|
An auditorium with nice wooden flooring. Luscious billowing folds of purple-laced black curtains obscure all but the display nearest the entrance. It is a scale model of a small, idealized town decorated for the holidays. It shows a startling amount of detail. Storefronts are decorated in tassel and drapery, jolly merchants stand smiling and waving. Families gather around the immaculately decorated central Christmas tree. Through the street rides a pageant. Santa in his sleigh, a marching band and beautiful girls throwing footballs to the people on the sidewalks. The entire scene is bathed in light. Everything glows, skinned with undulating colors and suffused with a warming brightness. In front of the town model there stands a cutaway model of a single home. While not small, the house has no ostentation or extravagance to it. Especially for its model sized diminution the house displays an almost living solidity and cohesion. All of its facets are sturdy, designed and built to last tens of generations. The modeler’s careful weathering, abrading and denting giving it the appearance that it is already several generations old. A feast, partially consumed, sits on the kitchen table. By the table sits an ancient set of grandparents, hand in hand, contentedly napping. While there is no tree in the house, the large arched window in the center of the living room aligns with the tree in the town square. Through the pair of windows on either side of the central window children can be seen playing in the house’s snow covered backyard. People younger than the couple in the kitchen and older than the kids in the backyard occupy the rest of the house, talking, drinking, reading, napping and playing. The interior of the house glows with lighting similar to the town, but dimmer and more diffuse, outlining the comfort and contentment of the scene. Suddenly a black shroud, weighted at its corners, drops from the ceiling and covers the models. A man descends, standing on a narrow crescent of gleaming chrome. He is bald, but with platinum facial hair. His eyebrows, mustache and long goatee are all waxed to long, thin tips. He is wearing a glove on his left hand. His crop top shirt has a single sleave covering the right arm it is attached to the body of the shirt by straps. His pants are full length, tucked into tabi boots. The entire outfit is made of skintight, black neoprene. His descent halts when he is inches above the shrouded model town. He slowly looks across the assembled crowd, smiles and says “That...that was the old Christmas." He pauses, as his arm slowly gestures towards the opening curtains “This is the new Christmas.” As they’re pulled aside the curtains reveal that the room behind them is a stark, minimalist white. The walls and ceiling are flat, smooth and painted the same shade of white. The floor is a milky, somewhat opaque plastic. All of the illumination in the room is cast from lights under the floor. The room has symmetrical openings on its left and right sides. They are rectangular, only darkness can be seen through them. Next to each door stands a pedestal, a simple cylinder topped by a large bowl, both made of clear acrylic. The bowl near the left door contains clay, the bowl near the right, water. In the center of the room is a granite table. The feat of the table are carved to resemble human hands gripping into the ground. There is a ring of human faces, alternating between man and woman, all bearing the same solemn expression, a mixture of the emotionlessness of death and the exertion of pushing against an immovable load. The table looks heavy, enveloped in the ephemera of its minimalist surroundings, in a room where the shadows are all wrong, it seems like the only solid thing in the world. On top of the table is a metal frame. The frame is composed of four branching cylinders, knurled at the initial trunks and the larger branches. At each division the branches split in four, retain the same overall volume. The cylinders narrow with every junction, going from rod to wire to a hair width, forming a fanning, coral-like filigree at their end. Music starts playing, while it has the tempo of a waltz, its melody has the movement of a drone. A homogeneity matching the room it is played in, but disconcertingly rapid, like viewing a flip-book composed of identical images. By age, beginning with the youngest, the children emerge from the left door. Each child wears an identical light gray tunic and trousers. On the back of each child’s tunic is embroidered a minor virtue. The most numerous are demonstrations of mundane filial piety; clearing viruses, sending cards, acts of landscaping and basic repair work, paying nursing home remittance. The remainder, petty details of hygiene, safety and demeanor. Each child, in turn and in step, scoops up a small amount of clay, steps in rhythm to the table, plies their clay to the armature beginning with the bottom trunks, washes their hands in the waiting bowl of water, and steps into the darkness of the right door. As the last of the children file out, the frame has been filled in with their clay. It does not resemble, as you might expect, a tree, but rather a geodesic dome. When the dome is complete, the music stops, and out emerges one last child. It is monstrously large, but clearly still a child. It moves as though it is fighting against its own limbs, it gives the impression that this awkwardness is not due to unfamiliarity but to wear and fatigue, it picks up no clay. The last child carries the word “humility” embroidered on the back of its tunic, its face carries the same expression as those etched on the granite table and its hands carry a platinum nest. The shape of the nest is a reflection of the clay dome, the nest carries an egg made of the same material as the nest. The last child places the nest on top of the clay dome, washes his hands and exits. The lights go out, then they strobe in a rapid succession of varied color. The egg in the nest cracks, a mechanical bird emerges, streamlined, sinister, an automaton meant not to mimic life but to reduce its essence to cold efficiency. The bird rises up fully, flies hawk-like, forward, the backing walls hinge open to allow its passage. Behind the newly opened door is a light, brilliant, white and almost blinding. It overpowers the fluctuation rainbow of light now being emitted from the floor, it contrasts heavily with the still impenetrable darkness the children entered from and exited to. The man atop the chrome crescent glides slowly overhead, following the bird. He stretches his arms and neck languidly and, with a cadence timed to the motion of his stretches, says: “This is the new Christmas.” Mr. Dick fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Dec 21, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2019 07:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 13:16 |
|