A festival story. The characters are imagined; the clothes are real.
I unfolded the slip, and the name on it belonged to the one person in the crew I had never heard speak.
OTTILIE, in Lou's square capitals.
I looked up. Forty feet above us, past the riveted girders and the dead hook of the old overhead crane, a light burned in the crane cab. It always did. Somebody up there had lit our parties for three years, and I could count on one hand the times I'd seen her come down the ladder.
"Rules," Lou said, shaking the last slips in his knit hat. "Nothing bought. Something you own or something you make. Midnight Saturday, we open them together."
He didn't say the other thing. We'd all walked past the banner on the fence: AVAILABLE, a phone number, a drawing of glass lofts where our loading dock stood. On the brick wall by the roll-up door, sixty-one party dates ran down the bricks in chalk, back to the first winter.
"End of February," Lou said. "I'm still looking."
Yusuf started restacking record crates that didn't need restacking.
On the walk home over the river I went through my apartment in my head. Welding gloves. A jar of rivets from the mill floor. A swimsuit with the tags still on, bought in July for a lake I kept not going to.
Nothing for a stranger in a crane.
✦
Friday was build day. Eight in the morning, 25°F, the river breathing white into the cold.
Ottilie came through the side door with her hood down, and the ends of her hair were frozen into stiff little brushes. Two pink rings circled her eyes.
Crying, I decided. A hard morning. I warmed a mug of apple cider on the crew hot plate and carried it to the foot of her ladder.
She looked at the cider. She looked at me. "Thanks," she said, and climbed.
At lunch Lou lowered his voice. "She asked me to take her off the February schedule. Wherever February ends up."
I chewed slowly. Whatever I gave her now had to say something a mug of cider couldn't.
✦
At two, a strip of gaffer tape came down the ladder with a message in tiny print: BRACKET? 4 IN. I welded one in ten minutes and took it up myself.
The cab was cold glass and old steel, a lighting desk where the crane controls used to be, and a stack of cue sheets on graph paper. Ottilie sat on the desk stool with her knees drawn up inside a charcoal hoodie, half crew member and half something roosting in the rafters. Taped to the window was a card: M W F 6:00 · L3.
Lamp three, I figured. Some morning check.
Her bag hung on a hook, and out of it trailed a loop of blue rubber strap, knotted where it had snapped. The whole cab smelled clean and sharp, like something I couldn't place.
She took the bracket, turned it over twice, and nodded. Then she looked past me, out the window, where a towboat was shoving nine coal barges upstream through the steam on the water. She watched it the whole way under the bridge.
The river, then. Or the light. Or both.
That night I wrapped the best thing I've ever made: a lantern of mill rivets, the first piece I built here. It looked like a good present.
It looked like a present for a lighting tech.
✦
Saturday, the mill filled with three hundred people in black. Somebody had zip-tied a string of white bulbs along the crane rail. Coats steamed beside the rented heaters. Behind the decks Yusuf, the only bare arms in the building, blue wings across his velvet tee, rode one hypnotic loop for twenty minutes, a hi-hat hissing over a kick you felt in your shins. I danced near the column where I always start, my cloak zipped as high as it goes.
At 11:02 the light changed.
Blue came down from the crane cab, deep and moving. Ripples drifted across the concrete and slid over everyone's boots, and the whole floor slowed and looked down, the way you look down from the edge of a pool.
Up in the cab window, Ottilie had her chin on her hands, watching her floor the way you watch water.
And the whole week rearranged itself in my head.
Hair frozen at eight in the morning is wet hair. Pink rings are goggles. L3 isn't a lamp. It's a lane. Six o'clock, three mornings a week, lane three. The knotted strap. The smell was chlorine.
She didn't love light. She used light to bring the water inside.
The swimsuit was across the river, in my top drawer, with the tags on.
It was 11:04.
✦
I ran.
Out the side door, hood up, the cold going into my lungs like a swallow of creek water. Across the yellow bridge with salt crunching under my boots and the handrail furred white. Then the city steps up the far slope, ice packed in the corners, my count gone somewhere past a hundred.
Keys. Drawer. Tags. The only wrapping paper in the apartment was the Sunday comics. The parcel went into the cloak's inside pocket, zipped flat against my ribs, where the ice couldn't have it if I fell.
Down the steps two at a time where the salt had been. Back over the bridge with my cloak flaring behind me and the eye on its back catching every streetlight.
At 11:56 Lou was holding the roll-up door open a foot.
"Cutting it fine," he said.
✦
At midnight Yusuf let a single loop ride, and we gathered under the chalk wall with our parcels. Mine went onto the pile straight out of my cloak. Ottilie came down the ladder. I'd never seen her stand in the middle of us before.
Everyone tore paper. I watched only her.
She peeled back the comics, still warm from my ribs, and the swimsuit fell open across her hands: deep cobalt and navy, feathered fractal curls mirrored down the center, a metallic sheen that her own blue cue set moving as if it were already wet.
She held it against herself. Then she looked around the circle, straight at me.
Of course she knew.
She went back up the ladder. When she came down, she put an envelope in my hands.
"You were very bad at secret," she said. It was the longest sentence I'd ever heard her say.
Inside were cue sheets, cue numbers on the front in her tiny print. On the backs, in pencil, was me.
Me at my first party, two winters ago, pressed against that column with my coat still zipped. Me welding the sign over the door. Me asleep on a speaker crate at dawn. Me last month in the middle of the floor, eyes closed, arms up, cloak swinging open, everyone close around me.
I had to set them down on a crate.
