(1) Candlelit and cavernous, the dimensions of the room flicker. Intimate and impossibly large, our dance oscillates around a dark rider on horseback. The oak floor echoes with every tap of the wooden hooves as the virginia reel cycles. I watch the rider reaching down to touch a stranger's rising hand. My mind's eye closes on the classically carved fetlocks of the creature: and I sense horse & rider are the same construct.
(2) A test. The lines on the paper are not numbered, but there are two columns of purple ditto. I spend entirely too long recognizing that I'm in class, and that the test is timed. My handwriting is impossibly bad, and I've only begun revising my answers. Seated third from the front in the farthest left row of the class, I filch a test booklet from the stacks atop the radiators by the window. It begins to dawn on me that I'm going to fail. But what is the subject? History, presumably. The hay-coloured light of a southern winter fills the windows...
(3) When did the actors in this horrid production contract the parasite? Clambering up warehouse shelving I watch them rehearsing their scenes. Some marking time, waiting. Others already in the throes of fatal struggle. It could be an Orion picture, for all the quality on display: everything relies on sub-optimal lighting. There's an elasticity to time here, trapped as we are. I sense that the movie has been filming for hours, days, weeks. The script could be a knockoff of Aliens, the white persian barncat an expy of Jonesey. From atop the shelves I watch the crew straining to come to terms with their roles and the reality that these events won't simply end in death. Events don't have endings. They have intervals.
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