marvelous descent

The marvel of her descent.

Though in the dreams it was over in a heartbeat, though she hung suspended for but a moment, cartoon-like, before striking the shattered rocks below, her descent never really stopped.

She fell like a child's doll, tumbling and turning, sometimes so light she thought she might simply slow-drop her way into weightlessness, sometimes so damn fast she couldn't catch her breath. So she stopped trying to breathe, and the burning sensation of starved lungs never filled her chest. Well, she thought, that's something.

She tried to identify where she was as she dropped, but the cliff was no longer at her back, the water no longer her target, the sky absent as a parachute torn away by steep updrafts. Gone were the clouds, the carpet of white noise: the waves, Jack's laughter, the distant bellow of the ferry as it approached the mainland. There were colors around her, but unfocused and dim, like faded painter's canvases flashing by at high speeds. Wherever she was, it was silent, and yet she felt the prickle of a million voices in her ears, soundless but no less urgent.

She entertained the thought that she was dead, but dismissed it almost immediately. This was much too unlike anything she had ever imagined to be an afterlife. So what was it? An interlude, she thought. A commercial break. An intermission. She saw an image of thousands of people plummeting as she was, all of them looking for the snack bar, wondering where their refrigerator had gone, hadn't they just gotten up for a beer? She laughed, and made no sound.

This didn't surprise her.

But the voice?

That surprised her.