Thousand: Four Hundred Sixty-Five

stumbling over one of the longer and more difficult words in his vocabulary. Did he even get it out? The word seems to have several syllables with eccentric stresses, consonants both implied and not optional, and a tonal quality that could be picked up only by gnomes. The cowboy is peeling the orange with a paring knife. The sharp sweet scent of it loops around and begins to cinch in Bernie’s expanding sense of connection to the universe. What cowboy ballad is that? “Hard, ain’t it hard, ain’t it hard,” Darn is murmuring. Am I really hearing it way up