Rumors had been spreading like wildfire. “Manumission” was the talk of the town. It was to be a new art gallery, opening soon ... Right on the same grounds that’d been the site of such horror...

The empty lot had stood vacant for 6 years. Despite the prime location, no one wanted to build there. After all, 98 people died, 124 injured, when an F4 tornado touched down, briefly, carving cruelty through that glass and steel-plated building, hollowing it out like a wrecking ball...

In addition to its infamous location, Manumission’s structure itself was a big reason for the hullabaloo. A six-story high building, it was half a block wide, shaped like a pyramid, and had thick, black-tinted windows that sparkled in the sunlight.

At night, the pyramid lit up, in riots of color, bursts of neon brighter than a Christmas tree, with “Manumission!” in bold red lettering, wildly circling the whole of the structure like a television news crawl gone haywire.

Everyone passing by the unusual structure gawked, was agog at its peculiar appearance. Pictures of the building soon went viral.

Soon after, “Anamnesis” leaflets were dropped via genital-shaped drones, plastered all over the city.

The leaflets featured collages of frames from the 1989 film Weekend at Bernie’s interspersed with comic book-style drawings of Kanye West. The drawings depicting Kanye, in a wedding dress, scaling the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai.

Each leaflet was sunburst gold and had blood red, Times New Roman font on its front center, promoting the gallery’s opening exhibit. The exhibit simply entitled: “ANAMNESIS: SPOILER ALERT”

The flyers were a bolt out of the blue and so striking and outlandish that they prompted scores of rumors, began long Craigslist and Reddit debates over just who was opening the gallery and exactly what “Manumission” and “Anamnesis” meant ... Was it a publicity stunt? But for what? No one knew for sure ... The proprietor behind the gallery was listed as “System Bandit Company” and had no website, no social media, and only a P.O. Box address listed in the Caymans.

On the Sunday afternoon “Manumission” opened, the air was soft and warm, and there was a long line curling around the block. The anticipation was palpable. A buzz was in the air, and the crowd’s murmurs and thrums began to blend into a uniform hum, its din growing louder than a hundred televisions. The hubbub soon drowning out the hiss of the nearby highway...

Many in the gathering crowd appeared nonchalant, while others were at the ready, with croaks of laughter, feral grins, and faces aimed at and away from screens. Then there were others in the line who weren’t even initially aware of what the hype was about. They just wanted to join the crowd. Those who happened by, joined the line spontaneously, were those seeming to take the most photos, video.

The crowd was diverse but skewed young, 20s, 30s, and most appeared hip, or appeared aspiring to be hip, or were those simply too hip to ever actually be hip ... Many wore colorful hats and vintage clothing ... A big bear of a man, a hipster, with a pox-scarred face, walked slowly, in long strides, alongside the line, live-streaming the scene...

One heavily made-up young girl, with a great cloud of purple hair, was by the pyramid’s entrance. The girl was pacing like a caged panther and was excitedly gesticulating and doing duckfaces as she snapped selfies of herself in front of the front of the line.