Sally walked through the wheat, arms outstretched, and made ripples in it with her fingers as she went. The stalks bristled and tickled against her bare legs. The whole field swayed in the wind, waves lapping across the great living sea that stretched as far as Sally's eye could make out. The road was behind her somewhere, and her car sat by the side of it. But she chose to forget these everyday facts, and wade in up past her waist into the fields by the road, carrying on and on, uninterrupted all the way to the horizon. She closed her eyes, and let teh littel ears weave in between her fingers. The ground was uneven in places. If there was a dip in the land, would she know about it?

And then as if in answer to her, the ground suddenly wasn't there beneath her right foot. She tumbled headlong - her belly struck hard on a rough lip of earth and rock and her breath left her. She lay for a moment in shock, trying to remember how her diaphragm worked, while the blood roared in her ears and the dull ache pulsed in her stomach. Pinwheeling colours and shapes swam across her vision. For a moment Sally lay and forced herself to inhale.

She ran a mental inventory: no pain in the limbs; nothing screaming painful in the abdomen... all fine. Apart from feeling a bit silly.

Sally sat up and opened her eyes. She found herself lying full-length in a narrow drainage ditch, empty of water in the dry summer. It stretched on as interminably as the fields had done. She looked up.

A pair of large eyes looked down into her own. They were large black eyes in a large white near-featurless face, and Sally could pick out little reflections of herself in each of them. She looked remarkably calm. So did the watcher.

It stretched out a hand with large fingers, and helped her stand with no apparent effort on its part. It stood about of a height with Sally, although Sally still stood thigh-deep in the ditch.

It was broadly humanoid in shape, and wore a jumpsuit which appeared to be woven entirely from wheat. It still stood peacibly enough. So did Sally.

It stretched out an arm, and a hand, and then one long finger. It touched its own temple with this finger. It extended another hand and finger, and brought this to Sally's temple. And then a pulse went through Sally as though the finger had been a shotgun.

-

Sally came to on the road, doing a solid eighty, and starting to veer into the other lane, where a large truck was setting about its airhorn. She snapped out of her daze, and made a silent promise to call at teh next coffee place for a strong one. These wheat fields could be monotonous, she thought - you could ver well drift off if you weren't careful