Take a chance on a resonance. Nancy O'Chance, changing the tires on her
wondercar. Here in the atmosphere surrey, here with the fringe of cloud
on top, riding the greenapple lanes on the greensward, underneath the
blue jeans sky. The sky was the color of faded old denim as Nancy and
Buck rode in the surrey across an endless perfectly straight dirt road
covered in fine dust like bonemeal that spurted up back of the wheels and
slowly subsided down again behind. Far as the eye could see, the ground
was flat and the sky was awful large, terrible big. The ground was humble
and uncommunicative, hoarding its secrets of squiggly life until at an
unknown and unheard summons, they'd perk up and bust out and start making
a living in air and sun.
     Nancy listened for that summons in the cricket dark at night, but
unless it was such that it would stand out from cricketsong or, if it was
brief, came in between a couple of chirps, then she didn't have a lot of
hope of hearing it. And hell, if nobody'd heard it yet, and not even
named it as a phenomenon, why, what made her think she could do any
better than that? But she had a heedless faith in her own powers. She
knew her imagination for what it really was, an endless facility alive
inside like endless sunshine. It was unquestioned, the question had never
even been formed.
     What would it sound like? Music? Where would it come from? The moon?
She fell asleep thinking about that.
     In the dry racket morning she hung laundry on the line. She went
from chore to chore to chore like a machine, like one of the machines
rusting out back by where the trashpile is. Like one of those hopeful
newfangled machines, all springs and steel rods and gears, which
unfortunately ran out of gas or money or got a stone in it and died out
rusting for want of a good mechanic. And yet the musclepower of humans
and also of animals, sort of one and the same in a sense — that power
was a dime a dozen and easy as pie to come by.
     The gingham curtains fluttered in the upper window of the attic room
where she lived. They were visible in a reflection of blue sky and some
longitudinal cloud formations that reminded her of eclairs. Eclairs all of
filling, since they were a creamy-looking white. But then again
éclair filling was usually yeller and the clouds weren't as such, except
sometimes at sunset. Sometimes at sunset they were like crops of clouds
hanging from the blue ground of the sky — she'd lay on her back and see
it as she felt it wanted to be seen. It wasn't mocking the land, no not
at all, it was saluting the land, trying to impress the land, in love
with the land. The sky clearly loved the land, and from what she'd seen,
the land was quite fond of the sky too, and all its bangles and ribbons
and gifts.
     As we come to the end of our vignette, nothing unusual happened. She
was powered by an eternal ease, security and serenity. Even with the
trivial conflicts of the day and night and the interpersonal friction and
the strange dreams and flights of fancy, none of that would figure into
it, later, looking back on it, she didn't know. This is what she didn't
know now and would — the knowledge was in her cells like the thoughts of
crops in the earth.