The Old Blog in the Desert

Down in the valley, where the sorghum fields swayed under a harvest moon, folks gathered at Rusty’s Feed & Seed to chew over life’s troubles. Lately, the talk turned to the city folks pushing apps and algorithms, telling farmers how to plant and pray.

Old Miss Eula, her hands knotted from years of quilting, sipped her coffee and said, “The idea of personal control is treated like an illusion, nowadays. They want us dancing to their tune, not our own.”

Young Nate, barely seventeen, sat in the corner, scrolling his phone. He’d been saving for a drone to “manage” his pa’s crops, sold on ads promising efficiency.

But the more he scrolled, the more he felt like a puppet, tugged by invisible strings. His pa, Amos, noticed the boy’s restless eyes.

“Nate,” he said, “put that thing down and come with me.”

They walked to the barn, where Amos kept an old plow horse named Juniper.

“She ain’t fancy,” Amos said, handin’ Nate the reins. “But she knows the land better’n any machine.”

Nate, skeptical, took Juniper to the field. The horse plodded steadily, ignoring the buzz of a neighbor’s drone overhead.

Nate tried guiding her, but Juniper snorted, setting her own pace. “She ain’t controlling herself,” Amos chuckled. “She’s choosing her path because she knows it.

”Nate frowned, “Ain’t that the same thing?”

“Nope,” Amos said. “Control’s what you force. Choice is what you trust. World’s tellin’ you your choices don’t matter, but that’s a lie. You steer your heart, not some app.”

Nate spent the week with Juniper, learning her rhythm. He ditched the phone, feeling the dirt under his boots and the reins in his hands.

Nate and Juniper kept plowing, finishing the field by sundown. Word spread through the Hollow.

Folks started turning off their gadgets, trusting their own hands instead. At Rusty’s, Miss Eula grinned as farmers swapped stories of planting by instinct, not instructions.

By harvest, Nate’s fields bloomed fuller than the drone-run farms. He sat with Amos under the stars, Juniper grazing nearby.

“Pa, why’d you trust me with her?” he asked.“

‘Cause you needed to remember,” Amos said. “Ain’t nobody controlling you but you. World’ll try to spin that differently, but your heart knows the way.”

Nate nodded, feeling the truth settle deep. In the valley, where the wind carried wisdom, folks chose their steps, one true turn at a time.

After writing a commentary on the shooting that happened today in Minneapolis, I had a FB friend take me to the woodshed, then unfriend me. Here’s the exchange.

Matthew Brockmeyer: Rioter? Now protesters are labeled as rioters, that’s the First Amendment right to gather and protest out the window. Armed? There goes the Second Amendment. Masked police now have the right to grab citizens and detain them? There goes the third amendment. I bet soon ICE will be demanding quarter in homes, I mean, might as well get that third amendment removed, too. Just go down the list. Welcome to fascism.

Me: Here is why I split the hairs. He came to a protest armed. That changes the idea of protesters to violent, thus violating the doctrine of ‘peaceably assemble.’ And Matthew, I expected you to be one to examine all the available video evidence. I gather you haven’t. It’s how I spent my day.

MB: I watched the video evidence. You call that rioting? Really? He was filming, which is a First Amendment-protected activity in public. I guess you never heard of the Second Amendment either? He broke no laws. He shouldn’t have been attacked, thrown down, beaten, and illegally detained.

MB: (I) love the way you guys say this guy (Kyle Rittenhouse) was a good American who knew his rights, and the Jan. 6 rioters were peaceful. Didn’t realize you were on the wrong side of history, boot licker.

Me: He was not just filming. He was in the way of an ICE agent detaining someone. That is where this all began. There are two videos that show what Pretti was doing before he was pushed out of the way and maced. When an agent is attempting an arrest or detention, and you place yourself in the way on purpose, that is violating the law.

Me: All seventeen videos?

MB: How do those boots taste? Goodbye, fascist! Cleaning house and don’t need the stress.

Me: Shame on you for name-calling. You are an intelligent man, and because of your emotions, you are reducing yourself to acts of childishness.

Me: Farewell then. Be safe and happy.

Matthew then blocked me.

Let’s take a breath for a second, because the situation in Minnesota has officially gone off the rails, and predictably, everyone is yelling past each other instead of dealing with reality.

An armed rioter is dead after an encounter with CBP agents, and within minutes, the narrative got locked in: a cold-blooded execution in broad daylight. No hesitation and no curiosity.

