The creek had ended, or rather it began and Job had come to that point, roughly, for there was no start so much as an area of the hill which must have underground springs. He knew little of such things. It was near nightfall and he lay shivering uncovered on the ground above where he believed the water must surely be pooling its resources into a final rivulet to break from the rocks fifty odd feet somewhat south of him. He was about two miles from the microwave; the hike had been easy, albeit melancholic. The moon would rise soon, fatter. Job was beginning to have the idea that everything coming out of him was going into it, regardless of where he had left it on the forest floor. Fatten up the moon like a sow, he’d eat it with the first snows. Rolling over and crawling to the base of a nearby pine, one of the few speckled here about, he dug underneath its low hanging bows, covering himself up with whatever dead plant matter he could find, and burying his feet in the earth. The fall of darkness closed his eyes.

As foggy headed bugs disturbed from their hearths of dirt crawled among his toes and fidgeted about the few clumps of hair left on his head, Job dreamed. Classical Mozart flitted through wisps of smoke and wafts of coffee breath. Dimly discordant music beat impressionistic splatters of glowing resonance on the book lined walls about him. There were bags near him, for some momentous reason these bags were dear to him, heavier in their invisibly groin attached cord than in their true weight of mass. People spoke burbling like the creek some said his name, but it wasn’t his name, he had just done something, in front, but he couldn’t remember, sitting at a table two people with Cherokee intertwined and stretching in their European blood spoke to him. Something about spaghetti. Slowly turning to see this plain hair on this plain head which was disrupted artistically by this over-plain angular face the features of which slid from memory like oiled glass, she speaking to a man with eye glasses and dark clouded brows of determinant ignorance of Job. Fear came, but not of life. Fear came of absence, and from the books lining the walls crawling in dot matrix infinity ladybugs without count came. Legs simultaneously huge and swiftly running and tiny and edging filling the walls, the eyes, marching cold lava sucking away the smoke and the dark Polish chant of the discordant musicians, filling the eyes of the Cherokees and the lone Chinaman who glanced at him with approbation. The ladybugs covered all and were all coloring, all moving, everything was them and then his hands, his body was no more but a swarming semi shape of miniscule orange and black bubbles of life. His mouth was filled, his eyes orange and blacked out nothing felt but millions upon millions of tiny oscillating ladybug legs scratching and groping and carving him anew their sculpture their captive their vassal. Gasping, Job awoke and immediately spit the ants out of his mouth. He had thought that they would have been asleep by now. Fuckers.

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