The jester: green suit strung with vivid, sequins sarcastic, grin rising as anger turns violent, terrifying happiness.
Oh yes, he whispers, and the whisper reaches out, suffocating the city in its sallow, sickly sweet embrace and – flick! – the billboards rife with advertisements, smothered with dreams of success via capitalism, fall blank for only an instant; now they are replaced with the jester’s inimitable face, filled with furious fantasy, ecstatic with exhilaration, his triumph contagious, but sickeningly so.

They recoil, they don’t understand, yet they are drawn forward – by some perverse curiosity innate to humans – and they take a step closer to their screens, already dragged under, drugged in their fascination.

So he speaks.