The Bug's nostril had the innocent perfection of a Cheerio (and Cheerios were on my mind, since lately we had begun to offer them to her), a tiny dry clean salty ring, so small, with the odd but functional smallness of the tires on passenger planes, or of the smooth rim around the pistil of the brass pump head that you fitted over a tire's stem valve to inflate it to a pressure you preset with a crank on the air machine: at first, as the pump head and the stem valve failed to couple, there was a sharp, wasteful hissing, and the dinger tolled freely, but then you got the surfaces to seal and the air began to flow throatily in &dash. each slow decelerating ding now made the tire change shape slightly, as if it were swallowing, and the sound of the hiss was released into the tire, where the extra atmospheres gave it an unusual pent resonance (this was truer of car tires than bicycle tires), like the sounds strong dogs made as they strained at leashes, and familiar also from the transformation of the initial chesty sigh of balloon inflation into a space-age-upward-warping effect as the balloon's limit was reached, or the faint, high 
, sonar-like suffix of sound that the expensive kind of textured red rubber playground balls added to the prosaic bounce of extemal impact on concrete: inside, the shock waves flew around the ball (and the balloon and the tire) in unusually high-velocity polyhedrons, delighted by the readiness of their compressed medium to hum their rebounds and lengthen their term of reverberation. 
Air, the unparceled and seemingly infinite plenitude, available world wide, was focused and linearized by the air pump and brought to bear on a single task &dash. and so it was with my lovely Bug, who was able to inhale its transparent liters through a pair of miraculous one-sixteenth-inch portals and as a consequence to live and even to <tag "515647">derive</> amusement from a superball with a swirl in it. 

