"Apricot Eyes" teaser - that was way too naked
Teaser for the video-book of Rohan Quine's novella "Apricot Eyes" - teaser 6(iii) "that was way too naked". // The images produced by my sight through the television cameras are less photographic than suggestive of their subjects, like abstract portraits. Yet so true are they in essence, especially when I'm seeing a person, that a vivid stab of Scorpio is slicing out its sultry vibration from all the connected TVs in New York that are currently displaying this online show. Ten such TV screens happen to be banked in a window on his left now, every screen alight with the image of a mesmerising black pulse cutting through a lurid coloured flicker as of neon... // He halts and stares, twanging with a shocked self-recognition. Straightaway, a section of every screen - the section where the eyes of that churning and terrifying shape would have been if the picture were less abstract - becomes not just fully figurative but even photo-realistic, as his recognition, unforeseeable by him or me, reaches out and grabs my sight and makes of our connection a conduit so clear that for one long moment ten pairs of Scorpio eyes stare down at him, pin him to the pavement, enter him and peer around his mind. // Raped by his own gaze, he shivers, looks away, then back again defiantly at me, through the screens; but I've turned the heat down for a moment, so those Scorpio eyes melt back into the surrounding blackness of the shape that quivers snarling on the backdrop of the neon swirl. // That was way too naked. // Now he knows it's me; I know he does. Although we're no longer staring at each other, our connection is now re-established after all these months of separation. // I continue to observe him. He can sense this and, excitingly, he feels a subtle thrill that I can feel as well!