And now for something...completely different...

Totally NOTHING to do with boxing! This was a snippet from a story I wrote a while ago that I never did anything with and I just like the description! :-) Afterward, I'll return you to your regularly scheduled letterboxing blog!

…fwhooff…

It's the noise you always hear in the movies when an atom bomb hits, that dull air-rushed thud that's even more baffling because the word "bomb" is attached to it. It's almost as if the very fact that it's the most deadly thing you can imagine makes it unnecessary to have all the noise you normally associate with other deadly stuff like dynamite, shotgun blasts, and cannon fire. After all, you're LOOKING at a mushroom cloud by that point, which is the visual symbol of total annihilation, so the "death wrapped in a Kleenex" kind of noise is meant to underscore that, I suppose. The bigger the cloud of death, the more likely you are to get that softer, quieter sound.

Which probably explains why that was the sound I "heard" upon entering the void. In retrospect, I probably heard NOTHING, just like I couldn't actually feel Josh grab my wrist at the last moment and cling to it to make sure he didn't lose me before the point became moot. I didn't "see" darkness, although I recall straining my eyes to the point of actual insanity, desperate to see even a shadow. I didn't "hear" my scream disappear into this blanket of death; I just knew I tried to scream out with all I could. And I sure couldn't have sensed the suffocating darkness pouring into my open mouth and all throughout my body before I felt the Kleenex of death wrap my brain into that softness that I didn't have the presence of mind to be afraid of for more than a second on some universal watch…