A man buried his dead dog and got sad.

Was two days after and he hadn't washed.

Midway up the vee of a large-print brown flannel about the spot in town he’d’ve buttoned it, the ten o'clock hour reflected itself off a pool of sweat and sadness drawn up in a slouching man's chest.

He wasn't talking, lips tight as the lid of the tea jar leftwise. A head sunk toward a heart days sunk.  Thoughts came slow and dissipated, grew in quiet swirls and faded almost as quickly. In principal he was embarrassed for steeping so. So he judged himself lazy and then let himself off for letting the mind go unchecked, Too beat ...'n with reason. Too early to chase em. Just let um turn ...into... something... The jar and his own vessel changed together slowly in the stale movement of time across the morning--darkening within, dirtying what might've been refreshing.

He let what his eyes took in wash over him by way of the floor. He’d known for a while and even before he bought it that he was looking at too many coats of paint trying to hide rotted wood. He thought, It's hot already. Air’s blank. Knots in this floor've fell out, rotten ..like blank eyes. Just left there ..staring up. Blank. Buh-lank. Buhl, and his middle finger came down with more force than he intended on the arm of the swing. Consequently, a cube of ice shifted in the big glass jar.

Like blank eyes staring up at that busted awning where the bats get in.

He spit and watched it speckle while the bulk of it moved past the edge of the swing towards where he wasn’t really aiming. To him, them beasty voices in the walls at night weren’t so much a bother, but, “Itn’t right for a home,” he’d said to her before, “But, we’ll have to wait till after taxes," he'd said, "And. And, pfft. Honestly, I don't know that much about that stuff.”

He eyed the movement of that wet clump of himself until it disappeared through one of them holes in the floor. To his accidental bullseye, he gave an underwhelming snort of triumph, "Hmmphf." And a smirk. The noise, part acknowledgement and part contempt, was the first sound he made that day. The smirk brought with it the movement of the tissues of his face. He'd forgotten how faces tighten after tears pass through them. And Things had apparently settled in the lines of his cheek. For, with the lifting of the lip, cracks were made known him in the dry beds of that place. Under the porch there was no sound as, down onto a bed of worms through some two feet of blank, spit landed.

He envied the worms mildly and mused shortly on a swell of grace come down, Heavenly torrent rushed all over the morning chores? That'd do fine. 

Answering, he smirked again, harder than before and from a different, darker place, Fine? Sure. If "fine's" just Somebody bigger's spit?

"No," he said out loud. Shaking his head in disagreement with himself, his upbringing took over and ran him from that place. He grunted and brought his foot down, leaning forward to make a change, but it came back more perturbed and making some argument having to do with incremental progress in the face of chaos, Sure as hell's different from what was happening a minute ago: eating dirt, shitting dirt, blank. This confused and irritated him. It felt right, but it felt slippery. But it felt right in the face of needing a change. So, taking ahold of the swing arm tightly, he swore silently in agreement to this last little coup.

"No." He still didn't like it. And at last, he bubbled up in a huff and spit again with such a serious hack down through those knotty-windows in the blue painted floor that he'd have broken one out if they hadn't been gone by a couple-ten seasons of God's good will and gravity.

He stood, stood up crooked, mad, and moving to white hand rail perching tea that hadn't seen any sun yet but had made tea all right. And in a dirty glass, a little more straightened out, he looked, looked and drank, and didn't look at anything until a clump of grass coming out of the moss on the stone wall jumped. It was a rabbit. But he wondered if it couldn't have been Jesus in-rabbit-carnate saving him from blasphemy for really wishing he was a worm.

He wasn't going anywhere but that's where he headed next. Out across the yard, he passed the mound that hadn't yet grown grass this season that'd been dug by the tool shed that now housed a new shovel. Looking at the dirt, he remembered how he'd fought and got her, bought something that was nearly a house but had had a porch, and kept on loving something till death did she part like he'd promised. And somehow that wasn't so bad. Only the dog went and parted two days ago, too.

He walked on passed the mound through a path that split the garden to a scraggly wood the realtor sold as "forest," but he never really would rightly call a forest on any representation to someone who didn't know about much about forests. His bit though, his hundred feet before the barbwire and sign that read "Private" were for several rows of windblock matured evergreens. Dry as they were from the last two summers, even still he thought them the best third of the vast pithy whole of the property he'd bought. And it was only part that could separate him from his residential doings of nonsense about worms and tool sheds and dead pets and dead wives into a natural something different. And there he cried again.

And again the cracks of a dirty face filled. And the headwaters, they bifurcated into bifurcates and so on through old tributaries on down. Headwater met pools, met spilling, met sweat, and followed gravity into the dark wet space of a half unbuttoned flannel.