The air smelled like rain; the streets were glistening like mirrors lulling you into looking down and looking too deep, and a spidery line of crimson liquid ran in a continuous streak over the hills of facial features. From its origin above a black eyebrow, it polluted the puddles that kids would play in with hate. The man’s eyes were open and empty, bruises forming on his arms and legs. People were shoving past each other to get away from the scene.
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“Mr Webber! Mr Webber, over here -” Jakob’s mind was a hazy, foggy place. Every puddle of rain on the pavement might as well have been blood.
“Sir,-” A man with a large camera pursued him.
“Jakob!” Blake screeched at him through the phone.
“Can you tell us-” the man with the camera yelled. Jakob was desperate to reach his flat.
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“People have been speaking of this happening forever, and here he is! Theo Penev!” the commentator gushed. The man in question, the one everyone had been talking about was walking along the edge of the diving pool drying off the droplets of water running down his body.
“9.5, 10, 10, 9.5-” The announcer counted up the scores on the loudspeaker that boomed through the entire arena.
“Amazing, the firework dive!” the commentator said, his voice paved with excitement.
The gloomy skies reigned, opposing the sun’s glow from behind the thick cover. A stench of cigarette smoke polluted August’s throat. It was a radical change from the stale air in his small one-bedroom flat on the outskirts of Pontoise. The grey roads blended into the grey pavement, and the pavement was elongated by the muddy-brown brick buildings.
“You should have been there. It was a blast!” Lorenzo puffed on a cigarette and leaned against the brick building. The gloomy skies reigned, opposing the sun’s glow from behind the thick cover. A stench of cigarette smoke polluted August’s throat. It was a radical change from the stale air in his small one-bedroom flat on the outskirts of Pontoise. The grey roads blended into the grey pavement, and the pavement was elongated by the muddy-brown brick buildings.
The smoke swirled over August’s head and he pressed his back even firmer against the raw material. He tugged his coat closer around his body and stubbed his worn-out trainers against a stub of a pavement brick that reached an abnormal height.
“Should have, I guess.” August shrugged.
“Is everything all right?” Lorenzo dropped the cigarette on the curb and crushed it with his black boot. He turned to face August. Lorenzo leaned with his side against the cold brick building, as August tried to focus on anything but his question.
“Yeah.” August’s mouth twitched, his eyes downcast.
“Will I see you later? We are planning to go to the new Thai place opposite the park.”
“I’ll see, I might not make it.” August tucked on the sleeve of his jacket, desperate to have something to occupy himself to not notice the look Lorenzo was giving him.
“Please try.” Lorenzo shrugged and trudged towards the flat he shared with a few of their friends as he lit another cigarette. August closed his eyes and irrationally waited for Lorenzo to come back. His breath came in short puffs and his shoulders tensed. He felt the dark matter stir from where it had planted itself in his mind, its roar fuelled by rude comments and religious slurs others had spat at him. The paralysing venom trailed down his spine, making his torso shiver and tense in alternating sets. His palms itched as he scraped them against the rough, uneven bricks behind him to steady himself.
Late afternoon hours found August sitting with his back against the rigid, uneven apartment wall. His phone vibrated on the mattress next to him but soon calmed with the press of the decline button. His phone vibrated again with a Facebook notification. He shouldn’t open it, he knew that, but maybe it was important. The light was too bright on his screen and he scrolled through his notifications, past the missed messages from Lorenzo. Further down, he saw that two students at the same university had mentioned him in Facebook comments. By his own standards, the first one wasn’t too bad, a racial slur as an extension of the joke it commented on. Yet, the second comment made his jaw tense, his palms itch and his leg twitch. The venom seemed to suck everything from the comment on the screen, storing it in his mind as a torture device.
He had hoped that the fading night, making room for the vibrant glow of the reds and purples tainting the sky at sunrise, would bring around new realisations, that somehow he would wake up with a clean slate in his mind. Yet, his thoughts were shackled to what felt like a never-ending drop. He remembered having hoped, at some point, that this was to only be a cameo in his life, something that would disappear with the announcement of change. Still, the rough sheets held him hostage with soft chains, as they did every morning. He laid in bed, contemplating all the feelings rushing back to him from the night before. They were an acid burning across his skin, replacing everything with pain. His nails were blades in his palms. The religion, something rooted in him from birth, was not a warm saviour. It had morphed into a burden, impacting his every choice and his every day.
