A Diptych: Six Floors Down: The Rooster Sang
Cocks, crows, performance, and self expression
Panel One: Performance
Floor I: My Garden of Cracked Dreams
Once a cock a time, in a garden grown heavy with ceremony and heartache, lived a rooster named Bacchus. His cousins the crows, crowed at dusk, cracked, crisp and crude. He tried once. The sound was too soft, too casual, too melodic, too strange. One cousin plucked his feather and handed it back: what on earth, that’s not a crow! They laughed with their cackle of black feathers twisting around him like a spill of ink in water.
That night he dreamed of a fountain: rose-coloured marble, cracked foundations, beautiful in its fragility as if it were about to burst, yet suspended in stillness. It stood in the center of an impossible feeling, he couldn’t quite put his feather on it. When he reached to drink, the waters trembled like a secret laced with glitter. The basin split. He woke gasping, louder than the rumours of that little life he was meant to live.
Floor II: The Weight of Expressing Myself
He eventually managed to mimic their rhythm: crow tall, crow sharp, crow to cry. But despite his efforts, his cousins still punished him. Not with words, but with silence. No nods, their eyes watched like stones that remember nothing and they vanished into the muted sky when he spoke differently. That distance is how his shame took root. So, shy that he is, he learned to pass. And to perform. To belong.
But when no one was watching, he traced small spirals in the dirt with one claw. Composed lines he never said aloud. He always stopped when the feeling got too raw, too vulnerable. Then he’d erase them before anyone could roll their eyes. Creativity, he realised, made you noticeable, and being noticed wasn’t the same as being accepted. Better to stay in the script. There was no punishment, no panic. Just the slow drift of his dreams dissolving.
Floor III: The Flight and the Fevers
One evening, drawn by a pull he couldn’t name, just his thoughts whispering: I’m going to blow it all away, he wandered beyond his garden. Deep in the woods, where thyme stood still, silence began to hum in his bones. Then he heard fire flicker. Around it danced three witches: Past, Present, and Future. Their faces shifted between the chaos of rising flames and the glow of silver moonlight. I’m standing here with you, why won’t you move? asked Present.
And he did. At first, the rhythm felt like freedom. He spread his feathers wider, sang louder, grooved like a superstar. They clapped, wild, offbeat. Future clapped hardest, mad eyes lit with what he could be. Past only watched, her silence heavier than the beat. When it stopped, he felt emptier. So he danced harder, bumping, grinding, until joy blurred into insatiable hunger. Until all three, applauding, laughing, folded him into stillness, like a fern recoiling at touch.
Panel Two: Self-Expression
Floor IV: The Fountain of Fractures
A breath, ten blinks, and Bacchus fell sideways into the second panel. New canvas, same fevered tremors humming in his mind. But the smoke cleared. And there it was: the fountain. The same one from his dream. Still trembling. Naked in the clearing. He approached it slowly, like it might fracture. In the water, he didn’t see a reflection. He saw the lines he’d never finished. The feeling he never talked about but used to follow, before asking if it was safe.
He stepped in. The cold reached beneath his silken armour, but didn’t sting. It lifted the voice he wore like a mask. A feather came loose and drifted behind him. Past stood at the edge and showed him his garden. He paused, one claw half-raised. Pretend ceremonial paths, polished by repetition, and where wildness was weeded out. The script waited. But the water held him. And when he stepped out, something stayed. It’s in his eyes.
Floor V: First-Person Flight
I rose from the fountain. My voice seemed to match the queer one inside, but I didn’t know what to do with it except hum my old rhythms. I tried to fly, and fell hard, wings crooked, breath knocked out, feathers scattered in the mud. No one laughed. Present stepped forward, silent, and tucked a jade green stone in each of my wings. I don’t know what they were for. But they felt like frightened fragments of my memory, heavy with flight.
I just stood up and tried again. I flew low, voguing over the trees I once hid beneath, toward the garden I once feared. From the air, it looked the same, but as I drew closer, the flowers tilted away, the irises blinking and the shadows pulling tight at the sight of my jades. The garden did not welcome me. Behind me, Future rose like wind, steady, certain, lifting me higher. Not as a guide, but as belief. And this time, I didn’t land quietly. I arrived. Wings open.
Floor VI: The Rooster Sang
I returned. The garden hadn’t changed. My cousins still stood tall and crowed on cue. I climbed the roof and let the sound rise from my chest. It wasn’t a crow. It wasn’t a song. It was a cocoricooooo. At first, the garden recoiled, leaves drawn, petals frozen in stillness. Then, almost imperceptibly, the vines began to turn. Blooms loosened, craving light. As if something forgotten had been remembered.
One cousin flinched. Another turned away. Most didn’t move. That was fine. I wasn’t singing to be grafted back in. Afterward, I climbed down and scratched shapes into the dirt. Flecks of jade shimmered through the lines. What are you looking at!? I tilted my head just enough for them to feel it. A young one watched, tracing circles with his toe. We just kept drawing. I wasn’t creating to be accepted, but to stay alive. Queerness wasn’t a phase. It had always been part of my wildest moments, my imagination. Far off in the tree-line, three shadows shimmered, knowing, inspiring.
