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     The varieties of accents and languages that surrounded Heather Chapman were so cacophonous, she couldn’t determine at first where they had all come from, let alone why.  She wondered without success what had summoned them all, and how they had known to come from so far for this event.  The morning sun had been cool, bringing a leafy late September breeze that basically smelled of pumpkin spice.  She saw the jays flitting to the side while others flew overhead in formation as though they were fighter jets on a mission to destroy.  She trod across the ground of a formless void.  And yet, Heather knew it could have been any day or anywhere.
     Heather didn’t know how long the whole ordeal would take.  She had heard of some of them being frenzied affairs, over in a few hours like a shark feeding, while others stretched on for days or weeks before they finally fizzled out and people went their own way.  Children were not around, of course.  In the middle of the day, people with jobs were working, and their children were too busy in school or else making dance videos for their friends where each copied the same set of moves in different combinations over and over.  Even at age twelve, Heather couldn’t get inside the head of those kids or why it entertained them.  But she was no cultural anthropologist, and that was a different question for another time, anyway.  The crowd was gathering too fast to worry about that now anyway.
     These scenes had almost become ritualistic, despite what seemed like complete chaos from a distance.  The closer she got, the more phones she began seeing—videos being recorded to prove that they were there, that they had been a part of this event.  No participant wanted to miss having their presence known, for they knew if they missed this, they might as well have their membership taken.  As though anyone would take their membership card.
     Toward the back, away from the main crowd, some were measuring themselves, checking to see if the heft they carried would be enough to weigh in.  “I’ll chance it,” a man said to himself.
     “What’s your name?” Heather asked him.  “Where’d you come from?”
     “I’d rather not say.  They’re always listening, you know.  But call me The Prophet.”
     “I see.  How did this even start?”
     The Prophet wore an unmoving expression as he walked on with purpose.  “People just tell their friends, and they tell their friends, and it goes on from there.”  Heather lagged behind The Prophet but kept exploring.  Some were in a circle debating whether adults should stop reading YA or genre literature, getting called snobs.  But that didn’t click with her.  In another place, older people were gathering, surveying the scene and beginning to reminisce about how it used to be.  They cracked off-color jokes, toed and then trod across lines that had been drawn in the sand.  The retirees delighted in their own chutzpah when they felt no one had any left.  Bobby Cox, a farmer from Ohio, spoke slowly of how it was the Mexicans that had made things different, or the libs that had ruined everything.  Jacob Wolf agreed.  “It was them that did it.  Can’t say nothing now without getting in trouble.  In my day, people used to know how to behave and where the line was.”
     “And you used to call them the N-word,” one passer-by screamed without waiting for a response.
     “Now that ain’t right, I never called them that.”
     “No, they were just ‘those’ people, right?” another screamed.
     “WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE?!  WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?” Jacob shouted, but his answer was only met with silence.
     Heather saw some people pass by and move on, uninterested.  Many gossiped with their friends or argued about politics.  Others advertised themselves or their products, trying to gain attention from the crowd through their performances.  But Heather moved closer to the focus of the scene, wading through the first ring of onlookers as they gawked like rubberneckers watching a traffic accident like they had never seen one before.  A few made generic, inane, and safely empty comments to one another, but most remained silent, watching, waiting.  As she passed through the outer ring, she noticed that the spectators mostly kept a distance from the inner action—whether from respect or wariness, she couldn’t yet tell.  There was a calm in that no-man’s land where few dared tread.
     A handful of brave souls had waded across the divide, asking questions.  Most acted like reporters trying to understand from the inner circle what was going on.  Others seemed innocent civilians and onlookers who, like Heather, knew better than to attract attention by saying anything.  “I don’t want to get involved in this,” Jessica said, but after her friend Jamal was sucked into the action and joined the inner circle, she followed him.  Others were pushed out for asking questions, screamed at and followed by tossed barbs as they ran in the opposite direction as fast as they could.  Before long, they disappeared in the distance and were never heard from again.  They were eulogized with vitriol long after.
     Heather finally reached the inner circle where the frenzy of activity was buzzing so loud, she could hardly hear individual voices.  Outermost seemed to be the legions who had already had their turn and had either emptied their quiver or else were recharging their energy to have another go when they saw an opening they could take advantage of.  Most of these seemed to echo one another, congratulating each other for a good attempt.  As she pushed through, the throng grew denser.  The crowd’s temperature rose as the electricity gained in intensity again and again.  Here were the sycophants, standing just behind the participants and like Neal Cassady, shouting, “Yessssss!” and “Go! GO!” as they egged them on to more action.  Between shouts, they turned around and tried to preserve for eternity their having been there on this momentous day of reckoning, taking snapshots with a view of the post, carefully framed over their barbs to establish their credentials beyond all doubt.  Heather thought she was going to be sick, but she swallowed it down and pushed on.
