2@hAt7*

A molt gray sky is better than no sky at all, reflected the man in the hat. Thinking has its drawbacks, as do skies, blueness, and a green greenness that inveigles and atropines the eye, a pustule of socket and cornea. His plant, the one plant he owned, wept for hydration, moist waterwheel soil, not hard Bedouin till. He fed it spittle, excreta, a watershed of backwash, or simply left it to wither, like a placenta left out to dry on a scrub board, cordless and feeble. Like his great uncle, the man in the hat had no liking for green things, beans, string or whole, peas, armored or shucked, Lima, split or dismembered, broccolis or asparagus. He hid green things beneath the clatter of his plate; his nose turned up like a spoiled child’s, knees thumping the bottom of the table like a distressed kite. His good eye flittered like a tiger moth, crepe with custard and sleep. He lost the other one, the bad eye, in a sawmill accident, flint wood piercing the cornea clear through to bone.