The Crowd - Early Draft

I can hear the car horn screaming, a constant. Faces swarm, buzzing about me, encircling like vultures. Several people ask if I’m okay; they’re spoiling the enjoyment of the clouds scudding across the sky but I don’t say that. I sense in the disquieting looks that it’s bad form to do so. Right now, at least.

There is a sticky wetness around my head and I reach with my arm to brush it away, but someone tells me to stay still. Without being told I know it’s my blood, it’s something I can sense but I’m unsure of how it came to pillow my head. I imagine it as a red halo, a radiance of my life as it flows from an unseen wound. Vascular tabefaction.

It’s then that I look at the faces crowding around my prone form: a woman with a shriek of red in her hair; a man with testudinarious specs on, their stippled form catching the rays of the morning sun and forming macula on his face – they look like liver spots although he can’t be more than twenty years old; an old couple, holding hands as if to stop them falling into the abyss that contains me, their lachrymogenic faces a mixture of pity and shame. I also see angry faces, a gamut of visages irritated at my holding them up, my getting in the way of their daily routines. My first thought was fuck ‘em. I could feel the shudder of laughter travel through my body, but tight-lipped I kept it down like the sickness of early pregnancy.

Can you talk? What’s your name? Can you hear me? A barrage of questions. I think: at least I’m wearing clean knickers.