Night Fight High Street
By J. F. Gleeson
I am going to tell you about something that happened in a place that exists, even though you might think that the place does not exist because you have never been there, and because no one else has ever been there, and because no one ever could go there; but it does exist, and this is the thing that happened there.
They changed the streetlamps some number of years ago. The new lights muddle the birds. The birds are spotlit in the new white floodlights and sing in the night, the streets and roads whitened and enlargened beneath them and blinded with the taint of derelict sports stadiums.
The place of this happening exists beneath, around, streetlamps of their original shade; all people and shopfronts painted night gold and safety orange, a gate-arch leading from a characterless tunnel out onto the middle of the street, the middle meaning that the ignorant and the new are dropped into the street as into the midst of a carnival, and no less so on the night of this happening, when the street was embattled by the footsteps of so many, stepping into the video shop to clamour under the ventilation units for their air because most of it in the street outside was in untenable demand.
A cluster of the Bunch, not all of them, who were the locus of the happening, stood in a knot by the gate-arch, pleasingly before that age and anxiety when sureness runs far out and sentences of talk are loaded with the desperation to gratify the compatriot, maintain attention for fear of loss of bond, and prove existential worth to the group and to anyone. Being before this they were well content just being, speaking, or not speaking, or speaking whatever they wanted.
The street was full, most full, most space spoken for, more people meandering out of the tunnel, flowing around the Bunch and others who milled by the exit, and bundling onto the pavement with every passing instant.
Amongst other conversation and looking about, one of the Bunch, who was possessive and sentimental and quick to rage when stirred with these things, found out that another of the Bunch was shortly to be married, and his gladness at the news was far towered over and totally conquered by his not taking well to being told so late.
And I bet you’re fucking going! he shot with concentrated acid at the one of the Bunch who had the most mortal shadows under his eyes, the sentimental one spoiling instantly for combat and conquest, the right, just, barbarian-frenzied teardown of the complicit Bunch, one affront bringing terror and temper and all reason needed for the Wrath. The one with the shadows said nothing but that which he said with his face, which was that his wish had been for this confrontation to never come to pass.
All right, said the one of the Bunch, who was very mild and quite kind.
And you! the berserker bellowed at him, provoking some verbal agitation from the rest of the Bunch, for such was the other’s mildness and kindness that it was wholly terrible to shout at him.
This reaction provided nothing but fuel for the berserker’s riot. The street was hugely busy, the Bunch pressed by the gate-arch into an edge of the road, the road in general permitting no traffic precisely because it was so busy with people out and about, and this chromed nighttime thronging was disturbed by the red rager, who instigated scuffling and shoving by stamping forward and grabbing hold of the mild one’s coat and shirt and tearing them directly off of him. At this time intervention paused very minutely for the terror of the Bunch, resumed louder as search for the mild one commenced, for he could not be quickly found in the storm of torn shirt and yelling and pushing.
At this time a bundle of things was seen on the ground, and there was no time to notice if it moved or shivered or if it were still, though the last of these was most probable.
The seeing of the bundle bared the violence of the night.
The seeing revealed that the enraged one had not torn only the clothes from the mild one, but that he had denied him far greater decencies and securities, by tearing right off in a rip all of his skin, all of it pulled in a lash as one might pull a tablecloth or mattress warmer.
At this time commenced the burling and the crashing along the street.
Out from the locus where the Bunch swarmed and smashed and where the slighted berserked one berserked on, screaming now and throwing fists and bodily weight and throwing blood up into his face and lunging against the people-tide to get now at the one with tired shadowed eyes, dedicating him the next, measured thus only over the rest of the Bunch, who were fair object also, and now anyone, the flocked street being so full of people that it was not possible for the disorder not to encompass all nearby, and then more, more in impression and reality as possibly those previously seeking the relief of oxygen in the shops poured out onto the amber-brown street to see what was going on, waves of people and eddies of them crowding to get a look under the amber streetlights and the browned starless sky, all contributing to the impossibility of getting a look or choosing a direction, the Bunch somewhere a whirlpool in the middle, the wild one sighted occasionally up and down as he was hauled one way and hefted other ways and trying to get at the Bunch, the Bunch pulling him back and pushing on and everybody on the street in the night involved now in the opposing currents, be they far down at the low ebbs or near the frontline where the crux was a twisting gyre. They packed and crushed and the people who ran the shops came up to their windows where even closed doors subdued none of the racketing deluge. The forces became imbalanced. The mass of those coming to see from one end of the street overcame those who came to see from the other. To be immersed was to be submerged and to struggle for breath at a storm-fraught sea. The Bunch, and everyone, wrenched and fought and the stream of them slugged down, away from the gate-arch, on past the restaurant that was perfect for being frightened in at lunchtime, far away from the known end of the street that led to more town, farther on down beneath the streetlights, pushed down farther towards the other end, where greens lay on either side of the road, and some large trees, and two streetlights and then the end of the streetlights, and black.
They continued that way, butting and swirling.
There had once been an observatory out that way, a very small thing made from foil and papier mâché, out there before the black and the end of the streetlights.
What could and could not be there?
Some places exist an uncountable number of times, exist again and again as they are daily woken into.
Far more places exist but once.
J. F. Gleeson lives in England. His work has appeared, or will soon appear, in ergot., Ligeia, Weird Horror, Lamplit Underground, Mandrake, Bureau of Complaint, Bullshit Lit, Crow & Cross Keys, Déraciné, Cold Signal, Maudlin House, Overheard, here at Sublunary Review and other places. He has a website called dead lost beaches.