A huge white pillow covers your face, you cannot see the sky . . .

A huge white pillow covers your face, you cannot see the sky, the monster’s face is white and terrible.

I have been playing around with this sentence. What if I were to remove the second phrase:

‘A huge white pillow covers your face, the monster’s face is white and terrible.'

Does it have the same resonance? I don’t think so. Here is the entire sequence:

But something is wrong, you cannot lift your head, a great weight is pulling it down. A huge white pillow covers your face, you cannot see the sky, the monster’s face is white and terrible. On the shore Valerie’s face begins to pucker; something is wrong, you have been out too long. Her arms flex with concern; she strides up and down.

I wanted the child speaker, who is drowning, to recall the sky. I’m interested in how sentences hold down time and space. Without the phrase on the sky - ‘you cannot see the sky,’ — we have only the monster’s face which are the white waves threatening to suffocate the speaker; the collapse of space and time; the loss of consciousness.

I am working around threes: three parts to a sentence, three parts of an experience, three parts of an experiencing body. The child is still making sense of what is happening. All writing involves this process of making sense of experience, and it is more truthful to write in way that allows for the parts of experience- the monster’s arms and legs — to struggle to connect to the rest of the corps. It is the phrase, ‘you cannot see the sky’ that is the central hub of panic in this tri-partite sentence. Without the sky there is no hope of survival. The three part structure builds a pattern of truthful experience which I then try to replicate in the sentences that follow:

‘On the shore Valerie’s face begins to pucker; something is wrong, you have been out too long.’

Another three part sentence, but I use a semi colon for a longer pause after ‘pucker’ and before the internal comment, ‘something is wrong, you have been out too long’: i.e. Valerie’s own internal discussion with herself.

After this follows a sentence that captures strong physical movement, arms and legs moving up and down:

‘Her arms flex with concern; she strides up and down.’

Valerie’s movements are definite, decided; her body carries the weight of feeling as we move from internal thoughts to their external manifestation. The semi colon is important again to separate the body in space into two definite parts: the arms and legs held together by the trunk of the body. Valerie comes in three parts too: a possessive pronoun (her) and a third person pronoun (she) as well as her first person name, Valerie. Perhaps I am thinking around a three act play, or a triptych, a three-part screen with joints running between welding the child together. And then there is something important about the way the pillow turns from ‘a pillow’ to a more definite or elaborated thing in the image of the monster’s face; and before that ‘the sky.’ The sky brings perspective, a sense of expansion, space, and more essentially, air, oxygen, life over death. The sky is both universal and particular; it is her sky, or your sky; your way of seeing and breathing. Her way too.