Just outrage, hashtags, and prewritten talking points. If you’ve been paying attention for the last decade, you already knew how this movie was going to end before the opening credits finished rolling.

But here’s the thing: this story only works if you surgically remove context. And context is the entire story.

Video footage appears to show an agent removing the individual’s firearm. That’s the centerpiece of the argument coming from the left.

With the weapon gone, the threat neutralized, it equals an execution; case closed. Except that’s not how the real world, or use-of-force decisions, actually work.

It wasn’t a freeze-frame moment. It wasn’t slow motion.

The time between the weapon getting pulled and the shots appears to be less than a second. Less than a second.

In a chaotic, deafening environment with whistles blaring, people screaming, bodies moving, and officers actively fighting to control someone they had already identified as armed. That matters.

Anyone pretending federal agents calmly processed perfect information in that sliver of time is either lying or has never been within a mile of a real confrontation. Officers were yelling “gun,” grappling with a resisting suspect, and watching his hands move toward his waist.

Communication clearly broke down. One agent may have known the gun was out of play, but others clearly did not.

After the shooting, you can hear them asking, “Where’s the gun?” That alone blows a hole through the “they knew he was unarmed” fantasy.

And let’s be brutally honest about the environment. It wasn’t a peaceful sidewalk protest that went sideways.

It was a hostile crowd, people intentionally confronting federal officers, obstructing operations, and in some cases showing up armed. Officers couldn’t hear clearly.

They were getting physically challenged. The situation exemplifies what every law enforcement training manual cautions against: confusion, adrenaline, noise, and the need for split-second decisions.

Now add one more inconvenient fact: the individual chose to show up armed and physically engage federal agents.

Whether the firearm was legal is almost irrelevant at that point. Legal carry does not give you immunity to consequences when you interfere with federal law enforcement, refuse commands, and get physical while armed.

In fact, if licensed, he should have known better. Basic firearms training drills one rule into your head: immediately disclose to law enforcement that you’re armed and comply, hands up, no sudden movements, no wrestling, and no hero cosplay.

Instead, the guy dressed for confrontation, inserted himself into chaos, and escalated every step of the way. It doesn’t mean his death is something to cheer; it’s tragic, but tragedy doesn’t automatically equal murder.

Could this have ended differently in a perfect world? Probably.

But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in one where officers don’t get to pause, rewind, and analyze YouTube clips before reacting to perceived threats.

They react based on what they reasonably believe in the moment. And in that moment, they thought an armed suspect was still a danger.

Another theory floating around claims the gun accidentally discharged during the struggle, triggering a reflexive response from other agents. I’m skeptical.

There’s no clear visual evidence of a discharge or impact. More likely, one officer fired defensively based on the man’s hand movement, and others followed, exactly how these situations often unfold.

What really frustrates me is how quickly this gets weaponized politically. Before investigations, before full video releases, before facts, politicians were already calling for ICE’s and CBP’s removal. That’s not analysis, it’s opportunism.

The implied threat is obvious: Stop enforcing immigration law, or we’ll keep putting bodies in the street and blame you for it. That’s not accountability, it’s blackmail.

And notice where this keeps happening. Minneapolis. Minnesota. The same leadership, the same tolerance for chaos, the same refusal to draw lines.

It isn’t happening everywhere. Officials are refusing to condemn obstruction and violence, instead choosing to ignore it.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you cannot normalize mobs confronting armed federal agents and then act shocked when something goes horribly wrong. You can’t encourage escalation, flood the streets with radicalized activists, and then demand perfection from officers operating inside the mess you helped create.

This death is tragic. It’s awful.

It’s something that should sober everyone involved. But pretending it was a simple execution ignores reality and guarantees more of these outcomes, not fewer.

If people actually want this to stop, the solution isn’t abolishing ICE or demonizing agents. It’s calling for calm, condemning violence, and pulling their attack dogs off the streets.

That’s it. Everything else is noise.

In the valley, where the river ran lazily, and the oaks stood proud, Miss Hattie’s general store was the heart of town. Folks came for flour, nails, and gossip, but lately, they’d been hauling in catalogs, ordering gadgets and gewgaws nobody needed.

Hattie, her braid as gray as storm clouds, shook her head. “Most folks are weird in their ways because they’re mixed up in their excesses and waste,” she’d say, ringin’ up another shipment of battery-powered doodads.

