The Marquee

When Laughter Split the Veil

This is how it started.

I was at a festival. Nothing unusual about it — just one of those big canvas marquees, packed wall to wall with people. Low light, bodies close together, that hum of conversation and music and heat that makes everything feel slightly unreal.

I walked straight into the middle of it and sat down.

I ended up kneeling beside someone who said something genuinely funny — one of those comments that catches you off guard. I didn’t try to hold it in. I just laughed. Not a polite laugh. A full, unfiltered laugh. I leaned back slightly and let it out properly — a deep, open, almost animal laugh.

And the instant I did, something happened.

It felt like the top of my head split open — not painfully, not physically — but as if. And at the exact same moment, a flash of light ripped across the entire marquee. Not a flicker. Not a trick of the eye. A full, sudden burst, like lightning tearing through fabric.

The effect was immediate.

The entire marquee went silent.

Hundreds of people — talking, laughing, moving — all stopped at once. You could feel the pause, like the air itself had frozen. People looked around, confused. You could see it on their faces: What the hell was that? No one could place it. There was no obvious source. No sound system pop. No stage effect. Nothing.

After a few seconds, the moment passed. Conversations cautiously restarted. The hum returned, slightly shaken but moving on, as crowds do.

I stayed where I was.

Then a girl ran into the marquee.

She came straight toward me — not scanning the crowd, not hesitating — directly to where I was sitting. When she reached me, she couldn’t speak. She was visibly shaken. Instead, she started gesturing frantically at her own head, waving her hand above it, trying to explain something without words.

She was trying to tell me what she had seen.

She had watched the light burst from the top of my head.

She didn’t know how to say it. Neither did I.