"Apricot Eyes" teaser - gold amid the grey and red
Teaser for the video-book of Rohan Quine's novella "Apricot Eyes" - teaser 5(ii) "gold amid the grey and red". // Over the great town of psychiatric compounds and hospital blocks between the river and First Avenue - high above that blast of pain cushioned in the soft wink and hum of shiny buildings - my vision soars again, shoots uptown a mile, then plummets in a graceful arc, down to Sixty-Third and a sleeping Kev, down to his bedside Bible and the long fat water-bug sitting on it, licking clean its feelers as it paws at the book. // [...] and energy he brings to his campaigns and plain-speaking rhetoric; his pleasure at the growth in small-town support across the States; and the practical effects of isolation and despair in the intended populations, leading to suicide or to violence from others, as appropriate. Always hard to quantify, but growing, growing steadily! I find myself snatching single images of individual human pain - nails sticking out red and jagged from the grey flood of pain that is caused or increased by him. I catch in particular the pain of the few who are always targeted and damaged by the rest, to the music of his preaching. I feel for the nails, as they poke from the surface and get bent out of shape. Then, among these nails of pain, I focus on the golden nails of hard-won magic, and I cry at the beauty of them, sticking out against the light, against the odds, against the flood, in triumph: pinpricks of gold amid the grey and red... // I long to stop this man from inflicting any more: his hate must come back on him, as deserved. // The darkness of my feelings stands bare, like those sudden hanging severed legs, side-lit in the moon-glimmer coming through the windows in his high-ceilinged, claustrophobic bedroom right now... // My vision rears up beside the preacher's bed, turns around and shoots across his room at shoulder height, bursting through the window pane to fly across a roofscape of chimneys, dusty parapets, aerials and water tanks.