It didn't take him long to bury me. He scrabbled at the thin till, gravel and chunk clay sprawling out from his cracked shovel and dull pick. The sweatband on his straw hat got darker and darker as he bent to his task, the air heavy with the silt of stars. Heat hung from his neck like a yoke on an ox. The hair on his fingers was matted wool, grains of earth glinting there in the fur, the sky fraught with moon. Two trees leaned their gnarled branches down on him, bitter apples withering, their skin flayed with scab and the froth dust of wormholes, shimmering with bleached light.