Sovereign Act (Ambiguous)

The hands arrived before she understood what they were for. White, careful, belonging to a body she could not locate. She had been lying in something warm and folded, not uncomfortable, not waiting for anything in particular, when the hands appeared above her and began their work. * * * She did not resist. This is important: she did not resist, but she also did not consent. There had been no question. The hands lifted her through a red transparency into an air that was different from the warmth she had been in, and she understood that this was either a beginning or an ending, and that the hands would not be able to tell her which, because the hands did not know either. Above her, the air. Below, the red light of the box she had passed through. She was suspended between them, held by something that had no name for what it was doing.