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Will Hunt Most Marshy Areas |
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I went after it as far as I could go and touched it with my nose. It spun. It floated off. I touched it--tried to, but the wind that flutters overhead gives motion to the sheets of light. (I'd fallen into it.) It lifts them up, the silent, flapping sheets. It turns them end on end and lays them flat, a jumble of rising and of falling that can look, if you are watching from a downright slippery edge, the way that coolness on the skin beneath a heap of heavy fur, you'd think, might feel; a light that, when combined with sudden twisting from within, makes arcs and swivels, wrapping bends and loops around the body that has tumbled into it, a body that must scramble around in it for something grainy and ascending, steady, if the body is to have a chance of climbing out. This light sneaks in through nose and mouth and slithers, flooding every hollow, catching up with breath to carry it right back out through mouth and nose into the sheets, the hazy flapping spaces on the outside of this cool but sinking body, floating up eventually (the body's breath, that is) to join up with the wind. The wind: it plays it just as if it's none the wiser that a dog who cannot swim fell into it. The mouth is open, but no sound is heard, and teeth are just as pointy as they ever were; but if there is not any breath, your teeth are no more useful to you than the moon is useful way up there wherever it is, your body head to tail no more significant, not to a moon at least, than just a smudge against a pool of light and movement (fly wings on the teariest of eyes). |
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