1The point is, I can say anything here, under nominal concealment of an obvious secret. The man says to the reporter “all right but this is strictly off the record okay” with the understanding that the reporter is there explicitly to record everything that is said. That is his job. I guess he doesn’t write the name down.

At a masquerade a man is leering, the mask covering half his face. He holds it in place unsteadily, having drunk more than his share of wine. He is talking to a woman. Across the room, his wife watches.

Two friends walk down the street, drinking out of a brown paper bag shaped like a bottle containing anything. It c(o)uld be anything. How is anyone to know?

Children speak in whispers loud enough to wake the dead, or the merely sleeping.

Posting on a fetish board from an anonymous account.

A crowd of torchlit men in white.

Nominal secrecy, worn like a security blanket. It does not protect, that is not its purpose, its purpose is to give license, to allow people to say and do what they can’t, and perhaps what they shouldn’t, in their day to day lives. People wear masks to protect their identities, and people wear masks to become otherworldly creatures, and somewhere along the way those concepts begin to collude and to conflate.

Secrecy is just a little game we play, sometimes.

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