Jackals and Peacocks

Nicole, with her press pass around her neck, was an official presence. She had to write. The security guards let her through, near the right edge of the stage, the grass was worn bare. The enormous speakers already stood there with their mouths open, ready. But there was still silence, like in a forest.

From the discarded, sticky plastic cups, Nicole could sense last night’s concert. Between the worn, cold metal barricades, Nicole found the bloodthirsty journalists and photographers.
The crowd poured in, and Nicole no longer saw faces, only bodies. It was completely dark by then, and only the spotlights were slicing beams of light out from the stage. The sudden thought that the crowd should somehow be stopped struck her as ridiculous. Nicole felt it was already too late, she wanted to look at the faces, but all she could see was a gray mass. She wasn’t afraid, because you cannot fear nothingness. There was nothing left to be done anyway. We humans, together, on our own two feet, forget yesterday, the tears.

As the crowd made the concert floor swell larger and larger, the stage widened. The spotlights stabbed and swept down from higher and higher above. Below them, the instruments had already become small and insignificant, almost ridiculous. Nicole was still standing near the right edge of the stage. She watched the human mass swell and arrange itself willingly, turning toward the stage with open chests and open souls.

This had once been a concert, Nicole could still sense the familiar rock songs. But there was no transition anymore, no time, no human presence, and the metallic crashes of the second song struck directly into the crowd-mass and the faces. No one had died yet, only a few had fused together, in small groups. It was a good concert. The jackals and peacocks onstage suddenly grew enormous, leaning steeply out over the audience, while the spotlights climbed even higher to make room beneath them. The singer and the guitarist had huge, sharp, red, murderous rooster combs.
Nicole was still only alive, helplessly. The feeling of her childhood fever nightmares touched her. When she was little, she could be overwhelmed by fear, as though she were going insane. She had never felt terror like that again, even though she’d been safe back then, at home. Her father’s hand, his voice calming her. The smell of the old piano.

Reality dissolves, life does too. We want to be strong, and we want to love. We hold onto beauty, we love it, preserve it. Each other. There are people we would die for at any moment, and then peacefully finish the day. We do not know the airless void. We want freedom, we write books about it. But we could never truly long for freedom. Because sometimes, only in bloodthirsty insanity, does it become apparent that we live only because we are chained.

The murderous jackals and peacocks were stupidly ridiculous, like cartoon figures. Nicole stood at the side with the other reporters, who had also begun melting together into a mass. Together, they were becoming lower and lower. As though music were still faintly audible beneath the horrific metallic noise, visible beams began shooting from the impossibly high, distant spotlights and the speakers above the stage into the shrinking masses of people. The volume was fatal, impossibly sharp, and a murderous electrical stench began to spread. There was no fear anymore, no desire to live, no human being. Something else had become, it was over, and the masses flattened out and disappeared. The jackals and peacocks remained up there, and without her past, Nicole no longer felt even on her skin. It was not Nicole who survived and prevailed. Because none of this had fallen silent — it had risen and dispersed: the jackals, the stage, the darkness, the stench, and the dead.

Perhaps Nicole was free now, and felt nothing.

2024 – Richard Kruza