Young Caleb, sixteen and restless, was the worst of them. He’d saved his chore money for a shiny new phone, the kind with more apps than stars in the sky, and when it arrived, he spent hours swiping, ignoring his chores and the sweet hum of the Hollow’s evenings.

His ma, Clara, fretted, “That boy’s lost in a screen, Hattie. Ain’t himself no more.”

Hattie, wise as the river, called Caleb to the store. “Help me clear the backroom,” she said, pointing to boxes of unsold junk, plastic toys, electric can openers, and sequined hats nobody bought.

Caleb grumbled but got to work, hauling crates under Hattie’s watchful eye. As they sorted, she told him about her pa’s saying, “A fence don’t stand straighter with more nails—just the right ones, drove true.”

Caleb snorted, “What’s that got to do with this junk?”

“Everything,” Hattie said. “Folks pile up wants, thinking it’ll make them happy. But all that excess just muddies the soul. Look at you, chasing that phone like it’ll grow you wings.”

Caleb blushed, thinking of the chores he’d skipped.

Hattie handed him a broom. “Clear what don’t serve you, boy.”

By dusk, the backroom was tidy, and Caleb felt lighter, like he’d swept out more than dust. Hattie gave him an old pocketknife.

“That’s worth more than your gadgets,” she said. “It’s true to its purpose.”

Caleb took her words to heart. He sold his phone at the county fair, using the money to fix his ma’s porch swing.

That night, he sat with her, listening to crickets instead of scrolling. Word spread, and folks in the Hollow started clearing their own clutter, donating unused trinkets, trading excess for time with kin.

At Hattie’s store, the catalog orders slowed, and laughter filled the air again. As fireflies lit the dusk, Caleb whittled a stick with his new knife, smiling.

“Reckon simple’s enough,” he told Hattie.

She nodded. “Always was, boy. Always will be.”

In the valley, where the river ran lazily, and the oaks stood proud, Miss Hattie’s general store was the heart of town. Folks came for flour, nails, and gossip, but lately, they’d been hauling in catalogs, ordering gadgets and gewgaws nobody needed.

Hattie, her braid as gray as storm clouds, shook her head. “Most folks are weird in their ways because they’re mixed up in their excesses and waste,” she’d say, ringin’ up another shipment of battery-powered doodads.

Young Caleb, sixteen and restless, was the worst of them. He’d saved his chore money for a shiny new phone, the kind with more apps than stars in the sky, and when it arrived, he spent hours swiping, ignoring his chores and the sweet hum of the Hollow’s evenings.

His ma, Clara, fretted, “That boy’s lost in a screen, Hattie. Ain’t himself no more.”

Hattie, wise as the river, called Caleb to the store. “Help me clear the backroom,” she said, pointing to boxes of unsold junk, plastic toys, electric can openers, and sequined hats nobody bought.

Caleb grumbled but got to work, hauling crates under Hattie’s watchful eye. As they sorted, she told him about her pa’s saying, “A fence don’t stand straighter with more nails—just the right ones, drove true.”

Caleb snorted, “What’s that got to do with this junk?”

“Everything,” Hattie said. “Folks pile up wants, thinking it’ll make them happy. But all that excess just muddies the soul. Look at you, chasing that phone like it’ll grow you wings.”

Caleb blushed, thinking of the chores he’d skipped.

Hattie handed him a broom. “Clear what don’t serve you, boy.”

By dusk, the backroom was tidy, and Caleb felt lighter, like he’d swept out more than dust. Hattie gave him an old pocketknife.

“That’s worth more than your gadgets,” she said. “It’s true to its purpose.”

Caleb took her words to heart. He sold his phone at the county fair, using the money to fix his ma’s porch swing.

That night, he sat with her, listening to crickets instead of scrolling. Word spread, and folks in the Hollow started clearing their own clutter, donating unused trinkets, trading excess for time with kin.

At Hattie’s store, the catalog orders slowed, and laughter filled the air again. As fireflies lit the dusk, Caleb whittled a stick with his new knife, smiling.

“Reckon simple’s enough,” he told Hattie.

She nodded. “Always was, boy. Always will be.”

If you’ve read anything written by an AI lately, or half the modern fiction online, you’ve probably encountered Recirculation Existential Dread, or as I like to call it, R.E.D. It’s that faint whiff of melancholy that floats through every supposedly “deep” story, like recycled air from a vent not cleaned since the Nixon administration.

