CROSSING BORDER ANTWERP 2 NOV 2023
Kies de taal
UNITED KINGDOM
NETHERLANDS
Sheena Patel - 4 - the bar
6 November 2022
She had a sense that perhaps they were all living in a death cult and attending a festival was a way of coping. The two days of heavy rain left the pavements in mirrored pools in the street light. She goes down to breakfast. On the way to the lift, she overhears two writers speaking in the corridor. The woman is stood in the doorway to her room, messy hair, a hand across the door frame speaking to a man who tells her, it’s ok if she can’t write now, she has to be patient, is she making notes, does she have ideas?
In the breakfast room, the man with the long necklace, the open shirt, the vest, is noting down guest’s hotel room numbers. The line of his muscles throb in his hand as the pen moves up and down the page.
Last night, she heard of an after party, she doesn’t have a ticket so at the door she points to her wristband and the bouncer lets her in. Inside is a swirling throng of people, swollen with exaggerated movements. There were half drunk drinks discarded everywhere on the bar, people smoked joints the size of felt tip pens, cigarettes smoked inside as if it were the nineties, she felt it cling to her hair.
She wants to spread herself out, seep inside of everyone. She takes a seat in the corner next to a group who half sprawl on the top of the sofa, two of their group sit intensely next to her speaking of writing, telling one another how much their words mean to the other, you’re inside my creativity she hears one say to the other and the other says in return, as soon as I read the first sentence, I knew.
She picks up a glass nearest to her. She puts the liquid in her mouth, warm red wine, bitter, acrid, it tastes of nothing but a memory of what it tried to be. She swills it over her tongue, spits it back out into the tumbler and places it near the woman. She watches the woman drink the red liquid from the glass.
WAT HEEFT DIT VERHAAL GEÏNSPIREERD?
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