Bounce

Bounce, bounce, bounce. Arms hold me. I see over the shoulder.

The black thing spins.

Grass. Dirt. Shoe. The dark again. Bigger now. It goes from ground to sky. Round and round.

Arms squeeze tighter. Bounce faster. My chin hits something hard. The heartbeat under me goes wrong. Too fast, like hiccups that won't stop.

The loud dark doesn't move. We move. It just spins. Wind screams. Someone breathes hard in my ear, like after crying.

Bounce, bounce.

The sky-eater grows. Dark pieces fly inside it. Trees, maybe. Things that were somewhere else.

I don't like it.

Someone yells a word. The arms clutch so hard my ribs hurt.

The spinning dark turns and turns and turns.

A stumble. The ground comes up. The arms don't let go. We're down in the dirt and the arms curl over me like a shell and everything is dark now, all of it, the loud dark and the arms dark and the closed-eyes dark all the same and the sound is everything, is the whole world, is

Nothing.

Grass. Somewhere, a bird. The arms don't move.

I wait for the bounce.