The last sheet was all of us under the chalk wall: Lou with his hat, Yusuf in his wings behind his crates, me in my cloak. And up in the corner of the page, in the small window of the crane cab, a figure with her chin on her hands.
She had never drawn herself in before. I'd just looked at every page.
Ottilie turned to Lou. "Put me back on February."
"Wherever February is," Lou said.
"Wherever."
✦
Wednesday, six in the morning. The neighborhood pool, the high windows still black.
I'm slow in lane four. I don't mind.
In lane three, a blue suit slides under the surface, and the lamps set in the pool walls throw moving ripples across the fractal on her back: the same light she poured across our floor.
At the wall she pushes her goggles up, two pink rings already printing round her eyes, and looks across the rope at me.
"Friday," she says. "Six."
Then she ducks under, and the blue goes with her.
On the bench hook, my cloak waits with its hood open. Three winters, the ends of her hair froze on the walk home.
This winter, they won't.
The cloak, the swimsuit and the velvet tee from the mill
Basia's cloak carries the whole run: the parcel zipped into its inside pocket over an iced bridge, and at the end a hood left open on a pool bench for someone else's wet hair. It's the Black Mystic Eye men's festival cloak ($250, unisex fit): black with silver-grey engraved linework, a Flower of Life medallion across the shoulders and a second one held in an eye-shaped frame lower down. Sacred geometry in black and silver sits right at home on a techno floor, and the long hooded cut covers the queue and the walk home.
Metallic Blue Fractal has ridden out a whiteout in a stalled gondola in Frost on Steel and kept an outdoor techno floor alive at −4°F in Three More Hours at Minus Twenty. This time it went into a Secret Santa parcel wrapped in the Sunday comics. The art is a mirrored fractal in cobalt and navy, feathered and scaled forms branching from a center line with a metallic sheen, like light moving through deep water. Ottilie's gift is the Metallic Blue Fractal women's one-piece swimsuit ($65; $68 in 2XL, $69 in 3XL), which the product page calls quick-dry and chlorine-resistant, and which doubles as a rave bodysuit under a cloak.
Behind the decks, Yusuf plays in the Angel Catcher crushed velvet T-shirt ($60 in crushed velvet, $50 in poly): charcoal knotwork with a Flower of Life hexagon at the center, blue feathered wings on either side and teal-ringed star medallions, short sleeves for the warmest spot in a cold building.
- Festival cloak: micro-mink poly outer · ultra-soft fluffy microfiber fleece lining in black or white faux fur · 200 g/m² · double front zipper · heavy drawstrings · four pockets (two interior stash pockets, one zippered, plus two deep side pockets) · unisex fit, XS–5XL; size up for layers underneath.
- One-piece swimsuit: 75% recycled poly, 25% elastane, 225 g/m² · four-way stretch · scoop neck, low scoop back, double-layer front · dye-sublimated print · regular fit, XS–3XL.
- Crushed velvet T-shirt: crushed velvet, 240 g/m² (also offered in poly jersey and cotton) · short sleeves, crew neck · dye-sublimated print · XS–5XL.
Wrap up your own crew: men's cloaks · women's swimwear · crushed velvet tees
What should you wear to a Christmas rave?
Wear techno black with one piece that catches the light. A December warehouse can sit near freezing at the door and run warm on a packed floor, so layer a bodysuit or tee under fleece joggers, then add a cloak for the queue and the walk home. Festive can mean one metallic or deep-blue piece, not tinsel.
- Techno dress code: black on black, boots you can stand in for six hours, silver hardware, and a long dark layer that reads as "techno monk".
- Old industrial buildings: riverside mills were built for barges and cooling water, not comfort. Concrete floors pull heat from your feet, and heaters only reach so far. Thick socks and a hood beat any hat.
- The cold outside: Pittsburgh's December normals run from about 41°F by day to 27°F at night, so plan for the line, not just the floor.
- Phone-free floors: many techno parties sticker your camera, so keep the phone zipped in an inside pocket.
When the warehouse season thaws, the nearest big riverfront techno weekend is Movement, held each Memorial Day weekend in Detroit's Hart Plaza on the Detroit River. Its Underground Stage keeps a warehouse feel below the plaza, and nights run 50–60°F, cool enough that a cloak still earns its place on the walk to the afters.
Frequently asked questions
How do you find out what someone wants for Secret Santa without asking?
Watch their habits for a week. Notice what they carry, what they do before work, what they look at when they think nobody's watching, and what they've worn out. Small clues add up: a snapped strap, a schedule taped somewhere, a smell on a jacket. A gift for a daily ritual usually lands better than a gift about their job.
Why were steel mills built along rivers?
Rivers gave mills three things at once. The flat ground beside them carried the railroads, barges brought coal cheaply, and the water cooled machinery and hot steel. On Pittsburgh's Monongahela, Ron Baraff of Rivers of Steel told The Allegheny Front that the Carrie Furnaces pulled in about five million gallons a day at their height.
What is a water ripple effect light?
A water ripple effect light is a stage fixture that throws moving, water-like patterns onto floors and walls. An LED shines through a textured optic or effect wheel that a small motor keeps turning, so the ripples drift and change shape (US patent 11428383 sets out one design). Clubs use it to make a dance floor look like a pool.
Written by Magus & Lylyth Fawn, the Los Angeles artists behind Magus Fawn. Magus makes VR and digital visionary art and produces Psy EDM. Lylyth makes fractal digital art and runs design and customer care. We've been selling wearable art since 2020 on Etsy (4.7★ from 144 reviews as of October 2026) and here at magusfawn.com. Come say hi on Instagram @magusfawn.
0 comments