Character I

She has long since stopped spending entire weekends at what were once called squat raves, but she has nevertheless retained from these events a slight perspectival obliquity, an instinctive way of seeing things, in this case animals, that are not inherent in the people she is looking at and talking to, as if they were actually innate within them somehow. A precocious consumer of amazingly human-looking animal cartoon characters from an early age, even completely falling for the lusciously maned and youthful Simba (of Lion King fame) at one point, she had always been used to seeing human characteristics in animals, whether it be the sensitive soul expressed in the sad eyes of her dog or the gormless credulity so obviously expressed in the rolling eyes of a drooling cow; but it took a particular mix of specific narcotics on one particular night in a rave for her to have this tendency inadvertently reversed. Apart from the air around her being apparently filled with small, crawling black creatures, she noticed, or rather couldn’t help but be utterly taken aback by everyone around her being animals, or maybe not quite animals, but at least as having such strong characteristics of certain creatures that they were somewhere between the two –beautiful animals with human form and language, and they were beautiful, as beautiful and beguiling as all those animals which had been transformed by human characteristics in all the Disney films she had cherished so long before, but there, in that room full of crawling black things, her mind had inadvertently reapplied the magic of analogy back into her world, back into her almost-adult, increasingly magic-less existence. Whether stimulated by narcotics or not, and increasingly not as time moved on, the appreciation of her human surroundings was enriched and partly guided by the resemblances she found between every combination of jaw line, eyes and nose -or any other mix of body parts- and her exotic index of animals and their characters; the two bringing separate qualities which together forge for her evocative wholes which would have been impossible through bare observation.