Everyone ran off down the street, screaming, trying to make sense of what they had just seen, but there was no making sense of it, as it was at once the most magnetic and the most repulsive thing that any of them had ever encountered, and they were both honored and ashamed to have witnessed it. So what was it? What had they seen? How can it be told? It cannot. It was—it is—like those horror moves made in countries with longer memories than our own, countries where ghosts roam freely through dim halls, where they bang on kitchen pans and knock down bicycles into the dust. In those movies, true horrors, when glimpsed, cannot be described for others, cannot be communicated or replicated. They work like a curse, tunneling into the consciousness of those who have seen them and refusing to be clearly shared. The burden is borne eternally by the witness. And so they must be approximated, which is a form of misrepresentation. This particular one, the one that everyone ran from screaming, was, let's say, a woman, maybe thirty, with long black hair and eyes to match, staring straight ahead, thinking of her freer youth. She fretted a corner of her sweater. A dark light danced in the hedges behind her. No one would survive the sight, not for long.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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