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Show 19 certain serenity stole into his knowledge of approaching death. Pain had its duration and would soon end, life drew to a close, duties not performed would remain undone or be given to someone else to do, days would soon pass without him and flowers would ripen on his grave and his friends would think of him now and then and admit they had always liked him. He could even savor his disorientation a little. Trees floated at various angles on all sides of him. Through the murk that the daylight had become he could see them--maple, beech, hickory, with a tender green haze around their branches and twigs--and he could also see, at some ambiguous distance, a long white neck dipping into the branches, making brittle silhouettes of the branches in front of it, and drawing back up. He could not make out its source. It dropped from a point above what his eyes could fix on, even though he rolled them until he saw the tufts of his eyebrows and felt the roots pull in their sockets. The neck withdrew and dropped again, feeling its way among branches, and he could see it was moving closer. Bands of steel tightened across his chest and he knew his sternum would shortly give way, the halves of his ribcage would shove together and interlace like fingers and his lungs and heart would squeeze out between them like orange pulp. The blunt end of the neck seemed to quiver, as though it were sensitive to the twigs and young leaves it dipped against. It touched the ground once and drew back suddenly, fixed in space just below the lowest branches of a dead linden, where it moved left and right and then slowly approached the ground again, stopping once or twice until it hovered the width of a hand over the tallest stalks of columbine, and then moved toward him again. It seemd to be much bigger around than he had thought at first, but that may only have been because it was closer now. Trees that were momentarily bathed in it suddenly warped and shimmied and then |