screw up your eyes

It was a question of seeing the next few paces ahead, and, even for that, you had to screw up your eyes.

"If you screw up your eyes, you make out some fine white diagonal lines," Marc adds in his opening monologue.

Don't screw up your eyes.

Screw up your eyes tightly and, at the same time, wrinkle your nose and compress lips hard.

It's tough being a bad shot who's hit the bull's-eye by chance, struggling to remember how you moved your hands and screwed up your eyes, how much pressure your finger applied to the trigger.

Fforde's comment that "you can actually come here and see what my alternative Swindon would look like, but you have to sort of screw up your eyes slightly" is precisely what not-quite-verisimilitude is all about: the familiar crossed with the utterly bizarre.

The glare from the sea, from the sails, and from the near - white sand of the beach, gave the impression of heat, even though its only real effect was to make you screw up your eyes so that you peered out on this tropical oven through slits, like a short - sighted Oriental.