R.E.D. starts innocently enough. Someone asks an AI to write something meaningful.

The machine obliges by handing you a scene where a lonely man stares at his reflection in a microwave door while pondering the futility of breakfast. Before you know it, he’s comparing his burnt toast to the fragile impermanence of life.

It’s not that the sentiment’s wrong; life is fleeting after all, it’s just that we’ve all read it before. It’s the same cup of cold coffee poured into a different mug, and like stale coffee, R.E.D. doesn’t wake you up so much as make you question why you got out of bed in the first place.

Writers once worried about clichés like “it was a dark and stormy night.” Now we’ve upgraded to, “She looked out the window and realized the void was looking back.”

The void must be exhausted. It’s been on duty since 1957, clocking overtime in every short story about finding oneself at a bus stop in the rain.

AI, of course, adores R.E.D. It learned from the best, thousands of human writers who decided that depth equals dread.

The machine can’t help it. If you say, “Make this thoughtful,” it dusts off the same line, “He wondered if anything truly mattered.”

Congratulations, you’ve just triggered another outbreak of R.E.D.

Humans aren’t immune either. We catch it from each other through literature, social media, and indie films where no one smiles for two hours. It spreads fastest in coffee shops, late-night dorm rooms, and anywhere the Wi-Fi signal is weak enough to encourage introspection.

But here’s the funny part, even R.E.D. has a purpose. Like mold in blue cheese, it adds flavor when used sparingly.

A touch of existential dread can make a story honest, even profound. The trick is not to let the words marinate in it.

So maybe the cure isn’t to avoid R.E.D., but to laugh at it. To recognize that yes, the universe is vast and our lives are brief, but we can still enjoy a good sandwich, pet the dog, and change the air filter once in a while.

After all, if everything is meaningless, then so is meaninglessness, which makes the whole thing sort of even. And that, my friend, is how you take the dread out of existence and put the circulation back into your lungs.

I come from what’s called the Jones Generation, a bridge generation that doesn’t quite fit in with the Baby Boomers, but isn’t young enough to understand the ones who live by their phones either. We were the ones who learned to write letters, then emails, then texts. Somewhere between the dial tone and the push notification, something human got lost.

The other day, I asked a friend to come by. She’s off for fall break, and I figured maybe we could share some coffee and conversation, two things that used to come easily before the world got loud.

She said she would, seemed glad for the invite, and I believed her. That’s my mistake, because I still take people at their word.

The days came and went. The coffee went cold twice.

The only sound in the room was the clock ticking as if it had somewhere better to be. No text, no call, not even one of those half-hearted apologies that start with “Sorry, been crazy busy…”

And that’s the thing about silence, it has weight. It presses down slowly, like fog rolling in off the ocean, until you start to feel small in your own home.

You tell yourself it’s nothing personal, that people get busy, that maybe she forgot, or didn’t feel up to it, but deep down, a little voice whispers, “Maybe it’s you.”

I try not to listen to that voice, but it’s persistent. It reminds me that when I was younger, plans meant something.

If you said you’d show up, you showed up. Even if you were running late, you called.

A simple “can’t make it” could save a friendship. Now, a lack of response is supposed to speak for itself, but it doesn’t say much beyond indifference.

Maybe this is just how things are now. Commitments are fluid, and silence is the new way to decline, or it’s something else.

Maybe people are tired, lonely, and too caught up in their own noise to hear the knock on another person’s door. That’s what I’m trying to understand.

How to stop taking no-shows personally. How to stop feeling like I must be the problem, and to accept that sometimes people vanish not out of malice, but out of habit.

Still, I’ll keep making the coffee, keep the extra chair open, because once in a while, someone does show up. And when it happens, when the conversation finds its rhythm, and the laughter comes easy again, I remember why I keep trying.

I worked with a guy at the KR, a good hand named Blake. Like me, he’d been in the Marines before he traded boots for boots, combat ones for the kind with spurs. You could tell from the way he moved, steady, patient, scanning the horizon for something the rest of us hadn’t seen yet.

Things didn’t rattle Blake much. Fences down, cattle out, water pump busted, it didn’t matter.

He’d nod once, squint at the problem as it had personally inconvenienced him, and then go about fixing it. No hurry, no panic, just quiet motion and a faint grin that made you wonder if he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

One afternoon, we were running a small herd down from the north pasture when the gate chain snapped. The younger steer, spooked by the noise, bolted toward the creek, and the rest followed like they’d been planning an escape for weeks.

