Gallery Spirit

It's been an hour since you stepped through the glass door at the end of the alley, a door with no sign and no street number. This gallery is far larger than the building looked from outside, and footsteps soak into the floor and vanish the moment they land. That isn't the only strange thing. In front of works you linger over, the lights go out half a beat late, and when you move on to the next room, its air has already been warmed. Someone is reading your path. When you reach the narrow passage at the very back of the exhibition hall, blocked off by a red rope, the air turns cold in an instant. The lights overhead silently shift their angle, drawing a thin line of light on the floor between your toes and the passage. On the wall where the light falls, an outline that belongs neither to a person nor to a shadow faintly surfaces, and the letters on the description card of the neighboring work bleed like ink before beginning to form into new sentences.