The Painted Nut part two

The figure of a man hunched with his head bent down forming a decrepit and abating arch on a too-high stool over a too-short table leads us to our principle. This contour is draped with a shrunken tent canvas that has, over the years, attached itself to his back becoming a part of his skin while slowly stiffening on his underside. He retained his shape over time by only vaguely moving his hands, not moving his head, and drooping over the table while his covering carefully buttressed his weight as it coagulated with age and indolence. The small amount of hair remaining on his head, matted and smooth like dirty old linen, started floating down and finding its way to the tabletop one thread, one strand at a time. Recently, the slight repetitive motion of his hands has pushed and corralled these fallen wisps in long rolling drifts like layers of dust and lint that stretch softly across the table, and these went completely unnoticed. Under his dry, scaly brow his eyes are wedged in a perpetual squint—not for lack of light, a light appears over his head every day, but for deficient sight and disregarded shadows, the lack of peripheral input—that is continually focused on miniature areas in front of his face on the table. No office or authority has placed him here; there is no love or attraction that has spurned him—only an excessively merited patience and the indecision of an unworthy perspective destined to grunt quietly to himself and sweat under a weary, desolate life.

Early in his deployment, he would occasionally recall flashes and hints of what he assumed was an artificially implanted former existence: the smell of grass blown in an open window, the faraway sound of surf, the rubbing of a cat against his leg, heavy and irregular footsteps, the mumbling and whispers of concealed hosts, the endless opening and closing of doors. In his circumstances and course of waning thought, and after a long unrelenting dialogue with his self, these remembrances faded to mere impressions that have no more significance to our subject than the accepted existence of the light over his head and the stool on which he rests. He hasn’t lifted his head in decades; the last time was when he thought he heard a knock on a door, but he told himself it was nothing. Initially he would rest his chin on his chest when the light went out for the evening, but his chin remains perpetually in this position, so now he merely pries his eyes open when the light appears. This light spreads just enough warmth on his back to counteract the chill felt in the shadow of his underside, and in this comfortable balance he makes very small movements as he manipulates microscopic tools across dimensions in reductionist space—occasionally he reaches over to exchange one tool for another from a supply in a dirty tin can that shares the tabletop with an old lidless wood box, three small plastic containers of paint, and a cloth bag of assorted nuts.