Bone on bone:
THIS loud and startling sound.
It was the sound inside my head I remember most. I was thirteen years old, and I was thinking that my legs were giving way and that I was falling towards the ground.
It was all so unexpected. It wasn’t a fight or anything like that. One moment I had been playing with my friends, and the next there was this… or rather these because soon they began to form rows…
… and columns. And I remember thinking, – So this was seeing stars. But I had not expected the grid of stars, the rows and columns, to be so regular.
Then there was a pause, a period of forgetting or withdrawing, but it felt like no time at all because the next moment I was looking up at the circle of faces staring down at me on the ground.
mmj