     Then, finally, she broke through to the center of the activity.  Here the ring kept its distance as the participants took their turn.  The more the crowd grew, the more reporters Heather could see surveying the action, reporting live from the center of it as though they actually had some fresh take to write.  Now and then, they, too, would have vile words thrown in their direction.  Whether it was opportunism or disgust at their voyeuristic gaze that had provoked them, she couldn’t tell.  “You’re all just going to lie about us, anyway!  Rank profiteering.  Burn down the system!” she heard, but before she could process it, there were more shouts that drowned it out.
     Heather moved to one side and, down low, tried to ask one of the participants quietly, “What do you hope to gain from this?”
     The woman named Liz seemed confused.  “What do you mean?  Everyone is here.  I had to be.”
     Heather tried again.  “But what do you think you, personally, gain by being here?”  But Liz didn’t answer.  One had woman stepped too close to the post, and a hail of barbs rained down on her.  She tried to throw responses back, but her reaction was impotent, and her voice muted by all.  The participants wound themselves up, puffing their chests to prove their strength, and then with all their might, charged and heaved the sharpest barbs they possessed.  Their lances struck the man tied to the post again and again, a hail of barbs coming at him from all sides without relenting.  He tried to free himself, tried to say something that would assuage the mob, but they had descended upon him, and now nothing would sate their bloodthirst.
     One particularly lethal barb seemed to tear straight through the man, nearly disemboweling him, but he kept upright, continuing to struggle in vain.  Tom from England stepped up and said, “Why don’t we take it a bit easy?  Can’t we be civil?  Isn’t this all a bit much?”
     Another asked, “How is this justice without a trial?”  They were slaughtered without remorse.  The barb tossed by Danielle from Kentucky glanced off, not piercing deep enough, and seeing the superficial wound, the crowd turned on her, too.
     Then Heather heard the first challenges being issued.  “Yours was nothing to mine!” Kerry from California shouted.  “I hate him so much worse than you do.”
     “You don’t even know what you’re talking about!” Jay yelled.  They lived so close together, they could have been neighbors, but they hadn’t known one another at all before they had met there this day.  Suddenly, Kerry turned on Jay, ally fighting ally.  Cooperation broke down as other strangers who had come from around the world jumped to his defense and hers, friends turning to enemies as they fought without reserve.  More strangers joined, each beginning to throw barbs at the participants they no longer supported.  The focus of the circle became hazy.  The pace of the quivers being unloaded into the victim slowed as the circle turned on itself.  A melee began and spread outward, swallowing up the no-man’s land so that it was difficult to tell who was inside or outside the circle, and who was mere spectator caught in cross-fire.  Heather no longer knew who was friend or foe.  She ran for cover to watch safely from a distance.
     The melee went on for hours, with people who hadn’t even been involved in the initial fight joining, jumping in on behalf of one or another.  As different parts of the world rose from sleep and made their way to the post, they, too, joined the fray.  Barbs came in different languages, but everyone was able to translate and understood the new sentiments.  The old men like Bobby Cox in the back began cursing at them for not speaking English, not knowing where the newcomers even lived or how far they had travelled to be at this event.
     Every once in a while, the anger turned back to the post, and barbs were flung in that direction, but the mob had turned into a free-for-all.  The victim’s voice was lost in all the commotion, and moment by moment, he began to disappear.  The mob’s focus had shifted so much that by the time he was swept away, they hadn’t even noticed or cared.
     After a day or so, with participants joining and leaving, the mob finally began to disengage.  Reporters moved onto some other crisis.  The remaining barbs were stored away for some future date, and people left the scene one-by-one until only a few stragglers remained.  Andrea sighed.  “Show’s over.  I was here first, you know,” Andrea said.  “I was woke and ready to go, just like that.”
     “Yeah, so what?” Janice replied.
     “Just saying.”
     “Yeah, well, you want a prize?  Nobody cares anymore, Karen.”
     “My name is Janice.  Don’t call me Karen.”
     “Then don’t be one.”
     “Whatever, let’s go find someone else.”
     “You’re right.  Let’s go look!” Janice replied immediately, and they left together to patrol for a new transgressive quarry to hunt.
     It was then that the victim emerged from the shadows, battered and bruised, but alive, even if only in body and not spirit.  As with all these events, no one dared mention his name for a long time—as though it even mattered—lest the mob descend on them, too.  In time, the victim went about his life and people went back to enjoying his contributions to the world.  After all the rage, it was almost like The Cancelling had never happened.