Out on the perimeter where the music reduced to a primal pounding, Izzy drifted past a row of canvas fins sewn into the sleeping grass. And stumbled on as occasional pockets steamed with curls of light tearing at the seams, electric samosas blurring and dancing in the night. What was the thing? She stopped and stared about into inky infinity, watching it scream deliriously at all points of the compass, and then shoot upwards as luminous bottle green stars streaked across the heavens. The compost toilets, they must be somewhere close, over that bridge crossing the small lake maybe? Her crystalline breath enshrined in the frozen halo of her head torch, Izzy wandered over the stone bridge, flickering left and right at an ecstatically green mist rising from the water below, so beautiful. On she went, to the edge of the last of the night’s revelry. No toilets here, but a shoreline of trees flowed in shadowy waves, calling to her from the nearby woods with fluttering leaves.
What was she feeling? It was bloody cold, but that wasn’t it. The trees wanted her to sleep. Where the fuck did that come from? She’d lost the controls somewhere along the way, all her dials were whirring and her buttons winked on and off in strange patterns that she could not decipher. The night had been long, the bands intense. Izzy followed her own path, flip-flops kicking up a dusty coke soaked rhythm.
Now, a clearing in the forest…HERE! Inclining her head she felt the whispers. It wasn’t the moon; it wasn’t the stars, nothing remote. It was here. There, down at her feet, the roots of that tangled tree. There was a strange odour, not foul, not sweet; it smelt of a different colour. There she saw it, a single glowing feather, denying the night. Its hues mingled and hummed, Delicate Rose one second, Sweet Alyssum the next. Her mind spiralling, Izzy reached down, reached out just to stroke. Then grasping. And she lit-up, all her cells illuminated. She couldn’t charge her phone at this festival…but her body was now power charged. So she ran, grasping the feather, brimming with secrets. Ran with purpose to find her friends again. Their faces now crystal clear once more, no longer a mellow after-glow faintly twinkling at the back of her consciousness like bottles behind a bar. This had been missing for too long. She had to tell them.
“Izzy, that’s just an old feather, looks like a peacock feather”, her friend responded from her canvas chair outside the tent as Izzy held it up to the morning sun. “No, just hold it for a sec”, she replied, her face looking scarily radiant. Jules hesitated, watching it ripple in the light breeze.
The Dinosaur Selection Process 