At Least He Made an Impression | Part 1
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
The glass wasn’t meant to stop anyone. It was there to frame the skyline. The way an artist frames a painting. Guide your eyes where they want you to look. He’d gotten distracted by that little glass barrier, on this same roof, when they were workshopping taglines for a new energy drink campaign.
“Chaos in every can,” Gordon said. “The suggestion of danger sells better than the danger itself.” The client wrote it down in a little leather-bound notebook. They always do.
Gordon, the Managing Director, stood on the wrong side of the glass. He was forty-something. His gray hair pompadour flapped in the updraft. He gripped the glass with the panic of a private school kid who had only ever fallen into soft things like goose feather pillows. The wind lifted his cuffs, a gentle flourish with every gust. The city below him buzzed as it always did, even after a train delay, when someone decides to end it all. But that’s not why he was here.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The banging was like thunder, far away, then somehow immediately here. Fists on metal. Someone should really oil that stairwell door, he thought for a moment. Nobody ever would.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
He looked back, and they were there, and there was nowhere else to go.
The woman in the high-rise across the street watched the whole thing play out. Gordon’s leather toe dropping into the night. The blackness of the dark swallowing him like it was a mouth taking a big, expensive bite. Before she knew it, he was gone. His shins, his knees, his hips, his chest, his head. A sequence of vanishing body parts.
Gordon didn’t scream. He had learned how to suppress his emotions at boarding school. He had practiced this. Once before, in a tunnel, when he was seventeen, and the silence afterward had lasted the rest of his life.
On the ground, the lookie-loos were already gathering. The Ford was a boxy, older model, positioned perfectly to catch him. Almost like a bowl that had been placed beneath a leak. The truck’s cab had collapsed in, leaving behind a clean, person-shaped indentation. The windshield had shattered, covering the street in beautiful, ragged glitter. Gordon had done the last thing that he would be paid to do. At least he made an impression.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.
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Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.
Photo credit: @mak_jp
When is part 6 coming?
Love this babes.