She moved with all the liquid motion of a tall glass of beer, weaving in and out of the crowd in front of her like a professional skier performing a slalom. Her hair, tied up in a bow, swung back and forth furiously, mirroring the ebb and flow of the crowd that surrounded and enveloped the woman. She had golden brown eyes that shone, moving forward against the flow of salmon-minded men and women in suits and blouses, shirts and trousers, slacks and heels — the effect was akin to a car’s headlight glaring into your eyes late at night, from the lane for incoming traffic. She tightly gripped in one hand a brown, leather purse that bulged with weight, and in the other, a piece of paper with something handwritten across one side. That day, she was wearing a pale orange cotton blouse, with a crimson-red skirt that reached down to mid-thigh length, with which she had on white stockings and gray, high-top sneakers. As she pushed through the crowd, her mind turned to heftier matters than the concern of bumping into strangers, though.
“I wonder if this is going anywhere?” she thought, in a contemplative matter of ways, “And I can’t imagine what I’m doing here . . . All these people? And this note?” She glanced down at the paper in her hand, reading, for the fortieth time in three minutes, the words: BE AN INTERESTING CHARACTER! “Some sort of editorial instructions from a divine being?” She shook her head and squinted her eyes against the rays of the setting sun that were beginning to shred across her field of vision.
Over the bustle of the crowd, the gruff voice of a man floated into her hearing. “Hey, why don’t you dance or something?” Confused, the woman sharply swiveled her head left and right, in search of the request that felt almost like a telepathic message sent straight into her brain. “Yeah, you. Dance, or sing. Display an unique and distinguishing trait.” Furrowing her brow, she bit her bottom-lip and tried to walk a little faster. “You’re no good.”
Suddenly, the scene switched to complete white, a blank and empty canvas yet to be painted. The woman yelped in surprise, and tried to cease her forward motion quickly enough to keep herself from falling. Slightly losing her balance and stumbling a few paces, she caught herself and looked around, stepping in a small circle. In bewilderment, her pink-lipped mouth gaped open and no words could escape her throat. Pushing the lump that had formed in her throat aside, though, she croaked out one syllable: “No?”
“You should’ve been more engaging. Nobody wants to read about a woman walking through a crowd. Seriously, where’s the intrigue and mystery in that? ‘Oh no, is she late to work or a date!’ Who cares?” the same voice echoed in her skull, seeming to rebound off of all four lobes and redouble in volume each time. Falling to her knees, the woman hugged herself and began to frantically sob.
“But . . . But, you didn’t give me a chance! I swear, I–I can be a good character . . . I promise!” she whimpered, and stuck her lip out in a pout. “It’s not fair, I’m so . . . So, unrealized!”
Out of nowhere, a man stepped forward with a pen and loomed over the crying figure of the woman. “Pitiful and wretched . . . Should’ve conveyed that kind of image sooner! For a good reason! Pleading for your existence as a character wouldn’t make sense. Hell, and you had to write a note to yourself? Show me a good character that has to remind himself to be good! Did Hamlet stop and ask for lines halfway through his play? Did you ever see the carriage-driver in Dickinson’s poem stop and do a dance, screaming ‘Look at me! I’m death! Death, death, death!’ No! that’s because nothing should be obvious. You just think to yourself that you’ve got to be interesting and mysterious, and then do something to do so. It’s simple.”
“Aw, but . . . You didn’t give me anything to work with! I was just . . . Alive? What motivation is that? I need reason, history, relationships! Something, you know?” the woman gazed upward, her eyes red and wet, cheeks stained. She tried to wipe the salty tears from her face with the back of her hand, but just smeared the eyeliner she had been wearing. “That’s not fair! Not fair!”
“Well, maybe you should’ve thought about that sooner! Hell, maybe you should’ve thrown a big, hissy fit in your apartment, touting the unfairness of life and the struggling of simply being, that way you could’ve been one of those ‘deep and tortured’ characters . . . Granted, I’d never want to write such tripe, but it’s something to go from, work with. But, no, you were just pushing through a crowd. For nearly half a page! That’s such a long time to write about a crowd. You try it, sometime, huh?” the man crossed his arms and tapped his foot, impatiently. The woman let loose a few pathetic sobs and hunched forward. “It’s all the past, now, though, and we can only move forward. Can’t erase time, and all.”
“Well, what are you going to do with me?” she questioned, with a tone in her voice like a plaintive, little girl. The man sighed and threw his arms up in the air, then took the over-shirt off that he had been wearing. Drawing a knife from the back-pocket of his pants, he flicked it out and paused.
“The only thing I can do, my child . . . Move on.” He lifted the knife and lowered it, hard, into her neck, then pulled it back out. Hovering over her for a split second, taking in the fullness of his actions, he stabbed her, again, in the base of the skull, then in the throat, then in the chest, stomach, again in the chest . . .
“’The only thing I can do’? ‘Move on’? What kind of line is that? Doesn’t even make sense! Ugh, this isn’t working, not at all, not at all! Not even as something funny, at this point . . . This is just disturbing, now. I should write with more purpose, I swear to God.” Kicking at the dead body on the ground, which had spilt red puddles all over the place, the man looked up at the sky. “I mean, even this whole bit has been done, done to death, even. Breaking the fourth wall and all, making characters into actors playing parts for the sake of making a point about the nature of writing . . . Blah, blah! Pirandello did it, who am I to reprise Pirandello’s works? And now, what? This is turning into one of those self-aware monologue things, where someone goes in Absurdist circles about philosophy or whatever . . . . . . . . That’s it!”
And a world-sized walrus fell from the sky and killed everyone.