Memory snapshot - (am writing these) would like feeback
I am running and hiding again. It’s the Kew Primary fete, and the school grounds are alive with multi-coloured stalls, masses of vibrantly dressed people, and strewn rubbish under-foot, all cluttered together in a tangled cooking pot. A bevy of children with face-paint dance past, giggling.
There are people everywhere, and I am on high alert. Danger could be just around the corner.
It’s become like a game to me; the running, the hiding. My eyes and mind are honed sharp, ready to pick out certain faces in the crowd and disappear in an instant, before they have even a second to catch sight of me. If they see me, all is lost. I will become trapped in a corner, a desperate animal with nowhere to run, while they wet me, push me, do things to me, knowing the fete will cover their torment.
Abuse is not foreign, but rapture is. While the fete acts to their advantage, it also acts to mine. The fete provides unforeseen cover, and a person as practiced and nimble as me at avoiding capture could lose oneself for hours in the blink of an eye.
I proceed to do just that.
I know how to weave through the crowds, blend in with the stall oglers, allow myself to be carried away on the path of most resistance. I also know the places to avoid; the toilets, the rides, the corners of the oval where the older children drift in assumed boredom, the places out of sight. They always catch you on the rides, when you’re trapped in line with nowhere to go. Eventually someone spots you, and it’s all over. Even if you’re on the ride, they can wait at the gate, watching as each slowing turn brings you closer to your downfall.
The fete is a giant rotation of people, noises, colours and sounds. Crowds move in circles, like clockwork, swelling and drifting, branching and rejoining. Always on the move. There’s a pattern to it, a repetition, that the shrewd observer can calculate. Predictions, calculations, the fete is a living organism and not chaos. There are times of day of increased safety, and times of increased danger.
The most important rule, never to break, is to keep moving. Always keep moving—not running—but steady movement with the crowds. Stay in one place too long, and the fete rotation will bring them to you. Run too fast, and you end up with nowhere to go, and you draw attention to yourself. Except at dusk, the transition between the day fete and the night fete. As the day stalls and rides close, and the night attractions are yet to open. As people drift away and the grounds become sparse. The sharks move in from the perimeter, bored and hungry for blood.
Dusk is a time for running.
But there is little chance for escape. Start running, and you have to keep running, bringing you inevitably into the fringes of the darkening playground and their waiting arms. You are like a mouse, running in hopeless circles in an open field, while the hawks swoop overhead.
Alone. Afraid.
But then, inevitably, inexorably, comes the night.
The night drapes blessed darkness over the fete grounds like a protective blanket and for the first time you are free to roam at will, unafraid. Night, when faces are obscured into a mirage of black anonymity. Night, where you are wild and free, immortal, untouchable. Night, when the teenagers come out to play, and you are just another tiny denizen—drifting between the shadows of giants.
I don’t remember the times they caught me. My memory rushes to the point where I see the face of Them, then suddenly there is nothing. Every time I think back, I reach that point and am thwarted, over and over again.
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Into the dark...
