Here are 3-4 sentences of pure scene, continuing from "a valley the shape of a sleeping man, and":
he pressed his palm into it like he was checking for a pulse. The clock on the nightstand said 9:47. Not PM. The orange bottle on the dresser had a new label, white, with a different milligram number than the orange bottle before it - and before that one, another number still.
The glass was the heavy one with the chip on the rim, and his thumb found the chip before his eyes did. Outside, the Hendersons' light kicked on for the oak tree, went dark - kicked on again for a leaf or a moth or nothing at all. Gerald watched it cycle three times, four, the way you watch a thing when watching is the only job left.
The Formica had a cigarette burn near the napkin holder that Gerald kept looking at instead of her face. She slid the paper across - he caught the words *Sleep and Aging* before he folded it in half, then in half again, and tucked it into his shirt pocket on top of the Kroger list. His daughter watched his hands do this. She picked up her coffee cup - set it down without drinking.
The paper on the table crinkled when Gerald leaned to look, and he pressed one hand flat against it to make it stop. The doctor tapped the red line with his pen - a ballpoint, the cap was missing - and said *fragmented*, then said it again while Gerald looked at the blue line underneath, smooth as a scar that had finished healing. Gerald's sock had a hole at the left big toe and he noticed this when he looked down instead of at the screen. The pen tapped the red line a third time - a fourth, and Gerald nodded the way he nodded at the Kroger checkout when they asked if he found everything okay.
The recliner left two dark scuffs on the hardwood where Gerald dragged it, and he didn't go back for the rug. He folded the quilt - the green one with the fraying corner his wife had safety-pinned and never replaced - into thirds and laid it over the arm the way you'd lay out a good shirt. Sometime before the birds, his chin dropped to his chest and the Kroger list slipped out of his pocket and settled on the floor, and nobody picked it up. The streetlight came through the curtain gap and fell across his hands and he didn't move.
The shirt was inside out in the pile and Gerald turned it right-side before he felt the paper crinkle against his fingers. He pulled it free - still folded in quarters, one corner soft from the wash it hadn't gotten, and smoothed it once on the Formica with the flat of his hand the way you'd press a letter you'd decided not to send. His coffee cup went down on top of it, dead center, and he left it there and looked out at the Hendersons' yard going yellow in the early light - the oak tree throwing a long shadow across their driveway that shortened while he watched.
The folded paper stayed under the coffee cup until Thursday, when Gerald lifted the cup to wipe the ring and it came up with it, stuck, and he peeled it free and set it on the counter by the toaster without unfolding it. The orange bottle was empty now and the new one was the same milligram, same white label - and he left the empty standing next to it the way you leave a chair at the table. He slept in the recliner again, and the Kroger list was still on the floor, and sometime in the night he reached down and touched the edge of it with two fingers and left it where it was.