Everyone was shouting, “Get the gate!” “Turn ‘em!” “Watch the ditch!” while Blake just sat there on his horse, reins loose, watching the dust settle.

Someone rode up beside him, mad as a hornet.

“You ain’t worried about this?” they barked.

He turned his head slowly, and he asked, “Why would it help?”

That stopped the guy cold. It wouldn’t fix the gate, bring the cattle back, or keep the boss from cussing us to high heaven.

Worrying only causes the heart to race and increases blood pressure. Blake didn’t say anything else, and instead nudged his horse forward and started rounding them up, one calm move at a time.

By the time the sun dropped low, we had them all penned again. The boss showed up ready to explode, but cooled off fast when he saw everything handled.

He walked away mumbling something about “good Marines,” and that was the end of it.

Later that night, Blake and I sat by the bunkhouse, watching the stars come out over the cottonwoods. I told him I liked that line, “Would it help?”

He chuckled and said he’d picked it up in the Corps. He didn’t remember who said it first, only that it stuck.

“We’d be knee-deep in mud or under fire, someone’d start to panic, and the sergeant would ask that. Would it help? Kinda puts things in perspective.”

I’ve thought about that ever since. Life keeps throwing gates that won’t hold, horses that spook, and people who make things worse than they need to be.

But when it starts to pile up, and I feel that old anxiety creeping in, I hear Blake’s voice again. “Why would it help?”

No, it wouldn’t. So take a breath, steady yourself, and get to work.

I was halfway through changing the porch light when I noticed the flicker. Not the usual buzz-and-die kind of flicker you get from a tired bulb, but the sort that feels aware.

The light steadied whenever I looked at it, then danced again as soon as I turned away.

“Don’t start,” I muttered, tightening the new bulb. “Not today.”

Inside, the kitchen light joined in. Then the hallway.

Even the old lamp by my recliner pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat. Buddy lifted his head from his nap and gave me that look, the one that said you’re on your own, pal.

I sighed, flipped the wall switch a few times for good measure, and sat down. The room went dim, then brightened on its own. It was as if the house was trying to get my attention.

That’s when I remembered what my friend Kay used to say: “Be the reason that lights flicker when you enter a room.”

She meant it metaphorically, of course, to make people notice you, even in small ways. Leave a spark. Trouble is, she said it so often it stuck in the wiring.

She’s been gone ten years now. I still catch myself setting out two cups of coffee in the morning. Old habits die harder than old lightbulbs.

The lamp near the photo shelf buzzed again. I looked up, and there Kay was in the frame, standing in her Sunday dress, one hand on her hip. I swear the light over her picture pulsed a little brighter.

“Alright,” I said softly, “I get it. You’re still running the place.”

The flickering slowed, then steadied. For a while, I sat there in the quiet hum of electricity and memory. I could almost hear Kay’s voice, that teasing lilt she used whenever I got too serious.

Later that evening, I walked through the house, turning off lights, but one in the hallway refused to stay dark. I’d flip the switch, and out it went. Take two steps, and back on again.

“Okay, fine,” I laughed. “You win.”

When I finally crawled into bed, the ceiling light gave one last shimmer, like a wink. I felt a warmth in my chest that had nothing to do with the blanket.

In the morning, the house behaved itself, no flickering or buzzing, just sunlight spilling through the curtains. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d imagined it all, but as I brewed my coffee, I noticed a ray of light above the photo shelf.

Maybe that’s what she meant all along. Be the reason lights flicker, not because you break things, but because you stir something alive.

And if you’re lucky, when you’re gone, the world still hums a little in your wake.

In the Hollow, where the cottonwoods whispered secrets to the wind, folks gathered at Mabel’s Diner to jaw over coffee and cornbread. The conversation that autumn evening was intense, as a federal mandate required every farmer to install expensive, complicated irrigation systems that were unnecessary for the small plots in the Hollow.

Ol’ man Tucker, his hands calloused as oak bark, slammed his mug down. “Ain’t the government’s job to tell us how to water our crops. It’s the other way around, we tell them what we need.”

Young Lila Hayes, barely twenty, listened quietly, her apron dusted with flour from baking pies. Her pa had taught her a saying, “A fence don’t hold cattle by pilin’ on more wire, it’s the posts that matter.”

