Anticipation Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
The music was pounding; the heavy bass could be felt pulsing in
their muscles. Their lights were low, having been replaced with dark colored
bulbs and black lights. The garage had been built with a guest room on the
second floor. The room was full of smoke and teenage kids. A strobe light was
set to a slow flicker. The smoke and the lights created a broken feel; the
night was seen in shattered moments, not a full or consistent stream of events.
It was free flow stream of consciousness. People appeared and disappeared.
Movement was stilted and short. People were posed in moments like art, and lost
in meaning.
Katie’s parents were away. No one cared where. That wasn’t the
point. That wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that the stage was set for
them to have their moment. It was a moment of freedom, a moment of release. It
was made to just be a moment to live in and experience the immediacy without it
having to be a moment that would matter later.
Katie danced slowly. She twisted and turned and moved to her own
rhythm. She moved to the music, but she was making something totally that was
her own. Everyone else was fast and eager and a little bit dirty. Katie just
moved and looked like she was the music come alive.
Vick sat back on the couch and watched the dance floor. He opened
one eye and closed the other. Then he opened the closed eye and shut the other
one. Back and forth, back and forth. Right and then left. Left and then right.
He was mindlessly cutting the room in half. He was feeling something of his
own. He wasn’t paying attention to the music. He wasn’t paying attention to the
beat or the drumming bass. He was just feeling his own flow. Half the room,
then the other half. Half the people, then the other half. The strobe kept flashing
and everything was stutter-stepped motion. It was broken and disjointed.
A pattern rose. The strobe flashes, the dancing in repetitive
synchronicity with the repetitive music beat, and his left eye, right eye
change in view. Everyone was in step. Everyone was doing the same, feeling the
same, creating the same. Everyone was the same. Except for Katie. She was her
own. She was different. She was on her own wavelength. And Vick finally saw.
Vick had looked at Katie before, but he hadn’t really been
watching her. He had seen her at parties. Everybody had seen her before. She
was well known for doing her thing. She was a dancer that knew dancers and they
all seemed to run together and live by their own rules. But Vick had never seen
her like this before. She seemed so free. She seemed to have escaped the
banality that was their shared existence. She was living in her own little
world and he was just looking in from the outside, one broken viewpoint at a
time.
He wanted to stand up and cross the room and be with her, but he
didn’t want to ruin it. She was a perfect picture right now. To include him
would only spoil the perfection. To attempt to reach her would only make him
realize she was untouchable. To try would simply ruin it. She was in a
different place, on another plane, and he was just an outside observer. He
needed her. She didn’t need him. She was whole. His legs realized something
that his mind hadn’t quite figured out yet. And so he sat and watched. It was
almost nothing, but it was slightly enough and all that he deserved to be a
part of. He was better just for getting to watch her perfection. He was
spirited away and got a chance to be part of something pure and energetic and
beautiful.
Katie simply danced. She had no idea what Vick was seeing or
thought he was watching. She just danced and didn’t worry about a single other
thing.
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