The question facing Seymour Bottle as he stood in the hot noon sun at the edge of the cliff tugged at his feet, as if the thought of whether to jump or not had a mouth with teeth that had sunk into his heels.
He would die if he took the 1,000-foot plunge, he was sure, but he wasn't sure if dying was not living or if it was something else. All stories coursing through his head of times spent with family, friends, and lovers seemed to form an unexpected alliance to sing to him in one voice: to go is to stop, to stop is to end, to end is to sin, to sin is to betray us. You are the thread of our tapestry of identity, just as we are yours. Remain. The cessation of weaving begins the kingdom of fear, a land we have given over to a rule by Emperor Death. Do you fight on His side or ours?
But a foot is just a foot, and just a foot can move weightlessly to where it has always and never been, and Seymour's right one inched forward. There was a feeling of gravel biting into his bare soles. The pain tried to lay claim to him, but there was no him to capture: The Watching bowed before his body, and the body of his mind, and the body of the stories of his experience, genuflecting before its flowering and decay, a gesture of form that was not-form.
He stepped to fall and the air held him sweetly to and from the not-here and not-not-here.
Look at the world like this, and the King of Death will not see you.