"The Platinum Raven" teaser - aquiver and alone on the Hollywood hillside
Teaser for the video-book of Rohan Quine's novella "The Platinum Raven" - teaser 10(ii) "aquiver and alone on the Hollywood hillside". // [...] Angels spread beneath him in the black, black heat. Pressed down by this heavy sticky night that never seemed to end - an L.A. night that sealed a day that always felt like the last day of all. The grid of bright darkness and points of coloured light stretched west and south and east to infinity, to suburbs that were so far, they surely wrapped around the earth and came back here, the neighbourhoods melting so together, fading on and on... Cars poured numberless and tiny on the freeways that sliced the flat enormity; then slower on the Avenues and Boulevards, from traffic light to traffic light, flicking north and south, east and west, north and south, east and west; then trickled through the darker grid of Streets from stop sign to stop sign, winking into shadow-view, glimpsed in the gaps between the buildings and the palm trees, residential stucco and security gates, where the lawn-sprinklers sprinkled... // At last the friend had to leave, and offered a ride, but Scorpio said he'd stay there alone. They air-kissed as usual, and off the other went. Then he sat upon his hands on the parapet, right there, his feet above the hillside, aquiver and alone again and hurting with the rawness of a squirt of flesh and nerves among the concrete and steel and the plastic and the gasoline that threatened and addicted him, week after week. Blades, rocks, glass, edges; fists in the shadows of the city, cocked in wait for him, spying out of doorways at the shapes of the contents of his pockets, or to check he was alone; and the gayness of his body in the pools of the street-lights. Hatred and desire and indifference coiled and built around him, oiled to spring. A crackle lit the sky of a sudden in the west (black wires up the hillside, aerials on orange-tinged night above the canyon), but no thunder yet drowned the endless cricket-chirp.