raven.

“This is called scene setting: where everybody is, who's alive, who's dead.”
- Invisible Monsters

She had escaped her higher-than-the-heavens friends and wandered through the soggy drag of the air thick with body odor and pot smoke and fake fog. The sound was oppressive, pushing down on her head and shoulders, breaking her neck with the weight of its bass lines, pounding on her spine every time the speakers shook. The beat beat beat her down deeper into the pulsing crowd.

She marveled at the bodies, swirling through the beams of colored light shooting down from the ceiling. They ran barefoot over crushed beer cans, sticky wristbands, and 3D glasses. They danced in circles, spinning on their sticky heels, on their cut-up heels on broken beer bottles and melted Sno-cones. Dancing and spinning on their heels, black with dirt and beer and bile and grime tracked in from the asphalt outside. The girls with pacifiers, stolen from their baby brothers, and their bracelets like armor filling up their skinny arms.

A dull-thud-ache began at the back of her head. She closed her eyes for a moment—and looked up to a wide-eyed girl with shock pink hair. The girl kept throwing Smarties into her mouth; she could see her teeth grinding on the little candies, her jaw muscles rippling. "Want some?" she shouted, pink spit flying out of her mouth.

She turned away from the Candy Girl and pushed deeper into the sea of bodies—almost tripping over a boy sitting cross-legged on the dirty floor. He looked up at her with ice eyes. He parted his dry cracked lips and breathed sourly into her face, "Wanna party?" His voice was surprisingly audible for how low he was speaking. She found herself drawing closer to hear but not really needing to. His eyes grabbed at parts of her that made her sick. She moved on again.

A she-skeleton emerged from a hole in the wall of people. The sweat on her bony neck mingled with a candy necklace and left pink, purple, blue, yellow stains that dripped to her collarbones. She chewed the sugar loops down to the string until it broke and the candies hurriedly followed one another dropping off of her neck and to the floor. The hunger in her deep-set eyes was so intense that she expected the gaunt girl fall to her knees and to gobble the candies from the floor. Instead she just wrapped the wet string around her finger so tight the skin turned purple and she could imagine her blood.

"You rollin’?" she screamed, repeating herself several times, as if she was attempting to ask every person moving around her. Before she could open her mouth to answer the girl, she was shot forward, her shoulder blades caving in from an impact. Pain radiated through her back and connected with the pain in her head. A boy in a rainbow scarf flailed his arms and legs, gyrating past her, sharp elbows swinging in all directions. His disco dance world had consumed him. He had no idea she even existed.

The crowd was completely alive, a separate entity, a living organism, pulsating and throbbing to some internal digestion of the music. Her body, squeezed so tightly between so many other gummy hot bodies, was caught up into the dense air. Her limbs pasted to her sides, her neck crooked at a harsh angle, her body was caught up and her feet lifted off of the ground. Dizzy, in her own whirlwind, she crushed her eyes shut.

That deep in the crowd, there was no light.