Ariel’s Tempest | spotlight effect
So then came that great, roving kind of silence.
Ariel felt there was much left to do; that deeper down, he was alive and could feel what all other human beings felt; that instead of a dramatic slow-motion, he was already on the ground — face right up against the polished wood of the stage, breathing in the dust and the silence of the crowd — fallen down and lying still, useless.
So then came that great, roving kind of silence. The kind which slowly drags pen across page in lazy arches — a fish circling in the shade of a rotting leaf and never breaking a ripple. It was a delicate sweetness and an utter waste of space.
Ariel thought of all the places he’d never see nor ever will see, and felt at ease; that he could lean at the prow of a ship bound for uncharted land and sleep with comfort, and that he finally has the courage to take a leap off this high promontory, this solitary sea-cliff to which he was bound — and into the seated men and women below him, whose hair glistened like foam upon the waves.
One by one, the lights blinked off. The audience faded to black. Not a darkening of vision, but a slow spiral of desaturation. Now there was no pen, and no fish, and no cliff, and no stage, and no sea, and no love, and no lie, and no flame, and it was as if nothing was ever known. Only mediocrity remains, at the heart of it all, beating in his heart along to the shallow breaths of this universe.
