Tyree And The Masquerade
Tyree sits on the leaf-littered ground with her knees against her chin and her white, ring-covered hands crossed across her shins.
The taste of denim touches upon her tongue.
In spite of her large anorak and the huge, glittering, warm bonfire she built earlier, Tyree shivers...she keeps seeing her friends through the trees,some darting, some dawdling, but all creeping towards her, oddly enough in animal masks and vintage clothes, their heads cocked. Ebony, with her long, slender legs and messy brown hair draping either side of an owl mask, is in front. She glances Eve garbed in an ivory cat half-mask, darting amongst the trees. Matt limps nearer the back, strumming his acoustic guitar in a haunting, autumnal way, a deer upon his face. Tyree calls, but none of them hear. "I must be quite mad." she thinks, and laughs in a way not in her own.
"Mine friends! Doth thou not see me? For surely, you are here to take me forward to kintyre! Matt, with thou guitar, play me a melody. Eve, with though lips, sprout words from your mouth like a plant from a seed, and let it flower into the comedy me and you share, but no-one else can ever understand!" none reply. Her voice is odd, it sounds old..as if the words came from a classical book buried deep within her heart, not her brain.
But her friends plough on, towards the glowing fire, they join hands and skip and laugh around it. "friends! Friends!" tyree calls and calls, but none answer. She turns, crying, aggravated, and starts! A clown! Amongst the trees! Gliding towards her! As it gets closer, the patchwork body, the balloon, the collar twists and turns in impossible directions, as if it was made of rubber and a small child was playing with it, and yet the face always stares straight at her, never changing, always fixed into a friendly grin. And then the body falls over, as if shot dead, but the face carries on gliding. It's now close enough for tyree to reach out and touch. It rotates one-hundred-and-twenty degrees and tyree sees it's hollowed out, the back of the head cut off, as if the side was in half. She gasps; it's a mask made from the actual head of the clown! It attaches itself to her, but she feels nothing, just turns round and walks towards her friends who welcome her, and she dances with them.
George Millership
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