They eat hungrily, hurriedly—but not much—then pay the bill in cravings. Their chair legs drag deep, slow lines in the sandy substrate as they push back from the table and lugubriously float loose. Climb an old wooden ladder speckled with flecks of bodily fluids, span the gaps of missing rungs, and exit through thick cracks in a crystal sunroof. Walk across the surface. The late afternoon sunlight lies in rhombuses, shining through the lattice that encircles the world; the vast shadow crosshatch creeps ever closer to satiety, spared daily—just in time—by sundown.

His fat hangs from him like dripping wax that's starting to cool and resolidify. The village children flock around him to squeeze and massage it with morbid fascination, their small greasy fingers swallowed into the depressions they make. He's too laggard to giggle or protest or defend himself in any way, and really all he wants is to go steal coins from the bottom of the fountain in the town square. A barrier of light from the setting sun splays across the surface of its water like an oil slick. The birds' buttery warbling in the trees reaffirms that dusk is coming. They won't take wing again.