when the music's over

That emerald-green door glistened in the fading yellow light. It creaked when she pushed it open. A long, drawn-out scream. A scream that persisted and intensified as she stepped inside.
Open sesame: another night.
A fluttering of indecipherable whispers glimmered over her cheeks like a veil of multicoloured powder. Strangers, all of them. Speaking in tongues; in arrhythmic multi-syllabic sentences they talked. A nest of cockroaches, or woodlice, or whatever those things are that eat wood; gleaming exoskeletons reflected back into her eyes. Sensitive eyes, today. Oddly sensitive, watering and irritated. The smoke burrowed in through her tear ducts and billowed in her head.

Someone said her name. It took a while for the separate sounds to form into that one solid recognisable form. She responded with an expression she didn't recognise, and couldn't picture in her head. In an unhurried, uncanny, unsure step she walked into the scene. She was suddenly aware of the way her muscles contracted with every step; how the joints hinged and supported one another as she hit the floor. On the walls, yellowed posters were peeling. Nobody seemed to come here during the day. An unkempt nest. She grabbed a glass off the table. Serpentine green. Dry on her throat; burning, like the first time.
Like the very first time.

Everyone sat and stood arranged like figurines on a table. Child's play. Moulded by tiny inexperienced fingers and painted in garish, odd, unearthly tones. New colours. Intersecting stripes, spirals.

She found herself pressed against the wall by an invisible force. A droning, high-pitched whine pierced into her ear, into her brain. That scream, persisting. A tortured cry. A clattering of discordant, inhuman sounds: garbled, misplaced, thrown into the sound-space; brutally torn apart and thrown together into a disembodied cacophony.

She turned and shoved the gramophone onto the floor with a pained scream.