This evening I went to a ball.

What wonder; a thousand lights fracturing into a million shards, turning.

The food was good. Excellent, in fact. But all I could think of while I ate was how ugly the tablecloth was.

There was a dull roar of happy voices. They made me sad somehow. I glanced across the room, and seated there, arrayed as a flower, with each petal of light magnifying his glory, was the King of Spain.

Magnificat anima mea dominum

I felt sick, sick at the perversions of God. The light screams. Look here, look there, it is so much beauty that my world is full, and overfills my cup, sickly sweet.

He does not look in my direction. I grasp at his spoken words like a fool, catching the fragments over the room's noise.

Later, as I stepped out to go home, a handsome backpacker asked me for a cigarette in a language I did not understand. I was slightly drunk. "I'm afraid not", I said. My mind was whirling, and in a state where every happening has significance and meaning. The birds overhead swarmed over the night lights.

As I walked slowly through the dark, I was overtaken by a couple. They were discussing eating Indians.

I swear to a God I do not believe in, that all of this is true.

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