FOGOU: 6

He makes tea that he’d grown, steam and oven-dried himself, and drinks it black and bitter.

He wonders about the brief cloud of airborne plastic eyes, and whether or not he would be visited today.  He wants no visitors today.  There were times, in every endless month, where he found he craved a visitor.  Sometimes he crammed himself down in the small space between the bed and the wall, just to feel something touching him.  Something holding him in space.  In place.  Sometimes he cried.  Unloving stone walls holding him in space in place in hell.

He looks at his kitchen table.  Once they had considered it weathered, used, loved.  These days it just looked scarred.  A dead body put on stilts and laid out on the flagstones.  It was snowed with his notes and calculations.  His endless drawings and measurements of the fogou, that he and his wife had carefully sliced into and that the police had carelessly shoveled up.

If they were watching him again, and if they were coming back, he could not let them see the notes on the place they were all so convinced he had buried her.

The place where he was convinced she left from.