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Show 321 crushed blades of grass; sprigs fell into his hair and tickled behind his ears. That interested him, though he was not sure he could afford the lapse in attention necessary for private impressions. She would not hold still, that was the other problem. It was hard to gather impressions into an integrated unit when they kept coming at you all over your body as well as from the closet and from the neighborhood outside the window. Still, he was aware that he had sunk deeper into the grass and that the looping speck in the sky was closer. Presently the ground opened under his head, and that was all right too. Grass stood on either side of the gap, waving gently as the wind brushed it. He felt himself slowly tip backward as it widened under him, and soon he was upside down, hanging by the heels and rocking from side to side with the wind. The other bank had fallen away and he watched the sun rise toward the mountains that hung upside down in the distance, and birds drifted by on their backs. She had settled down now and was breathing in jerks. A motorcycle went by outside. His heels came loose, and through the back of his head he saw the face of the cliff sweep past him, studded with flat rocks bearing writing. He spun for a long time, his arms and legs spread wide, watching the patchwork of fields below him get smaller. The speck was in a different part of the sky now, flapping like a live dishrag. Its circular loops had degenerated into erratic and frenzied zigzags. He tried to keep a constant distance from it, but this meant falling past objects so rapidly that he couldn't tell what they were. He also could not tell which direction he was falling, or if he were still upside down.. He opened his eyes to look at Alice, but she had floated away against the ceiling; her body had become attenuated and he could see specks on the sheetrock through it, and a single strand of dusty cobweb that undulated as a breeze from the window caught it. He |