His hand floated back and forth a few inches from the ground, feeling the currents from the air conditioner bouncing off his palm and back to the floor. He looked over his shoulder. "If I listen to any more of this particular brand of electronica, I think I might go insane."
"That'd be interesting," his companion replied, her arms outstretched across the backs of the pillows that propped her into a sitting position on the bed. "But I think the cleanup wouldn't be worth the hassle. Change the tunes."
He did, flipping the sonic landscape so hard on its head that reality seemed to take off down a deserted alley where before there were only clapboard houses and water towers. Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe the urban landscape dissolved under their feet, gently dropping them in an acre of wild grain, a silo just barely visible over the ridge.
Either way. The colors shifted slightly towards the invisible as the grass continued to slowly (but audibly) push him upward. He imagined riding a raft through a sea of wheat. She imagined the concrete as quicksand, eating at her ankles as she ran for shelter from the rain. They passed the same lampposts (he with a makeshift paddle, her with a wind-whipped umbrella) just in a different sequence, he a storey above her and peering through the grain.
As she pauses at a safe spot under a green translucent awning, she looks up at the rain battering the plastic and, just for a half moment, half-glimpses the silhouette of a man on a raft cheerfully waving his paddle at her and swimming through the air. And as he looks down, he imagines the face of a past lover laughing up from the heady earth, her mouth open and her eyes squeezed shut, daring the sun to stop shining before the waves engulf her and she is gone.
Back on the bed, feet hanging off the end and toes pointing to the sky, they smile and wonder.
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