As he walked across campus, he passed the flyer board where grassroots organisations and student-based initiatives would hang their flyers to catch everyone’s attention. Usually, these were social activities such as a concert, a demonstration, or a gathering. This implied that August also rarely spared the wall a second glance. At a white table stood a man who looked rather young, perhaps in his late twenties or so, with blue flyers stacked in mountains on the table. The man spotted August, raised an eyebrow and offered him a flyer with a smile. August hesitantly accepted the folded paper, “Thanks.”
“No worries. Tonight, seven o’clock, Varya Park Road. It would be wonderful to see you there. My name’s Jakob Webber by the way.” The man smiled again, and August opened the flyer as he continued down the hall towards his first class of the day. The front had a shiny gloss finish with the words ‘A Higher Plane; a campaign movement by Blake Reid’ written on it. He browsed through the headings and the dates of their gatherings. ‘No science or cold facts, only heartwarming, eye-opening stories,’ the flyer boasted.
The entrance to Varya Park Road that met one of the central streets, was lined with roadblocks. Some people had congregated just past the barriers in small groups where they whispered amongst themselves. Others seemed optimistic, with their big arm movements and megawatt smiles. To August it looked like a clash between two forces. The oil of the slow- moving, narrow-minded university town and the water of those who had already experienced acceptance. The latter with their uncaged smiles, radiating positivity and with a gleam of a fight in their eyes.
It was another twenty minutes before the crowd started moving down the road away from the central part of Pontoise. August followed blindly in the herd of people. The crowd was still split, the more sceptic people trailing a fraction behind. The crowd halted suddenly, and the air was alive with enthusiastic chatter from the front of the herd. The same man that had handed August the flyer that morning emerged from the front of the crowd. He stepped up onto a small podium. “Good evening.” They waved a few banners and signs as a recognition of the greeting. “May I say, that I’m very pleased to see so many faces in the crowd tonight.” Even without the aid of a microphone or megaphone, his voice was still a strongly grounding presence that drew August in. “On that note, my name is Jakob Webber, and I look forward to getting to know your stories. From up here, I see people with the stories we so crucially need, bursting at the seams to be recognised in our society. We need you because with stories we can tuck at the heart and cause empathy to spread. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could live, travel, and love freely? Without worrying about what it might mean for our social, physical, and mental health?” The crowd echoed his enthusiasm in significantly larger applause before he continued. “Let me tell you why I’m here, not why you are here, because I don’t know, but specifically why I’m here. I’m here to make a difference, no matter how small. I’m here to fight for you. I’m here to ensure that you,”- He pointed at a woman in sleek, grey office wear. -“will get the pay raise or promotion that you deserve as much as your male colleague. I’m here to ensure that,”- He looked closely at a young African girl towards the back of the crowd. -“the colour of your skin will never affect work opportunities. I’m here to ensure that your marriage,”- he gestured to two men affectionately holding hands and leaning into each other. -“will be recognised wherever you go. I’m here to ensure that you,”- He singled out a woman wearing a hijab. -“will never have to face prejudice for your beliefs.” The roaring applause trickled through the night at the speed of light, a stark contrast to the usually still, slumbering nights. He saw a few people shedding tears, people hugging, and banners waved around. He felt some tension seeping from his torso, down his legs and into the pavement. The man, with his dark hair and brown eyes, watched the fire he had sparked in them with proximity. An electric current weaved, with the hope Pontoise hadn’t seen in a long time, through the crowd. This man was a mover in a place where little ever moved. “We do not fight to be superior, we fight to be equal!” With that, the man stepped down from the podium. The electric atmosphere created a bond within the crowd. It was as though people’s personal bubbles burst in a storm of enthusiasm and cheering. They were hugging complete strangers, waving signs and clapping and no one in the small town congregation seemed to mind. No one in the crowd was an outsider looking in, because they were all the crowd, a united frontier now that they had found common ground. Upon a second and closer glance, August reckoned that all these people seemed to be minorities in one way or another. There were immigrants, like himself, who were finally finding a place in Pontoise’s closed community, and finally overcoming hardship, it seemed.
