Innocuous, scientific space, as alive – or inert– as I am.

Drifting upward. Let's look at the moon. Earlier she had been daring her eyes to turn away from it, as the somber face it afforded, was holding her eyes, like pale embers, hypnotically.

I put on my best clothing, and powdered my face, and even carefully penned in my lips, as if I might be going to a talent show out there, rather than just a walk, a very secret walk, in the woods… * * * * * Illustration from Surrealizations

What will I feel tonight? The mind, working over itself, like a machine–

She told herself to stop staring off into space. Keep moving along the path of fallen branches. But the mind, the mind continued to stare at this one patch – the mind through those eyes, the thick cat-eye glasses and onto a fuzzy black patch two or three feet to the side of the dim path.

At an even height with her eyes…

Where oily shimmering eyelids remained still as fallen petals from a lily, a meaty flower – then flickered, as if blinking.

If I can focus more… on the irises of eyes glowing orange like a radio dial, like the cathode rays inside… the cathode tubes.

And It stared back, with the crease between Its lips growing wider, a shadow darker and more intense than the ordinary shadows. Soon the gaping space was glowing with an irritating and absolutely lavish darkness. (So irritating, Barbara thought, because I try to focus on it, but it doesn't make sense… unless I decide to make sense of this later, and just enjoy how lavish this is right now… I should be going…With you into another life.)

"Barbara Kelly, Graduate of Moxee High School, Nineteen-Fifty-Four–"

And this was what the voice said, also irritating because the voice didn't seem to be coming out of any mouth. Irritating to the very crennelations of her brain! (Yet the idea of it is astounding… that it is actually resonating from the tree trunks… or at least in my delusion, in stunning and detailed, down to the mosquito-sound, clarity…)

Not only was the voice resonating from the trunks of trees, the soil beneath her feet, inside her feet, in the air which had grown as still as the perfumed air in the bedroom that safely awaited her so far away… it was returning, in a density, to the area of the speaker's lips.

Barbara wondered if she should respond to the being. She wondered if responding would in some way commit her to a sort of adventure, or loss of her soul, which could never be reversed. Well It is here, her logical mind conceded; subject to some constraints of space and time as to be able to be concentrated in front of me, and moving, and It knows my name, and how I'd kick myself forever for not finding out why…

So I might as well talk to It–

"I haven't graduated yet–" Barbara said. Her voice was pushed across her tongue, forced out of her, seeming like aeons from word to word. (Am I this scared? I must sound stronger!) Her mouth like an unwanted grand piano.

It probably knows better. Can see through my brave little act…

"It's only fall–" This was Barbara’s defiant stroke. "I don't graduate until next June…in Nineteen-Fifty-Four. You talk," her imaginative mind started spinning, "as if to you, Nineteen-Fifty-Four has already happened."

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