Burn The House

For a split second the crowd pixelates back into individuals. There’s little Eve in the middle, all angled bones and darting eyes, her spiky hair spraying sweat as she dances. A gleaming droplet hits Sean close to his lips and he rubs it into his own solid face before his tongue claims it.

His girlfriend, Gwen, points her chin away from him and drops her shoulders back as if she’s summoning something. Demons, perhaps, to do away with Eve and her liquid charms. Gwen’s movements become an eruption of arms and legs, uncontrollable, possessing feet of space in front of her. Ben moves closer to Gwen, slips into her rhythm, dodging her wind-milling limbs. Something contagious is on the dance-floor tonight, it’s spreading and I’m the only one who sees it.

Now it’s reached Nick and his feet stomp the beat along, punctuating the bass notes. His facial expression reminds me of a two-year-old who’s just discovered they can do something. Poor Nick, I'll let him have this freedom tonight, let him believe he has decades to dance. I turn the volume up a tremor to pull them closer in, give them relief from their lives.

Mona sways with her eyes closed as if she doesn’t want the outside world to be there, as if it’s safe only in her own head. She hasn’t yet realised her mind will destroy her. She should keep her eyes open and never hide inside. Already she’s missing the beat, nodding on the downs, adrift. She's lost, even I can't reach her.

James moves away from Mona flinging his head round and round as if trying to throw it off his neck. He senses something, I can tell, he’s trying to clear his ears of the tune but it's a bug burrowing deeper inside. His mouth opens and closes on no sound.

My friends morph back into part of the heaving, undulating crowd. Their features indistinct, their faces inhuman. They slam the floor as hard as hailstones, whirl like dervishes, become other, not themselves. They flit in and out of the music and the lights as if someone shot a film that’s been ripped into pieces and patched together again. They aren't people, they are dance moves consumed by the dark frenzy of sound. It is eating them alive. The noise builds relentlessly and their breaking bodies coil around it, tighter and tenser than flesh should get. Nobody’s breathing, talking, drinking. All they are is carriers of this parasitic dance.

You think I’m a devil, the devil perhaps, the pusher of the drug that transformed these kids, the corrupter of innocents, a predator. You’re both right and wrong - I’m just the DJ.