The group moved forward as a unit. Presumably, because the man with the warm, brown eyes had led the group away from the podium and further down the street. Darkness had fallen completely. At Jakob Webber’s command, they turned phones on a flashlight setting and August imagined that if one was to look at their relatively small group, from above they would be visible like a spotlight in the sea of the dark town. As they walked through the streets, chants of equality flowing through the air, several residents emerged from their houses to witness the spectacle that had woken them. The divide was clear; some faces were set in a disapproving grimace. “Be quiet!” one yelled after them.
“Disgrace!” an elderly woman hissed from her balcony.
“Go home!” a younger man yelled with a clear implication that everyone in the crowd should consider where home really was. But some people joined them. The unusually electric atmosphere drew them in and they hurried down the front steps and found a place in the crowd. The number of people clinging to each other like grapes on a vine grew out of proportion.
They kept walking until they reached the small, central square. There, they congregated on the cobblestone piazza, sandwiched by the old beige buildings and small cafes, a marble grazed fountain had its place as the centrepiece. Jakob Webber stepped onto the fountain ledge, and his magnetic energy drew everyone close so they were standing side by side. “My brothers and my sisters,” he addressed the crowd, “look at our diversity and see all the opportunities this society has missed by not taking us in. We mustn’t let that define us. We are blue iris buds waiting to bloom. We are beautiful, we are worthy. Although we protest, we must not destroy. We must protest with patience and persistence. This lack of radical action is not a silent acceptance of our lives; it is a show of willpower. We must not let anger rule us, for anger splits waters. We must tell our stories and change hearts through empathy and human sympathy.” As August looked around, he found that Jakob’s words perhaps hadn’t even been necessary, because he didn’t see anger in the faces of the protestors. He saw love, determination, sadness and scepticism. There was resistance within the group, those who were scared that this was not beneficial, their singing only fueled by bursts of fleeting hope. The crowd had gone silent. Jakob’s words hit a bullseye target within them. Here was a voice in the place where little was ever voiced.
A murmur crept through the crowd, chirping birds echoing the same thoughts. August heard pieces of frantic conversation as Jakob turned around to talk to one of the other organisers. People’s eyes darted and shoes tapped against the cobblestone street in fast patterns as an outlet for the uneasy tension. Jakob was still engaged in a hushed conversation with an organiser when August heard a motor whirring and getting closer to the piazza. The group was scattering, and he felt the tension return to his shoulders. Perhaps this had been foolish. The headlights of a police car trailed across the uneven street, casting a spotlight on the protestors. The car came to a halt and two uniformed officers stepped out. They approached the crowd calmly, although August could sense the unease that was now spreading like a thunderstorm. The officers’ hadn’t drawn their weapons nor did they carry pepper-spray. Yet, the collective thoughts were piercing as Jakob stepped down from the ledge and approached the men. After a quick exchange, Jakob returned to his spot on the ledge where he declared, “We have received a noise and disturbance complaint, nothing to worry about.” August’s palms were still itchy and the prospect of returning to his tiny flat was dreadful. “But this marks the end of tonight, we’ll be heading back shortly.” As soon as Jakob once again disappeared from the ledge some people scattered from the crowd, but, the majority started walking back from where they had come as a collective group.
They kept the volume to a minimum as they walked up Varya Park Road. Chatter had subdued to a volume where you could hear the engine of the occasional car driving through the town, though those were a considerable amount of time apart at this point of the night. As they approached the roadblocks, August could hear the more distinct noise of a motorcycle before the engine died down. The flock of people reached the roadblocks as a man-made his way between the roadblocks and trampled through the crowd with no apologies. August felt himself being pushed to the side before a piercing pain spread from between his ribs to his arms and torso. He clutched his side and looked down to see his hands drenched in a dark liquid that flowed over his knuckles and down onto his pants. Similarly, another wash of pain spread to his legs, and he felt his muscles refuse to cooperate as he collapsed onto the asphalt hitting his forehead on the curb. The few people close to him turned at the unmistakable noise of bones hitting the rugged ground. The sound of screams swam like fish in his muffled mind and he could no longer pinpoint whether the dark matter he was looking at was the asphalt or the night sky. He felt his rapidly pounding heart against the ground and every breath hurt as though his heart was being slammed repeatedly onto concrete. His ears filled with a buzzing sound, the cotton preventing him from hearing the chaos of which he was in the midst. His breath picked up, his heart slammed, his head swam, on and on and on as he slowly disappeared.
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