Like a dog. Time is sudden. And like all dogs, Roqe locomoted tail over head in stiff somersaults. Existence time continental drift or millions of years change – all rote dire shock across the canid’s vision. Away from horrors – dogs carved or stitched into mechanical array – Roqe had loosed himself. Never being the same dog twice, he diverged from the hospital so that it no longer and did not ever exist. Or Roqe might have been the hospital transformed and just like a hospital he slid from the past forward. 

Plagues hovered over the mountains. Drops of moisture formed on ribs emerging from decay and retreat. A plague feeds itself, endlessly, on itself, endlessly. Retrieves its poisons, delivers them. He was hungry. The end is the same for mountains. He was so hungry. Roqe steered his tumbling toward the plains. 

Roqe cowered when he saw a roaming herd of transmission towers. Enormous towers, like and like, all reach and signaling. Most small creatures in cleverness sense what’s unnatural from twinning. Able to slink and jitter to the cover of an overturned bench, he tucked tail and did. To every place, there are storms and pests, and so: discrete and dry havens. The other fragile animals here included two dogs, each noted Roqe’s entrance and breathed desperate and wide like him. One pawed at the bandages, git warned off by a rumble inside Roqe. Inside Roqe, an edgeless forest broadcast. Colonies of shroomcaps peppered exposed root systems tangled neighbors, plants and motes talking a-lively in the light and trees inside that dog among which the oldest a sickly beech sickly its entire life withered while mammoth oaks and elms grew and fell. Ages are sometimes marked this way. 

Roqe staggered with an unbearable scission when the sickly beech quit growing and finally relinquished. In anonymity among that wooded interior where it had been hidden, it absconded. Roqe felt it, comprehended its absence. He knew to lie down careful, wait. Just watched plagues tend the distant peaks toward decay.

Absent a sickly beech emerged a smaller dog crawling severed at its waist and sewn into Roqe’s neck. This dog—newly alone, vibrant—tugged the bitter stitches which had bound him to Roqe. He covered his wounds and lacks with salvageable bandage before he scooched away. 

He settled, became relevant to the geography of structures and animals, told any who passed that his blood trail converged back some ways with the rotting Roqe, a dog whose thoughts he could recall as if a phonograph needle were tracing the contours of that other’s dessicated brain.