr smiled at the thought of starting over, and of his own moving on, up, out.
The birds still drove him upwards relentlessly toward the blanket of slate, though now they also slowly turned to head out over the ocean. Orr spread his fingers, letting the wind play though them as it also danced through his hair.
Higher still he rose.
Up, up, up.
Through the cloudbank Orr burst. Bathed in blue light, he began laughing. “Higher! Up! Move!” he cried joyously to the birds with tears streaming down his cheeks.
They did not listen. Having finally found their sky, feeling it slide across their black and brown feathers, they scattered in all directions.
Orr began tumbling, a whirl of arms and legs plunging back down through the clouds. No longer flying but falling, falling, falling down toward the blue water below.
Screaming.
Then laughing.
Orr straightened his body out, spreading his arms to embrace the wind while tilting down. He was moving, no longer falling but flying, flying, flying down toward the blue water below.
Orr flew down into the deep blue ocean.
And up into the deep blue sky.