Sentence The Threehundredandsixteen
She was holding someone's hand, but couldn't remember whose: everything in her body fizzed, from her toes to her scalp, she could even feel her hair fizzing, each individual follicle, and her toenails and her teeth and all the cells in her body, it was like she was the foam which sometimes gathers along the riverbank in the still water caught by sticks and stones and catches the wind, or like the spittle left by insects who lay their eggs on leaves or like frog-spawn; she wanted to scream but couldn't open her mouth, or her eyes, she didn't know if she was floating, on water, or air, she had a sudden horrible vision of the 'Falling Man' in news footage of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and the image which invoked
the opening titles of Mad Men and always made her feel sick at the terror that poor man must have experienced, and she thought of others who have jumped from heights, clifftops or high bridges and she felt the sway of a rope bridge high in the Andes and the nausea it induced, she panicked as she always did when she had the falling dream – oh! to plunge through fear or desperation or in order to commit suicide and she knew, or believed she did, that for her the fear of falling outweighed anything except perhaps fire; and then she felt a slight squeeze of her hand, by whoever the other hand belonged to – why was she holding someone's hand? no memory came, but the fizzing seemed to increase in it's intensity so that she felt she was now bubbling, like boiling water in a kettle, and she was acutely aware of her lungs, her heart, liver, kidneys, stomach, bowels; she desperately hoped she was not going to wet or soil herself, that would be mortifying; and she remembered that the dead often do that, involuntarily, as all the muscles in their bodies relax, and all self-control is extinguished along with their life; so was she (were they) falling, or floating – she could hear the wind and became aware of a chill starting to penetrate her body and of the noise and coolness of a wind rushing past her, so maybe the fizzing and the bubbling were over and this was whatever was next and when the hand squeezed hers again, the skin felt like lutestring, cool and smooth as she squeezed back and although she had no idea who it was – Jesus, she didn't even remember who she was herself, was she black or white, where did she come from, was she a woman at all, or actually a man and what had become of Nimrod – the Hunter, but who was the Hunter? it was as if she had been erased from her own memory, she had no memory, save these unconnected visual fragments, flickering and flashing behind her eyelids with sometimes a celerity she could not follow and when suddenly there was only silence, with no more fizzing, nor bubbling, nor even the wind blowing and she held tighter to the hand for, no matter who it belonged to, the suzerainty of her position was fundamental, it was her only contact with anything at all, she utterly depended on it and her identity if she had one was only in relation to it for without it, she was nothing!
She was holding someone's hand, but couldn't remember whose: everything in her body fizzed, from her toes to her scalp, she could even feel her hair fizzing, each individual follicle, and her toenails and her teeth and all the cells in her body, it was like she was the foam which sometimes gathers along the riverbank in the still water caught by sticks and stones and catches the wind, or like the spittle left by insects who lay their eggs on leaves or like frog-spawn; she wanted to scream but couldn't open her mouth, or her eyes, she didn't know if she was floating, on water, or air, she had a sudden horrible vision of the 'Falling Man' in news footage of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and the image which invoked the opening titles of Mad Men and always made her feel sick at the terror that poor man must have experienced, and she thought of others who have jumped from heights, clifftops or high bridges and she felt the sway of a rope bridge high in the Andes and the nausea it induced, she panicked as she always did when she had the falling dream – oh! to plunge through fear or desperation or in order to commit suicide and she knew, or believed she did, that for her the fear of falling outweighed anything except perhaps fire; and then she felt a slight squeeze of her hand, by whoever the other hand belonged to – why was she holding someone's hand? no memory came, but the fizzing seemed to increase in it's intensity so that she felt she was now bubbling, like boiling water in a kettle, and she was acutely aware of her lungs, her heart, liver, kidneys, stomach, bowels; she desperately hoped she was not going to wet or soil herself, that would be mortifying; and she remembered that the dead often do that, involuntarily, as all the muscles in their bodies relax, and all self-control is extinguished along with their life; so was she (were they) falling, or floating – she could hear the wind and became aware of a chill starting to penetrate her body and of the noise and coolness of a wind rushing past her, so maybe the fizzing and the bubbling were over and this was whatever was next and when the hand squeezed hers again, the skin felt like lutestring, cool and smooth as she squeezed back and although she had no idea who it was – Jesus, she didn't even remember who she was herself, was she black or white, where did she come from, was she a woman at all, or actually a man and what had become of Nimrod – the Hunter, but who was the Hunter? it was as if she had been erased from her own memory, she had no memory, save these unconnected visual fragments, flickering and flashing behind her eyelids with sometimes a celerity she could not follow and when suddenly there was only silence, with no more fizzing, nor bubbling, nor even the wind blowing and she held tighter to the hand for, no matter who it belonged to, the suzerainty of her position was fundamental, it was her only contact with anything at all, she utterly depended on it and her identity if she had one was only in relation to it for without it, she was nothing!
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