Follow the ocean line, follow the flow, and give me a little time to take what I know

Ocean Bay Seafood, Wytheville, VA

--a sentence from Marc Richard's "Happiness of the Garden Variety" (in The Ice At the Bottom of the World)

…one thing about Vic, and I say this to show how Steve Willis and I made all this worse, was that Vic not reading or writing seemed to make him not to think about things like they had names that he had to remember by of thinking that needed spelling, but instead Vic seemed to think about things in groups, like here is a group of things that are my humans, here is a group of things that are my animals, here is a group of things I got for free, here is a group of things I got off good deal making, and here is a group of things I should keep a long time because I got them from some people who had kept them a long time, and maybe because of another couple reasons put together, Vic had another group of things painted aquamarine blue because he had gotten a good deal on two fifty-five-gallon barrels of aquamarine blue paint, and everything—even Vic’s humans and animals who could not help but rub against or sit in somewhere because it was everywhere wet—everything was touched the color of aquamarine, though all of us calling it ackerine, because even spelling it out and sounding it out to Vic it still came out of his mouth that way, ackerine, keeping in mind here is a man who can’t read nor write, and Steve Willis and I saying it ackerine like Vic said it, for fun, because it also always seemed like somehow we were always holding a brush of it somewhere putting it on something in change for rent.