☥ 7th. {video} welcome one and all to the theatre of the absurd
[The static-filled feed opens on Philomena sitting alone in her burrow--an important distinction from Charlotte sitting alone in her apartment, and that should be quite clear based on her bizarre appearance on its own. Until she moves - and even after, to some extent, like a marionette - she looks like an uncanny and slightly dusty china doll, with tangled dark hair and corpselight blue eyes that seem too large and too bright for her face, like the eyes of someone dying of fever. Even her clothes are different, and she's augmented the inherent oddity of her face by staining her cheeks in blotches of red, lining her eyes in sooty black smears, and applying white lipstick to her narrow little mouth. The lipstick is invisible on the filter of her cigarette as she sits in the light cast by an iridescent spiderweb draped on the walls around her and the ceiling above, pale and silvery.
She holds her cigarette to the side as she sips delicately from an antique silver teacup, which catches and reflects the light to be the prettiest part of the whole picture unless your tastes run to the 'slender creepy thing' end of whatever spectrum Philomena occupies, and when she smiles slightly at the camera before sucking on her cigarette again there is something sunken and strange about her mouth - it might be recognizable as a lack of teeth, or it might not.]
Good evening, City. [Her already quiet voice is simply a whisper as soft as moth's wings, here, scratched by the static of transmitting from the other side.]
Is it evening, isn't it? I ought to know the time, I could be in terrible trouble otherwise. Although I--well.
[She taps her fingers on the table, disturbing the mouse sized spider that until now had been hiding behind the teapot. It scurries out, a prickly looking black-carapaced thing, and she absently strokes its back, which calms it into crouching under her hand.]
I've been dreaming of the winter carousel. Around, and around, and around, brighter and brighter. Winter can be such a light season. All that snow, that's the thing, and when the clouds are emptied on the ground the light--cuts. It cuts. Snow blind, that's what you become. And your wet skin sticks to the metal. Sticks and tears. Red, white, and blue - those are the colors that don't run, aren't they? I wouldn't know.
I'm--[she looks out the window as she speaks, and whatever she's saying is blurred into static completely.]
She holds her cigarette to the side as she sips delicately from an antique silver teacup, which catches and reflects the light to be the prettiest part of the whole picture unless your tastes run to the 'slender creepy thing' end of whatever spectrum Philomena occupies, and when she smiles slightly at the camera before sucking on her cigarette again there is something sunken and strange about her mouth - it might be recognizable as a lack of teeth, or it might not.]
Good evening, City. [Her already quiet voice is simply a whisper as soft as moth's wings, here, scratched by the static of transmitting from the other side.]
Is it evening, isn't it? I ought to know the time, I could be in terrible trouble otherwise. Although I--well.
[She taps her fingers on the table, disturbing the mouse sized spider that until now had been hiding behind the teapot. It scurries out, a prickly looking black-carapaced thing, and she absently strokes its back, which calms it into crouching under her hand.]
I've been dreaming of the winter carousel. Around, and around, and around, brighter and brighter. Winter can be such a light season. All that snow, that's the thing, and when the clouds are emptied on the ground the light--cuts. It cuts. Snow blind, that's what you become. And your wet skin sticks to the metal. Sticks and tears. Red, white, and blue - those are the colors that don't run, aren't they? I wouldn't know.
I'm--[she looks out the window as she speaks, and whatever she's saying is blurred into static completely.]