Diorama City -
Short Story
Introduction:
Wigs with shoes
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[…] blows the bag that dances its way between cars and buses, playfully tugged beneath a wheel every now and then, teasing the kids at the bus stop that hop from left foot to right desperate for the bag to grace their feet so their ‘chosen one’ status can be flaunted to the others.
The bag will never choose them.
Instead it will continue to dance shameless and aimless, up and down this stretch of Stamford Hill, oblivious of the electrified atmosphere it conjured under the glow of a bus shelter.
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Located somewhere beside the Docklands Light Railway
The four heads of hair: birthmark, red toes, windswept and turquoise, lift their noses and all eight ears assume position toward a block of flats as a pigeon manifests itself mid-flight, mid-air in grey space. Each head of hair watches from their mark as the pigeon performs a controlled air-dive disappearing out of sight and quickly, all four players continue about their route seemingly unaffected by the supernatural spectacle they just witnessed.
Zoom in,
a mousy brown head of hair slowly encroaches on the station. Their rash-like birthmark is just about visible, a symbol we will use to identify this player.
Zoom out,
another head of hair emerges from the rear carriage that just pulled into the platform. We can just about make out the tips of their leather shoes that are an usually proud, bright red so these toes will be this player’s identifier.
Pan sharply
over to the front carriage and a blur of a blonde, windswept head of hair, lunges and is caught in the doors before slipping through and slumping against the window. The state of this player’s hair will be their identification.
Coming into focus,
there is a more ambiguous head of hair covered by a bicycle helmet, freewheeling down the cycle path that runs beneath the railway bridge. We notice that their helmet is turquoise and will hence serve as their identifying marker.
From above,
it is always hard to imagine the eye colour and teeth formation of players. We’ve occasionally thought to discuss how different their pathways might be if we could look into their eyes and watch the movement of their lips and tongues against their teeth. The floor shimmers again. An occasional microscopic ripple on the asphalt
and the bitumen, indicates to us there has been some rainfall this morning amidst locating the four. Usually, the wet is easier to notice when its dark and the vehicles’ lights sweep drunkly over the ground, again and again until it is time to dim the streetlights as dawn breaks. Of course, there’s no question of the weather when its torrential rain, our ability to tune-in to the player’s voices and exhales becomes suppressed with wet white noise; static.
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Chapter One:
Birthmarkhead
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Something they will always make conscious effort to avoid is to disappoint others or oneself
Being one of our most identifiable players, Birthmark has a distinctive and familiar voice - one that a few friends have agreed could make a small fortune in audiobooks or public speaking that sounds more like storytelling. Although terribly inexperienced in reading much literature at all, they’re well spoken and well mannered so its a wonder why then that many pairs of ears that Birthmark passionately divulges their interests and tales to are simply not listening.
This player’s most prized possession is their streaming service subscription, going out £5.99 a month. There have been quite a few instances where they have referred to themself as a ‘SoundCloud Evangelist’ over the years they’ve spent as a resident here; the last of these instances was in conversation with their parents. Their father was quick to question their use of the word evangelist, they haven’t written or spoken the phrase since.
This head of hair was grown in a different world to Diorama City. Since the beginning, their mother and father provided comfortably under a farmhouse roof, with plenty of green space containing both livestock and wild animals including their three older siblings. The nearest building was at least an hour’s walk down the bridlepaths north and south of the farm. In this quiet, green and expansive world, Birthmark learned to master their skill of listening.
Fast forward back to Diorama City.
Birthmark went on a date last night. Judging by their recent recurring activity at this time on such day, its apparent to us that this has become routine for them. From what we are able to decipher from their incoherent scribbles they rarely log in their journal, London is a new adventure for them and a place of rehabilitation after suffering a few minor ‘hiccups’ in their past pathways.
This pathway will be the most substantial yet for them here in Diorama City.
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Chapter Two:
Redtoehead
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Sometimes, they will book a haircut, pay a deposit and never go to the appointment
Red toes almost never wears any other shoes, or at least shoes with such character and boldness that even we can see clearly from up here. Twenty four hours before these shoes hit Euston’s concrete platform earlier this morning, they had been instructed by a colleague to note down some suggestions of London’s ‘hidden gems’ to photograph as part of their research as an ‘architectural composer’. They have only very recently felt that the term ‘architectural composer’ is one they could use comfortably to describe themself and their practice is quite regularly challenged as a legitimate career let alone field of interest.
This player’s most prized possession is their phone’s built-in Advanced Dual-Camera System (Cost: £383.00p [refurbished]) on which most of the material they have as visual cues for their compositions have been ‘foraged’. Since attending a workshop back in an unfamiliar urban maze, we noticed that they started using the term ‘foraged’ to define the process of finding a thing of interest or inspiration and documenting it. They’ve explained to a few pairs of ears around Diorama City, that the artist who guided this workshop and sound walk, encouraged foraging material as an alternative to ‘capturing’ and ‘recording’ so to acknowledge; respect the source and perpetuity of it still remaining in its own world.
