"Apricot Eyes" teaser - on the Palatine in Nero's day
Teaser for the video-book of Rohan Quine's novella "Apricot Eyes" - teaser 7(iii) "on the Palatine in Nero's day". // Then the drums beat anew, he wheels around to face them and he dances, as only Phaon can - hypnotic self-completion, the divine androgyne, channelled pre-gender, pre-Eden, straight through time and ether. And dancing, he begins to spin, just beside the precipice. Inching ever closer to the edge, he gathers speed, so his big brown eyes through the whirl and streak of hands and arms flash toward the band like the wink of a lighthouse. Long-lashed brown light, half-lidded, self-tranced, smiling inside, sweeps over the watchers every two seconds, one second, half-second, less... Red light peeks through the strands of his hair where it streams out long across the width of the sun's orb, half-sunk now beyond the marches of the city. // His slender frame is sharpened by the dusk to a silhouette, and now the moment comes (though he surely cannot know it), the moment in a life when such perfection is attained that a single fleeting second lodges, swells like a teardrop, gathers weight and falls away, sideways through the centuries - to land here, as lightning earths, captured and framed perhaps awhile, perhaps longer: Roman youth, addressed as Phaon, epicene, of few words and much affection, earlier and later life unknown but glimpsed now, dancing on the Palatine Hill in Nero's day, for Dionysus - only for a moment and only for a few, but with such heart-captivating beauty both of body and of soul that he rises and dances in the sky for us, for all time - fey black imp on orange sky, dancing with laughing eyes, divinely and forever! // See him up there on the precipice, right now... // A rush of air cracks out, a flicker and a crackle as of lightning; and then a bell booms, slow and deep, unimaginably ancient and vast, out of everywhere and nowhere at once.