Photo: Piczo. Styling: Kamilla Richter. Total Look: Louis Vuitton. From SLEEK 55.
There was a town of low square buildings lining two roads, a town of a constant and low-level activity. There was a woman crossing the road where it bisected with the other. She had been shopping. There were bags of food in her hands and a rucksack on her back, a bouquet of yellow asters sticking out from the top. She waited for a break in the traffic, but when she got to the halfway point she stopped. She laid everything carefully on the road, took off the rucksack to use as a pillow, and laid down on the tarmac as comfortably if it were a bed. The cars revved their engines but stopped before their bumpers touched her. She did not flinch.
Her brother and her sister arrived in a shining white car that they parked on the side of the road. The police arrived soon after, but when a policeman took her red-coated arm and attempted to wrench her up the woman screamed so hard and so loud that everybody covered their ears, and then nobody touched her at all. They set up a temporary roadblock instead.
The brother and sister took turns to kneel besides her and talk, hovering their hands over her body. She didn’t respond. They tidied the things spilling from the shopping bags – packets of salted almonds and birdseed, a cream cake smearing jam on its plastic box, a dark jar of pickles.
A crowd gathered around the woman. It started to rain. A man in a neon orange jacket propped an umbrella up near her head. Someone else ran into their house and returned with a patchwork blanket which they draped over her, tucking it up to her chin.
By midnight, somebody brought a quilt. Somebody else a pillow. The sister lay down besides her for a while, but then left with the brother in the big white car. I’m sorry, she said to the watching crowd, But I just can’t stand it! The woman lay serene. Her pale hair rippled across the pillow, spotted with dark where the rain reached it.
The next day was sunlight, hard as a knife. The umbrella was angled to protect her face by passerbys. The police returned but did not know what to do. The traffic remained diverted. She kept her eyes closed and only opened them occasionally, as if to ask What’s the fuss about?
An old woman sat next to her and asked outright – What’s the fuss about? – and then told everyone that she had gotten an answer, which was I just wanted to have a lie down, but nobody believed the old woman, who had a habit of invention.
The woman did start speaking after a few days, saying words out of context but which became immediately heavy with their new uncanniness. Seaglass. Wind. Thermometer. People came from all over to see her and to tell her things and receive words in return.
By the end of the week, the woman was surrounded by candles brought and lit by the people who visited. The shopping in her bags was disintegrating with the rain and weather, but when anybody tried to dispose of it she screamed that same blood-thrilling scream that she had let out when the policeman touched her arm.
Instead people brought new things. They brought peaches sliced into bite-sized pieces, flasks of hot chocolate laced with brandy. They brought thick socks for her feet. They brought more flowers, arranging them artfully in patterns around her.
The people showed the woman kindness at first, lavish kindness, thick and clotted and unconditional kindness. But one day a small boy ran up to the woman, and kicked her in the leg. She did not react, but he was borne up and away by the crowd, chastised roundly. His parents were fetched. The boy had cheeks ruddy as an apple. Wholesome as you like.
"The woman did start speaking after a few days, saying words out of context but which became immediately heavy with their new uncanniness. Seaglass. Wind. Thermometer. People came from all over to see her and to tell her things and receive words in return."
But what, someone whispered to someone else, if it is the intrinsic intuition of children and animals that made him do such a thing?
Like when a horse can smell approaching lightning; or the cows lie down; or the dogs, they run around the field in great circles, onwards and onwards, with no end to the foam at their mouths.
What if he is right? the people of the town told each other, this small town with the scrubbed trees at the edge of its border and where nobody came.
When another child, a girl, started to slap the face of the woman, nobody stopped her. The girl’s hands were small and she laughed delightedly, she could not have been doing much harm, but still the woman’s face was splotched with red.
The crowds built and built like a storm surge. People came from neighbouring towns to talk to her and hit at her. Her limbs were bruised by the children, and then by the adults who enacted force upon her too. She could bear blows, but when her body was manipulated or puppiteered she screamed that same scream that cast off the policemen before.
It was suggested in the newspaper that the scream itself was a portent. A wordless word, building on from the other words.
Nobody fed the woman now. The shrine around her started to fall apart. People stole the blankets and kicked over the candles. Rats came for the food, and when rain fell she opened her mouth to let the water in.
But elsewhere. In the supermarket, a man laid down on the floor and placed his basket besides him. In the school, a teacher in front of her class. In the gym, a man lifting weights stopped and lay down on a gym mat for hours.
The newspaper reported that other cities had their own version of the woman in the road, and that they were venerating them too. Except the woman was no longer venerated.
The newspaper placed a notice saying Enough is Enough!, which advocated for action. Because of the rats, and the closure of the road, and the existence of the woman herself.
We want to lie down too, the townspeople told each other. We want to lie down too, but we run around our lives like the dogs that go in great circles at the scent of the thunderstorms, and are we not also foaming at the mouths, waiting for our prescience to be recognised?
And are the children not infallible and blameless, subject to electricities we cannot see?
The townspeople gathered together at the ordained place, at the end of the road. The woman where she lay was just visible. The crowd moved together up the road as one. When they arrived at the woman, pale and thin as a branch by then, her breathing was very rapid.
The crowd lifted her up. One person and then a second, and then three. She did not resist but she did scream, and the rest of the crowd covered their ears, but there was no getting away from such a scream. It is true what they said about the scream being a portent. The scream seemed to bring everything down upon them, but all that was happening was that the sun was setting.
And so they bore her off in their arms, carrying her, passing her further down the crowd so that the burden was shared, and they walked on to somewhere. It didn’t matter where. It was all in the motion, the uprightness. It was all in the limbs. They went on and on and on. The screaming continued, but they started to become used to it. The shrine behind them, ruined, covered by the falling light.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 60, out now.