J.O.I.'s father's garage monologue — "It was less like falling than…"
It was less like falling than being shot out of something, is the way I recall it. It did not did not happen in slow motion. One minute I was at a dead and beautiful forward run for the ball, the next minute there were hands at my back and nothing underfoot like a push down a stairway.
Context
Recall-phenomenology stated outright: not what happened but "the way I recall it," playback speed explicitly corrected against the cliché. The fall exists for the father only as a replay, and he narrates the replay's mechanics — memory as the medium the event now lives in. (The doubled "did not" reads as a deliberate drunken stammer, consistent with the monologue's other stutters.)