Sticker Pinch

The day closed in and I began my ascension up the mountain. From far enough away it looked just like any other mole hill one might cross on a prairie.

As I sat, imagining walking through the painting I wondered what a real climb would be like, what it would be to climb a real mountain.

I pulled my eyes away and looked around the room. There were walls painted red and people talking out their mouths, from their heads but the more they talked the less sense they made. They were confusing the easy life of living below the raze or rather rays of the sun, beneath the hardships of climbing a hill, every day to get home. They were jabbering and talking, talking and jabbering. It was the shear ridiculousness of the entire scene that probably drove this particular artist to paint the mountain.

Each person had a motive, a purpose, a goal, a nothing really. They just bounced from one person to the next, wearing a label. A sticker that might identify them as someone other than who they really knew they were.

People would try to grab other people’s stickers and by the end of the day the person who had collected the most stickers would be declared the winner of a circle, the winner’s circle.

Others would just raze or rays or rather raise their voice when they believed they were being heard. Those would hearken to the listeners who were not yet animated. They were livid, unmoving without process of things that went on about them until hearken alerted them of a purpose.

The hearkened waited until a wire was tripped before knowing the turn to speak. Speaking in turns. Turns like a cycle a circle, the winner’s of the sticker pinch.

People nodded when eyes were on them or they would turn their heads and look away, it was purely irrelevant to the whole of the community.

I sat staring at the painting and wondered what it would be like to sit on the mountain and look down on the city. Everyone would appear to me as an ant and no detail would be made out. There would be only little dots, dots like the stickers they wore bearing the name of their occupation, occupancy or image. I would not climb the hill to see this. I would climb the hill to see this with the knowledge that I had worked to get hear or rather here. That I had worked hard to get somewhere to see the dots that were the people, not the dots that people wore.

I would have worked to see something that other’s could not see. It was something that took work and effort just like the others.

I sat and stared at the painting wondering what it would be like to know what it was like to stand on the top and see myself reflected as the painting reflected the descending sun’s raise or rather raze. No, rays. What would I be? A cloud? A high flying bird? Would I be the great vast beyond of blue sky? Or the ascending moon or rather sun of the opposite world?

I wondered what it would be like to see each person, each ant, each dot whorled or rather world. No, wore. Which is to say boar or perhaps bore a dot. A dot as a painting, a painting that could be walked through with the mind. Each person was a painting as a dot, which was the pointillism of the whorls. No, worlds. 

I watched the illusion as it changed in the light. I desired to know more about the people. How funny, I thought. How inspiring, there was something more in the world of this art.

I turned on my feat or rather feet and was confronted by a man, who of many dots wore a black dot upon his left arm cuff.

As I had watched the painting, I watched him reach out and nab from my lapel, my last dot. I was dotless, finally, dotless. Without a dot, dot free.

I observed his decorative adhesive spots along the shoulders of his shirt, worn like a bar, a brocaded epaulette, a symbol of status and wondered, how had he collected so many? How had he accumulated those dots? Which represented who and who were those people walking around without, missing  a dot?

I watched as he contentedly affixed the dot spot to his collection, smiling smug.

I turned and walked towards the wall, the wall that held the painting. I stepped inside and advanced towards the mountain, ascending higher, working for something that no one else who collected dots had ever thought to do. Dot free and without a dot.