The Girl Who Started Talking to Me
It was a birthday party at a bar. I was in a circle of people talking about health, but everybody gradually went away, until one girl was left. She was young, maybe forty years younger than me, and pretty the way all young girls are. She was wearing a blouse with thousands of tiny flowers.
”And I also read,” she said, “That a guy in the nineteenth century really criticized electric light. He said natural light comes from the sun and the stars, but electric light is artificial and it makes the skin go pale. And scientists now are confirming that natural light comes from atomic fusion in the furnace of the sun, but electric light comes from burning dead plants and animals, you know, coal and oil, and so it is also dead. It’s zombie light, or vampire light. That’s probably why zombies and vampires are so popular nowadays.”
I looked closer at the pattern on her blouse. Some of the flowers created unsettling arrangements, like skulls and skeletons in bathtubs using dinosaur bones to row across a sea of dead bodies. Or maybe it was just the light.
”Excuse me,” I said.
”So the dead light flows across a small space, like between your face and the light bulb, or sometimes is reflected from the mirror. Especially when the room is flooded with light, like a dressing room.”
How did she know I was an actor? The flowery-bones on her blouse also depicted a dark ritual of sorts with grown-up skeletons raising tiny baby-skeletons towards a sun made out of skulls and bones and a petrified sea creature.
”Excuse me,” I said.
”And the light makes a noise, you know, a buzzing sound, which keeps you from sleeping. Also, the moths get disoriented. They never fly towards the stars, or towards the sun if they happen to be awake during the day. Their wings get burned up.”
Some of the skeletons on her blouse were doing strange drugs, pouring liquids down their eye sockets or putting hallucinogenic icicles through their hand bones or rib cages, waiting for the bony sun to melt them. Desperate for a fix, they did not know the sun was cold.
”Excuse me,” I said.
”We get nosebleeds, autism, night terrors, paranoia, temporary blindness, dyslexia, various mental illnesses and disabilities. Well, society calls them disabilities, but they are really related to electric light and dysfunctions of the sleep cycle. Unfinished dreams make us anxious and itchy, so we get stressed and stress manifest itself as all sorts of problems. The world behind the world seeping through and getting in the way of normal life.”
One skeleton was a boy playing a drum. Just a regular drum. Dum, dum, dum, just a regular drum.
Dedicated to Alan Rickman
Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk