I am taking the world’s loneliest jog when I happen upon the world’s loneliest house where I spend a lifetime trimming the world’s loneliest topiaries and collecting the world’s loneliest crab apples in the world’s loneliest cyan pail and then I slide down an ant hill and no longer believe in the end of days.

Why is the dread of being a failure the same dread as the dread of someone seeing my nose hair in polite discussion and proceeding to point, or worse, but maybe better, pluck, and what if I gather everything that drifted to the ground and announce on live television I intend to put it all back but get overwhelmed and move to the side of a big, flat pond.

I laze about in fancy sweaters.

I figure out the game of tic-tac-toe.

I form a depression in the bark of a mossy log.

The front door is open wide one day.

Someone is inside taking photos on a portable device.

This is where we first met, they inform me.

I’m shocked.

I walk in like I own the place even though I’m only renting.

We plan on sneaking around more random buildings to look at fire exit signs because we think we’re stuck in a parallel universe where all the fire exits exist as blue objects but on the way there a gorgeous breeze gets installed at ground level and confounds us so we divert to a different place and unshell each other’s honesty apparatus.

It was an idea to a build a birdbath with Jacuzzi jets.

We didn’t predict it would become a brand-new beach.

Presently, I’m shoveling sand out of the bed of a pink truck, thinking about chair lifts and choir lofts, searching for a step that will not disappear while on a staircase in an unfamiliar location embraced by an orange mist rising like an audience from the undergrowth.

The shadow of a puddle’s pattern on the surface of a separate puddle.

A generation of saltwater, hailstone, haircut generalists.

Not long after, a wood thrush is found with a Jacuzzi jet in its beak.

The wood thrush lives and what happens next is it turns into a stylish thing for birds to have Jacuzzi jets in their beaks so gradually the Jacuzzi jets go missing.

The world’s loneliest ocean dries up.

A company is at the bottom selling ferromagnetic self-care products.

The back of their shampoo bottle says Shower longer and you’re in power but flip it over and there is someone larping out of the frame like a classic heist movie I enjoyed at home prior to my nose hair faux pas.

I climb onto the hardcopy balcony with the ability to grow bone-in winglets that bond through commensalism with a wide veil of oblong larvae ranging from files and patients to workaday houseboat platters and weedy rockeries.

I paint a prototype of moving along the grass at an uneven tempo.