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Chapter Three:
Windswepthead
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Somehow, they’ve seen a pair of cis white men wearing matching pristine, skinny white jeans on almost every commute
Windswepthead has always been in Diorama City, though their head of hair has only recently appeared this way, as if they had been caught in a perpetual vortex of air channeled by a floor of concrete balancing megalomanic glass monoliths. However their identifying attribute has not always been the state of their hair - They have not always been the easiest of the four to locate among people as if lined up like the uniformed row of fruit and veg in the front of a kebab-shop’s counter display. This player’s most prized possession used to be a ‘1974 Yoyo King’ cap (Cost: £0.80p) until it was left in waking from drunken slumber on the Overground home one night last Summer. They appeared into the dark off the carriage that night with their hair tussled and in constant motion - it hasn’t changed since.
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Chapter Four:
Turquoisehead
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Someone who is aware of the superiority complex of umbrella users versus the umbrella-less
This player’s most prized possession is: a blue, Apollo Fusion road bike (Cost: £0.00p). Before they were gifted this beloved bicycle, Turquoisehead would commute only by foot as they have little to no trust in vehicles with any more than two wheels with any kind of power, horse or electric. The bike was placed in their hallway by their elderly neighbour who’s former tenant left it to rust and puncture when they moved out, too busy to have it serviced, so busy that it was often speculated by Turquoise’s neighbour if they had ever ridden that bike at all. It was insisted by the neighbour that they make use of it and so obligation grew and blossomed into mutual anthropomorphic companionship, physically impossible for either to go anywhere without the other.
Pathways tend to be second nature to this head of helmet-hair, left and right turns are calculated and measured with precision and total awareness of their surroundings so much so that we have often seen them as a ‘mobile fixture’ of Diorama City.
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Chapter Five:
A bird’s eye view
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It’s said that heads of hair have worshipped and put faith in the giant unknown above them for centuries, millennia. This faith has become harder for us to see in them as conflict escalates from disagreements between two right beneath us to wars that would bleed and break into dioramas of any kind, anywhere. They don’t really know what they are believing in, we have never had any need to justify our purpose. When we look down onto heads of hair we see life and when we look up at each other we feel love.
During the course of our lifespans we have seen the city pile and stack up on itself, flight after flight. When they’ve had enough of redrawing the dimensions of their lateral boundaries and borders, they reach out of their spoiled soil, aiming for the sky without looking up. We’ve watched this, perched upon glass vertices and steal beams. We’ve watched mid-air and helpless, sometimes from the taller trees, former saplings of the forgotten forest but only with the confidence that no other thing watches down on us watching down on them.
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Chapter Six:
First person
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Through this head of hair’s eyes, down the bridge of a nose we watch shoes dragging and scuffing up the steps toward the platform. First we hear music from the AirPods that play from a playlist titled ‘dress’ and then we hear electrical whips down the rails as the train just departed drifts away. Their vision is focused on the spots of chewing gum, attention flitting between the continuous stream of dots and pigeon droppings on each step as they ascend.
A pigeon.
A sickening feeling reminiscent of the writhe of a rat under snake skin engulfs the body while their mind replays the spectacle.
The pigeon.
We wait to watch as Birthmarkhead’s nose tilts up to reveal it.
The next head of hair is locked in on their pathway, there is a right turn pre-calculated 40 feet ahead and it is fair for us to say that their awareness has been unpredictably skewed today…
The pigeon.
As we notice the same note played repeatedly on a piano scroll like clones on a factory assembly line, ticking in cycles and skipping out beyond the tip of their nose the white speck of chewing gum on the front bike wheel relentlessly drives Turquoisehead towards it.
One by one of four, a head of hair peels back and up toward us to show face for the first time and we are offered a new impression contrary to the long speculated legend of a heads of hairs’ appearance. Unveiled bit-crushed and blurred, no detail nor definition - just a grid, where all signal has been lost, reminiscent of how all of Diorama City looks when we are viewing from maximum altitude. Where their teeth should be is a border of pink squares that gapes to reveal a black void.
Loud static.
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Chapter Seven:
Dolly, zoom out
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[…] lays a nest of wigs, in commemoration of the heads of hair the feathers and wings cannot save. In this collection, each wig is carefully selected to be not a replica but akin to the head of hair’s mind and soul the feathers and wings could never read or feed. The feathers and wings rest and recuperate on the heads of hair everyday, it comforts them: a warm bed of artificial fibres while a cold, polluted breeze strokes the feathers and wings above Diorama City.
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THE END
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Written by Ruby Cotton