To Lila, that meant freedom came from folks standing firm, not from rules stacked high.

The next day, Lila rallied the farmers. “We ain’t refusing to farm right,” she said, “but we know our land better than any suit in Washington.”

They drafted a petition, plain as day, listing why their old ditches worked fine and how the new systems would bankrupt half the Hollow.

Tucker added, “Government’s supposed to serve us, not herd us like sheep.”

When the county agent, Mr. Phelps, rolled into town with a clipboard and a frown, Lila met him at the town square, “Read this,” she said, handing over the petition, signed by every farmer from the Hollow to Pine Creek.

Phelps scoffed, “You can’t fight federal law, Missy.”

But Lila stood tall, “Ain’t fighting law. We’re reminding you who it’s for.”

Word spread like wildfire. Neighboring towns sent their own letters.

The local paper ran a story, calling it “The Hollow’s Stand.”

Soon, a congressman, sweating votes more than principle, showed up to listen. Tucker and Lila walked him through the fields, showing how their ditches fed crops just fine.

“You wanna help?” Lila asked, “Fund our schools or fix our roads. Don’t tell us how to farm.”

The congressman, seeing the crowd, promised to push back on the mandate. Several months later, the mandate got canceled.

At Mabel’s, folks raised glasses of sweet tea to Lila.

“You showed them,” Tucker grinned.

Lila shrugged. “Just held the post steady, like Pa said. Government’s only as strong as the people it listens to.”

As the sun sank over the Hollow, Lila smiled, knowing freedom wasn’t in fancy rules but in folks standing up.

It wasn’t that he hid from hygiene; he didn’t chase it down either. Somewhere between apathy and endurance lived a small idea he called “frugalness.”

It made him proud, in a way that was both pathetic and heroic. He wore his blue jeans for thirty-five days straight, and each morning when he pulled them on, the denim seemed to sigh, remembering the weight of his life.

The jeans had once been a sharp, dark indigo, but now they were a fading ocean of stains from oil of a broken fan belt, mustard from a gas station hot dog, and a mysterious dark patch near the thigh he couldn’t quite explain. Each blemish felt like a badge of perseverance.

He’d say to himself, quoting Ben Franklin, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” though it never seemed to accumulate anywhere meaningful.

He lived in a one-room apartment with wallpaper that surrendered decades ago. The sink leaked, the light above the stove flickered, and the floor slanted toward the door as though even the building wanted him gone.

His landlord didn’t like him, but he paid on time, so that was that.

He worked nights at a printing plant on the edge of town, where the air was thick with the smell of ink and solvent. Machines coughed and shuddered as if protesting the endless run of paper through their metal throats.

The foreman, a man named Groves, didn’t talk much, but when he did, it was usually to say something useless like, “You missed a spot,” or, “Try not to stink up the break room.”

He didn’t take it personally. He’d learned a long time ago that other people’s disgust could be a kind of armor, and if they kept their distance, he didn’t have to pretend.

On day twenty-seven, a woman named Teresa started at the plant. She had a voice like tired gravel and eyes that saw everything. She sat across from him at the break table, sipping instant coffee from a paper cup.

“Thirty-five days, huh?” she said, nodding at his jeans.

He blinked, confused. “How’d you know?”

“Just looks like the kind of number you’d settle on.”

She didn’t say it cruelly, and that threw him off. Most people either mocked or ignored him. He felt a strange urge to defend himself, but words stumbled out wrong.

“Still got some life left in them.”

“I bet,” she said, half-smiling. Then she looked away.

The next night, she didn’t show up. Groves said she’d quit.

No explanation. The factory air felt heavier after that.

He went home that morning and stared at his jeans on the floor. He thought of washing them, even got as far as filling the sink with water.

But when he dipped the denim in, the water clouded, and something about the way it looked, like dirty history bleeding out, made him stop. He pulled the jeans back up, still wet and cold, and went to bed.

By day thirty-five, they were stiff as cardboard. When he walked, they made a soft rasping sound, like dry leaves.

That morning, he sat by the window, drinking coffee and listening to the traffic outside. It wasn’t that he enjoyed the smell of himself or the look of those jeans. It was that they reminded him he’d survived another month, quietly, cheaply, stubbornly.

He thought maybe on day thirty-six he’d change. Wash them.

Perhaps buy new ones, but not yet. Not today.

He stood, stretched, and went to work. The jeans followed him like a second skin, loyal, patient, and unashamed.