#visual prose

a word on Silence

The first firework shot into the air like a signal, and the waiting people below burst into flower, like a parched desert plant thirsting for the first touch of rain. It was a crowded place, and dark. The only light was that of the phones that were blinking and flashing away as their owners took countless selfies and videos of bleached-blond hair and long legs that stretched for miles. The house trembled like a living thing, pulsing with the sheer life and heat emanating from the bodies of the party-goers, seemingly on the precipice of an explosion that was yet to come. The swimming pool lit up with some sort of fluorescent light— probably chemicals added by some chemistry student, glowing sinister and green, like a witch’s foamy brew. The guests lounged by the pool and in the pool, sipping pink and orange drinks of an equally shocking colour, like naiads of the followers of Dionysus at a wild bacchanal. Music blasted from every corner, the loud bass thumping so loudly you could hear the beating of your own heart in your eardrums, pounding and almost unbearably loud. The main room of the house was filled with dancers, all gyrating and shaking to the beat. If one could not hear the music, they would have undoubtedly looked like banshees to the untrained eye, partaking in some strange ritual. Even the stairways were filled with people, like the dark alleyways of the Victorian era, where vice and sin carried on so shamelessly. Kissing couples, drug-snorting hippies, and forlorn exes commiserating with each other littered the hallways, making it hard to move through without coming in contact with some part of human skin, detached from their owners and feeling oddly like an out of body experience. The party carried on long through the night, its vitality and excitement fuelling the revellers, and when dawn came, they retreated like slimy creatures exposed to the sunlight, to party another day.