Job was moving in the earth, swimming through grimy black dirt and rocks and roots, letting it flow into his mouth and out of his ass in one fluid movement. As if Job himself were earth, mud, and stones. And so Job was earth and swam up close to the surface where he could blow into the bottoms of roots and crunch to dust the discarded skeletons of devoured rodents. He tickled seeds out, and he carved caverns, and he stirred the lava with his root earth tongue, and he cradled the hard rotating iron ball at the center like an enfant. Which was the enfant thought Job. He painted the magma brown, and the melting liquid red and orange and yellow, and he painted the crust gray and beige with splatterings of red and yellow and ochre and mauve and blue and purple and chemise and etcetera. Job was colorless in stretching to the rims of the globe, circular himself; globular Job was pregnant with heat and rock. It rained, and his exterior became damp and mossy, mold grew and things sprouted and ate of him. They covered all his skin, devouring, and in eating they bloomed and had more hunger among them for that. They multiplied, and ate of the earth. Fortunately, in a strange turn of physical law wherein through the displacement and transforming of mass with the external addition of powerful light, it seemed like they shit more than they ate, and so a protective coating was laid about Job in the cloth of dead and rotting dung and corpses. This seemed even tastier to them than Job had himself, and so they pretty much left him alone after that. So Job was allowed to fall asleep in wakefulness on a beautifully warm early December day.

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