Thanking all the stars that fall to earth, Mary stopped and put her hands on the white fence, thinking calm and hard. The song, she thought, has to end, for the sake of pride and strength and all those silly brown flecks of nonsense that chip away at white fences all over the world. We'll forget, she believed. And that was the last bit of falling truth before she closed her eyes and forgot to open them again.

Let's float around in empty meditation, why not? Lets float and bubble our thoughts through the ether, wash and steam them flat until, paper-thin, we can fold them in great rolls like the hole-punched grocery receipt of a giant.

Shift now to another medium. Press out the extra air and breathe the alien sounds crunching in your ears. The sound of lovely words strung together and dropping like flies from electric light poles, dancing morse code in the early rain puddles. Fell from the sky, and the clouds and your eager eyes, wet and shining despite themselves against our iron light.

A choir of whistling children, bulging their ears and eyes for the school choir, jammed with metal chords to become the perfect whistle-blowers.

This meditation is ending, too contrived, short and imperfect, and we try to forget and forget, stretching our eyes to whatever's behind, searching wonderful and hard, straining to stay calm, for that perfect fence.

If it surrounds just one green acre, that'll be enough, i think.