We Liars

Angus is sitting in the corner, in his wedding dress, playing with three red juggling balls. He throws them all up at once. Again. And again. He keeps muttering, ‘this time.’ I watch him with half an eye. After a while, I see he won’t be achieving whatever it is he has in mind soon, so I don a pair of headphones and press The Start.

Angus exhales as various electronics begin to purr. He dusts off his wedding dress and walks towards me, flanked by a choir who yearn for something, something just out of …

A harp twists and the corner falls away, revealing a vast green. Angus invites me to take his arms as we pass by an array of oblong strings and gusts of triangles, gurgling mouths without bodies. ‘Where are we going?’ I ask. I’m too afraid to ask where we are.

Bleeps and bloops jerk my limbs to ecstatic rhythms. Angus towers all six foot six of himself, wailing, lecturing, howling, over me, and the rest. The crowd, the mustachioed mass, subsumes me; I osmose myself into this kicking, dust-purple fantasy.

Three red suns lineate the sky. A ladder stretches asymptotically high. We climb, struggle together, up, blown by multi-coloured lengths of string dancing to falsetto honky tonk bitter harmonies emanating from a lounge fan. We reach the top, we turn our eyes heavenwards, we peer, we see scrawled in pen: YES.