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Show 17 you gripped your hands together until the knuckles turned white, and held them in front of your face, pressing the palms into each other with all the strength of your biceps, and closed your eyes tightly for a minute before opening them slowly and squinting up at the sky. He understood that in some cases you threw your head back and emitted sounds that boiled up from the warm hollows under your brain and contained hidden meanings, but he was still too self-conscious to do that now. He remembered that sometimes you swayed back and forth on your knees with your fists clenched under your chin and your elbows held tight against your ribs. He could do that. The sound of his breath between his teeth did not startle him the way his voice would have. He found, incidentally, that along with the clenched hands and arms and eyelids, it helped to sink down until his heels pressed into his buttocks and bend his body until his forehead touched his knees, and in this position contract every muscle he could control as hard as he could, without letting up. The tendons in his throat drew tight and he felt his gums dry out. He imagined muscles like clothesline rope standing out on his shoulders and back. He knew he could not hold this tension for very long, but while he was holding it his mind could not wander. Veins stood out on the surface of his brain. A clutter of irrelevant lights swam against his eyelids, related sympathetically to the stabs of pain in his back. He thought of muted things, the pale brown blanket on his bed, the soft grey ash at the bottom of the fireplace, the dingy white mare his father had bought for six dollars and a pocket watch and rode to town on Sundays to scoff at the Baptists or Shakers. He thought of weathered redwood buckets and holes in the earth. The strain was beginning to tell. He could feel sweat on his stomach and one of his front teeth seemed about to snap, but he fancied |