The faceless name dance.

A night drunk with wild air dancing, shifting between the locked walls. People, faces fragmented in motion – eating, chatting, talking. Eating other faces with their hoarse laughter. I see a face, faces in a face blown apart. Then they come together. I stretch towards it.
“Name, address.” I ask.
It gives me its received location and its given name.
“Now,” I say, stretching to it, “you are fiction. You know that, don’t you?”
The face remains blank.
“I made you up. Just now,” I exclaim. “I own you. I am you!”
Indifferent, it stretches its made-up hands towards the hollow glass, and sips its contents. I look away, at a loss at what to do. I sink into the seat.
I gave you no purpose. What are you here for?
“What is it exactly that you do?” I ask.
The face looks at me, then looking down, bites its cuticles thoughtfully. It has no eyes, no nose – smooth as an unfinished painting, perfect as a childhood memory. Searching for an answer, it remains mute.

Blood rushing within me, I slam the glass into the wood of the table. I suddenly yearn to get out of here – of this madhouse of faceless puppets, faces that I could not paint, tongues that I could not write. My own tongue stretched around the corner, I race through the corridors. At the bar, a marionette hangs tangled in its own lines. I remember the story: it was a girl-meets-boy type of an affair. It now lays crumpled under the table under a nose-full of napkins. Poor girl – I meant for it to end so tragically, but always hoped it would be with flare and art. It was overrated.
So it goes.

Searching through the corridors my legs give way and I slump into the floor. Black drowns me and I succumb to it. I swim and swallow peace and it finds me and it is wonderful. Yet I awake.
Faceless ovals within the walls stare, crowded around me. In hunger their eyes bulge out; tongues wiping the idle paint from their faces. Tongues in me, their lips flush with health, and eyes spark with color.

And aboveground, my friends are waiting. They peer inside the hole of the rabbit. They wonder who would descend into it, and why it has not yet been filled up. They have a cigarette and joke. They go home.
Inside, the marionettes dance in their feast. And within the tunnel, the light goes black.
And aboveground, my friends are waiting.