The Glint

By Rachel Dax

“Watch for the glint!” he said, before he wrote about Rhinoceroses.

“Watch, because it spreads like a disease. And not just through those who have not had the privilege of a good education.”

He chose the growth of horns as his metaphor for the glint – as a glint itself could not be seen on stage. He saw it happen in his own time, and he warned us how it looked and whom it took. His last man standing was not the Philosopher, but the Ordinary Man who somehow withstood the seduction. Somehow clung to all that was good and right in the face of a world turned upside down and back to front – good becoming bad and bad becoming good. The Everyman who somehow stood firm, even when surrounded by nothing but horns.

I started to notice the glint appearing in my lifetime a while back now. I saw it begin to manifest a dozen or so years ago, when beautiful young men whom I’d once nurtured through learning became unrecognisable from just a few years before.

I saw it in the eyes of those who claimed there were swarms of criminals coming our way – so better go it alone and have the right to let them drown.

I saw it spread to the eyes of neighbours, relatives, and outer circle friends.

It was just as he described back then – the spreading – its insidious viral nature permeating everything, everywhere, everyone.

Suddenly, the people who fled became vermin. Those running from the effects of what we caused. “But yes, of course we have the right to drill baby drill, burn baby burn. And then take absolutely no responsibility for the consequences. No, you cannot come here even though we made it impossible for you to live there.”

The glint spread and spread. I saw certain folk who were once only tittered at or ignored (not that that was right) suddenly cast as the enemy, rapists-in-waiting and stealers of rights. The glint spread to my own kind and tore us in half. The oppressed duped by the oppressor into believing that they were somehow on their side. That somehow, they actually cared about us. Those who once I might have embraced as sisters, glinting and glinting and glinting. Not even realising they were nothing now but glinty pawns.

The centre stopped being the middle. Those who before were seen as personifications of everything that was wrong in this land, suddenly started to seem so reasonable, so sensible, so moderate. Even the Iron Lady would be central now…

The glint spread everywhere. Those responsible knowing they had a powerful example elsewhere they could model. The devil himself held up as the bastion of all things right and good. If it can be done there, it can be done here, thought his acolytes. The ones who like gold lifts and underage children.

More glint. More glint. More glint.

In my profession I was lucky. There were more glint-free than glinted. However, there were some – some who tried to hide their glint – because there were still more of us than them.

I did not presume I would remain immune – remember it was the ‘Philosopher’ who succumbed, not the ‘Everyman’ in the stage play. Any of us could fall for it, I was well aware of that – the disease tries to consume everyone in its path. All I knew was to self-assess. Double check. Notice any glinty thought that crept in due to the constant bombardment by all things glintish and glintesque. Casting out and disinfecting regularly. I thought at this point, there still might be enough of us and that a critical mass would keep watching themselves like me. Mission: to remain glint free. Not to grow a horn.

And then it happened. The saturation point. More glint than not glint.

A man who was accused of a crime he did not commit, was targeted by a chief glint-maker. A black man. An autistic man. A man who did nothing wrong other than exaggerate a little around the edges about how many miles he ran. All other accusations found false.

“How dare you say you ran 100 miles a day for 6 days when it was every other day making it 12?! You are a stain on our society, claiming that you ran like that!” said the 50-year-old, who put on her CV that she was a classically trained singer because she was once in the school choir.

“And apparently you made a noise on a bus when you were 7 – so you could always speak – you fabulist, you liar!” said the 40-year-old, who claimed in an interview that he had a strong background in drama because he passed his GCSE.

“Let him pay!” cried the warriors of the keys, reading the latest paid for ad. “Let’s make money out of this!” decided what once was the only glint free source of information left, rubber stamping the claims of the most glinted.

“Let’s destroy him!” they roared in threads of acrid abhorrence. “That pretend runner! How dare he wear the robes of those who excel, when that perfectly porcelain glint-maker told us he copied a paragraph – which proves he is innately stupid ‘like them all’! I don’t believe he was exonerated – that’s just a woke institution defending itself. Just another lie. How dare he challenge the glint-makers? How dare he think he has the right to be with those whom the glinted hold in such high esteem – when they agree with them, that is. [Otherwise, they are the problem of course – the experts. We’ve heard enough from experts – until someone says he is one of them – then how dare he be an expert?] How dare he, who is brown, push back at those who peddle the glint, and then have the audacity to tell us all to remember our humanity and ‘sew a thread of love throughout the world’? Did he not get the memo – that empathy is now officially a sin?”

“You think you have a right to stand in those halls? And then challenge how the walls were built and question the very skulls out of which its esteemed ones drink?” they shouted in his face. “We know you are bad. We know that even though you were cleared, you are bad. We know that even though the mission to destroy you came from a brazen chief glint-maker, that you are bad. How dare you peddle love and humanity? How dare you? You, who exaggerated how many miles you ran! You shall be put to death!”

And so they lynched him. And then laughed. And the glint glinted on.

Postscript

Ionesco was right. There is a glint.

I shall keep checking the mirror. And keep hoping that nothing flickers as I stare at my devastated reflection.