note: wasn’t gonna post this at all, but am doing it anyway. I was gonna write what I was gonna write on this normally, but I preferred some abstraction for summing up my feelings here–at least… I felt like abstraction could express my feelings better than cut and dry communication. It is not a short story, it isn’t a narrative, it isn’t anything like that. It is just my feelings on something expressed in somewhat of a narrative format. So foff.
The two stood huddled together in the corner of the room. Each a pair of fake mustaches appended to their faces; they were the two strangers looking the wrong direction in a crowd. It isn’t that they were below the radar, they just weren’t on it.
Lance, the more excited looking one swiveled around and motioned at all the bustle and chatter around them.
Wearing a buoyant smile and possessing a bludgeoning laugh as a weapon he pulled back his grin for a second to remark, “This is great! Isn’t this great? I don’t think I’ve been so happy since I’ve been back home. See! See! Do you see these people?” he elevated both arms toward a trio walking by, they looked like Rich Uncle Pennybags must have in his youth. Standing adjacent each other, it was clear the three men walking by weren’t costumed in any way– this was simply who they were.
“Man! I love it!” as if gambling with his voice he doubled the ante, with a voice that at least gave mild competition against the deafening bustle of the rest of the room he raised both his voice and its pitch, proclaiming, “This is living!”
Anton hadn’t heard a single word Lance had said.
If it weren’t for his eyes tracing every trail of motion, flash of light and fade of shadow he could have been mistaken for a wax sculpture. He stood there with his mustache tilting to the left side of his face as the adhesive he wore underwent its metamorphosis from adhesive to sludge. He paid no mind to the fact. He simply looked around as if he wasn’t really in the room.
Perhaps he was absorbing the uniform look of the faded beige tile on the floor and the walls, each one gritted with a rough layer of sand that fit the mood of the room. From there, his eyes likely followed the cracks and chips in the worn out facility as the shapes transitioned from the jagged unpredictability of entropy to the overwhelming grid of humanity. Maybe it was that juxtaposition of self-imposed order and natural dystrophy that whisked away his attention.
Maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it was the backs of all the people. He very well could have been sizing up each person in that room. He knew that faces could be deceiving, but when obscured, you could tell a lot about a person.
The man roughly 10 feet away, barely in his periphery, stood alone, but still on the social forefront as if to say all he has to do is lean in and he breaks the barrier. His feet were pointed slightly outwards and roughly as wide as his shoulders, trying to project his presence, yet he held an empty beer bottle closely tucked in next to his chest, shoulders slightly pinned like the roof on a house. He had a habit of biting his bottom lip and furrowing his right eyebrow. He kept taking sips of a drink that was no longer there until he scratched his head, looked down and walked toward a crowd of women that had been standing in front of him.
An endless sea of subjects, all posed in different arrangements of balance and 3 dimensional space. The short, busty woman who seemed to be playing an imaginary game of limbo, leaning back subtly further and further which each word she ejected from her oral cavity; an offensive and mind numbing weapon that clearly caused even herself to recoil with each word fired. The circle of people, each man alternating from the hanging over you, slouched shoulders and slightly bowed neck stance, subconsciously placing their pelvic region slightly in the forefront of their personal space looming type of presentation, and the next being more of a Brauny man approach; wide stance, arched back, any ploy to show case burgeoning arms, of which were still more fatty tissue than muscle, and most puzzling of all, the way they centered their gravity around their butt, almost like they were prepared to walk backwards.
Dick, asshole, dick, asshole, one by one by one. Maybe that’s what he was thinking– assuming that is what he was looking at– dicks and assholes. They were unfortunately hard to avoid.
Nobody knows what those eyes were focused on, though. He likely wasn’t paying mind to any of these things. Perhaps he wasn’t seeing anything, just imagining being somewhere else.
Lance had not yet stopped talking. With a relenting sense of urgency he swiveled around, grabbing Anton by the shoulder.
“Oh, oh! Look! Those two girls over there, there’s two of us, and nobody is talking to them! Let’s go talk to them.”
With as much as Lance pointed one would think he had more hands than a clock.
“What do you think we should say? I should ask them if they like Dungeons and Dragons.”
