She dreams of a precipice, a clearly defined line before which, perhaps for acres on end, are grassy hills, or sloping fields of thistle and dry caked dung. And after? All fields and fences end suddenly and fall away. Forty feet below are beach stones, a skree face of driftwood and bones, a vague sense of a beach and an indefinite amount of ocean.
A habitual stomach sleeper, if she dreams of falling, she is always facing downward when she falls. The falling is more like flying. She never hits the ground. In the dream of the precipice the sensation of fall-not-falling is more precise. She has walked and walked. Even asleep, she is tired from it. The fields are dull and rough, not meadows at all. There are misquotes and the land is in debt. Before this place in the dream there was a gray cracked road and God knows who-all tumbled into a completely indifferent car. The walk is framed by the false horizon which looms ahead - the edge of the earth is a tangible thing when the edge of your farm is eaten away each year, little by lots by little, by the over zealous ocean and the weak capricious cliff. When the end is near, she drops to the ground and pulls herself forward on her elbows to the edge. Everyone knows about the over-hang.
She lays on her stomach on her bed in her sleep in her dream on the edge of a field which juts out into a nothingness, an absence of soil beneath the sod, a fine line between her and falling to a rock-sharp and salt-watery grave. She lays low, and spreads her weight out as evenly as possible. "What if the lemmings come?", she thinks suddenly and in her sleep her husband hears her laugh. If, just about now, a mass of lemmings - driven mad by over population -
were rushing hell-bent for her particular edge of the earth, perhaps the scales
would tip, the over-hang would give way as a thousand thousand tiny claws and tails raced across her back. Their bitty little bodies would do nothing to break her fall.
J.R.Carpenter
