Free The Entire Predicament by Lucy Corin

up the stairs, the funny flaky bundles tugging along like a tiny pack of sleigh dogs until I’m sailing again among the tables, the nods, the orchestra of motion and sound, the pulsing colors, and light that ranges from staccato sparkle to low humming glow.
    I loop down into the kitchen, the kitchen streams by, and when I next rise from the basement I pause at the entrance, to see if I can, of my own volition, and it turns out I can. I feel like a rock in a river, but it’s because I’m still that I am able to notice what I notice:
    It’s a breath I’m taking, a breath like I have never taken before, one so discrete I can tell that it comes from somewhere . I am of the collective of servers, but then I take this breath that feels like an icy ribbon of vapor is being fed to me in this hotly buzzing room of kaleidoscopic bodies. It’s a breath that is coming from someone. As I take it, I can almost trace it, and then I do, I trace it back toward the kite it’s come from; I’m paused at the foot of the room and the other servers bend
away from me convexly; I feel them pull, elastic, but I am held there with my tray; I am breathing the ribbon that has been sent to me. In the pause, I remember that I used to draw pictures as a child, something I stopped doing, I only now suspect, for some reason . In the pause, I remember drawing a picture of a road going into the distance. Did I draw it accidentally or is this something I learned? I remember that moment in my history when I discovered, just as some time in human history it was discovered, that a triangle in two dimensions can make two feel like three. It was sort of great, but it also ruined everything.
    I stretch my neck and close my eyes, and I am being pulled by the center line of this perspective. Have I ever used the word perspective ? Would Becky, Jacob, Tandy use that word? I am being wrenched, I am being dragged, and then I feel the last tendrils of my connection to the serving corpus plucked away like nerves in a surgical amputation—plink, pluck—although it appears I’ve been properly numbed or stung or filled via breath with druggy distance for this ordeal. I’m so loopy.Time is wobbly around me, and space is, too, and the thing that’s going to happen is about to happen.
    I almost know I am on my way to being unimaginably blissed-out.
    At the top of the room, a woman, the kite herself, has risen and she stands at her table at the head of everything. She is dinging her glass with a fork. Her gown is yellow with silver threads. I know it from way back here, hot gold and cold silver. Her pale hair swoops around the back of her head, loose enough to form a halo. She’s got diamonds on. I am dumb and I am awed. One is worse.

    She looks wise, like an excellent actress.
    I don’t know what happens, but she speaks.
    There are bells, or applause.
    She is as if born of the room, molten, but then her tone shifts and the room turns moony, or her tone shifts and everyone’s cheeks glow like roses at once and light dapples their spotty heads. It’s true she’s too far away to see but that doesn’t seem to be the point of this experience. Luckily I have no idea how time moves here.All I know is it’s not mine. Not my time, not my place. And thank God. Mine sucks. Luckily I don’t have to wait. Luckily as I stand there and her voice reaches and feeds me I am stunned as if by certain kinds of insects I have never studied. What’s sharp? What’s smooth? This is sharp and smooth. She’s done dinging, and finished speaking, and now it’s a banquet peopled with playing cards, jacks, queens, kings, and jokers that simply fall away from the grid of round tables and who knows where the rest of the deck went; back below, long ago.
    Light pulses and spasms from the mirrors and the gilded ceiling. Then the light quiets and cools. The hall is a field of strewn white napkins. I see them blow away like petals. I see the tables take to their legs and scurry off stage. I