Sometimes sound waves got tired with as fast and dense as Lance could speak.
“They won’t get it. They will think we’re stupid, but I bet they will have no choice, but to laugh.”
Amused, he laughed.
“The mustache—- on that woman,” Anton must have just been beamed into the room and sputtered to a pathetic start, “Like, wow, she is… well she isn’t cute, she’s in the same vein, you know, but it is like if cuteness were a balloon and you put a little bit of helium in it instead of just blowing it up,”
Lance was listening to Anton intently, his eyes zeroing in on the woman in discussion.
“It is just a little more buoyant, you know what I mean? We can’t talk to them, man, look at us!”
Lance had agreed with everything he had said until that point.
“No man, no way, that’s exactly why we have to. Besides, I like her friend more. Her mustache is good, almost looks like it isn’t a fake even. I bet she’s a cosmetologist, I always wanted to meet a cosmetologist! Come on, it’s a perfect plan!”
While Lance never lacked enthusiasm, Anton’s moment had already passed. He returned to calm and spoke almost lullabylically.
“I don’t know, I guess you’re right,” he either paused, or both of them just stood there for a spell of time and thought about who they were underneath their fake mustache camouflage. As if reading sheet music, the rest ended and both took to motion again as Anton continued, “This was a good decision. I’m glad we’re here.”
They had been doing this sort of thing for weeks. Last week they were in the basement of someone’s house, everyone huddled around a few sets of musicians trading guitars, tambourines, harmonicas and fiddles. Everyone had some sort of tail pinned to them. They wore Peacock tails, except Lance’s tail feathers were gray scale in contrast to the bright technicolor flourish of Anton’s. The next week they found themselves doing the same thing at a place called The Pirate Ship. The week following it was a gathering of spandex-clad twenty somethings in the parking lot of a dilapidated venue for what was billed as the largest game of Twister the city had ever seen. They even met a pair of women there and shared company for most of the night.
For a few months this was their life. One might call it social espionage as they tried to blend in with all the various crowds, consequently hiding their true identities. Enough time finally passed until the end arrived.
They drove around town that night, looking for the spot of the night, but they found nothing. This time they had brought their other friend, Allen. Allen drove, Anton rode shotgun and Lance, talking as much as usual, owned the back.
“This is fitting,” Lance remarked. “I don’t know if you guys realized this, but this is our last night doing this. I won’t be around long enough for there to be another time.”
Allen wasn’t around often enough for it to matter to him, and Anton had known this for quite some time, but these words triggered no stimulus. Anton offered no response.
Lance fretted.
“I don’t like being disappointed. You know what? This is disappointing. I’m upset. We were just hitting our stride, you know? We were finally on top, and now it is gonna be wasted.”
He did that voice raising thing again.
“ON TOP!”
Anton was tired. They had been driving around for over an hour, and he had exhausted all the options he could think of. Collectively, they gave up, spending the rest of the night in a dimly lit basement conversing over a few beers instead.
A couple of weeks had passed over the day that Lance passed custody. It was the start of the weekend and Anton was pregnant with restlessness. All he could think to do was to find Lance. Maybe they would find themselves dressed up as Tesla and Edison that night. It was that idea that kept spawning in his mind. He knew it wasn’t an option, but his heart held on to it. His friend, Bree, was celebrating her birthday that night. He was supposed to leave in 10 minutes. Prying himself from his desk chair he scrambled to get ready. It was in the bathroom that he caught a moment to examine himself in the mirror.
He stopped everything. He looked himself in the eyes. Turning each side of his face he crept up to the mirror, gathering all the angles. Intimately close to his own face he froze, at this point examining himself out of the corner of his right eye until he couldn’t get any closer.
Everything paused.
His heart must have kicked him back in motion, urging him to breathe as he bucked away and looked at his reflection square. He thought he looked familiar in his periphery– maybe that one guy he kept seeing around The Pirate Ship several weeks back– but when he looked at himself straight on, no synapses fired, there was no twitch in his eyes, nothing happened. He may as well have been looking through glass; he didn’t recognize what he was looking at. He was done.
After turning off the lights, he left.