The following is a piece I did for the the writer’s group in the Utne Reader online community. (As I mentioned in yesterday’s post)
We were doing Exercise #2 of Ursula K. Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft.
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After the Festival,
After the festival, the station is teeming with people in traditional and not so traditional summer wear. They mass together into a river of color and sound. Laughing and complaining of the heat and the crowd, yet unobservant of their own contribution to both. They slowly move as one through the row of open doors. Compacting into the air conditioned train.
The train is quickly overpowered by the combined body heat of so many, accelerating the flapping of multicolored hand fans. Beating them like so many fins in a school of desperate fish, they fan faces, wipe brows and squeeze together more and more. Finally, station employees are required to push bodies even tighter together so the doors can close.
This small segment of the festival crowd is thus removed from the throbbing throngs continuously gathering on the platform. Steadily streaming in from the slowly emptying streets, still bustling with people. Capitalizing on last minute sales from closing street vendors and making post festival party plans on cellular phones.
