A Crowd
A group of sexless, androgynous individuals, featureless, white-skinned, in white cloth, bathed in selenian light, huddle together under the cover of night.
They murmur, they mumble, their words a muted minimalist music, an arthritic cello in a broken church, a violin bowed on the moon, they shift, undulating, dust on a moonbeam. There is a mood of worship. They pray to lonely gods.
You come across this group on the empty streets of your city. An inexplicable mass of people. At night, silent. A sight unseen in the metropolis. A crowd of uncertain purpose, unstimulated, quiet, directionless. In a sense, free. A mass not under the cover of protest or money or entertainment.
A kind of white terror rises in your chest. None of them turn to look at you. A rustling of their clothes, mass-produced in a South Asian factory. They are dressed like ideas and dreamed into being.
You approach the group, fascinated and fixated, despite your anxiety. You feel nausea, vertigo, inertia, motion and motionlessness. Their bodies are reflected in the curved glass of high-rise buildings. You press on through the crowd, their threnody, growing louder, more chaotic. Charged with desire. Burgeoning, bursting. Dry skin. Linen on flesh, bedsheets twisted round their necks.
An urge to lie down and be swallowed by them, covers drawn, moonlight through a cracked curtain, genitals brushing the linen, the air.
(And why are you crying?)
Soon you reach the centre of the mass. You realise there is a clearing in their midst. You push forward. There is something in the middle, but it almost can’t be seen. Like there is nothing and everything to see. Something unrepresentable; looking at it is to look away from it.
You find yourself on top of it and then the world bends like a lens around your eyes and unfolds itself like a glass flower, like a chrysalis. You emerge where you began, the sky a blue screen with a crack in it, lights winking. The cool breeze tells you that this is not unreal.