Stacy--Part Twenty-One

Splog # 72

Twenty-One

   As Stacy watched the rods of the tower mingling with each other in their intricate dance, she felt herself being drawn deeper and deeper into its interior. Now, the rods were not only moving, they were also changing size, expanding and shrinking all around her. They encompassed her entire field of vision. Rods were growing to become larger than she was herself. And when one would diminish in size, she felt herself becoming smaller and smaller in order to follow it and discover what part of the tower it would incorporate itself into next. Now, she was standing on a rod and, as it slowly began revolving, she started taking steps in order to keep balanced atop it. Then she was hearing a lively tune lightly floating in the atmosphere around her. And now she was keeping pace atop the spinning rod to the merry music. Then rods passed by her hands, one on either side. Without thinking or planning, she reached out and grasped one with each hand. They felt cool and warm at the same time. She pictured herself rubbing snow on her hands as she held them in front of a fire. They began lengthening, growing beyond her hands at both ends. Then they started revolving like the one she was standing on and she loosened her grip enough to feel the pleasant friction against her palms. The rods started to roll up the insides of her arms and, when they reached the juncture of her arms and torso, she was gently lifted off the rod she'd been pacing on and now she was practically flying. She looked down but there was no floor or bottom to wherever she was. Neither was there any sense of great height, the space beneath her being obscured by the rods, large, small, and in between, moving up and down, left, right, and diagonally. Her flight ended as a phalanx of rods, close enough to be touching each other, grazed the back of her neck and then gradually moved down the length of her spine, at the same time lifting her until she was in a prone position. While this was happening, the two rods under her arms shrank into nothingness and the music grew less lively and more soothing. The rods she was lying on began to slowly undulate and Stacy felt herself beginning to drowse as her eyelids got heavier and heavier. The surrounding rods, all of them crystalline, with no touch of color anywhere, were also merging in her sight into one vast blankness. Her eyes would gradually close and then open for a moment and this action repeated itself with the intervals before reopening becoming longer and longer. Her breathing was becoming even and relaxed. Her whole body felt languid and inert. The pleasures of motionlessness were enveloping her entire being. Her eyes slowly opened for a moment and started to reclose again when a speck of color darted across her field of vision. Her eyes continued to close but they opened again a little more quickly than they had last time. It was still there. A spot of red moving around on a vast clear, but opaque, background. Her eyes closed again but immediately came back open and her mind wasn't as lethargic as it had been a minute ago. She watched the red something as it darted irregularly here and there, sometimes straying from her range of sight, but never for very long. She watched it only with her eyes, feeling no need to turn her head when it would whisk out of her sight, content to wait until it returned. She was still ready for sleep but this colorful distraction was a pleasant brief interlude before she finally surrendered.