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Here’s the result of tonight’s short writing practice.

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The milkman wakes up sad every morning, too early. He used to be glad to be up before dawn, before the dogs awake and start barking. Even the gulls and doves are still asleep. He was glad to set milk on the doorsteps of families, so that children had breakfast and went off to school. So that fathers had shredded wheat unsweetened, carefully avoiding their fresh-knotted neckties, went off to their offices, with their business sections, briefcases, bumbershoots. What a fun word.

But lately, he wakes up sad. He dreamed once and saw what the children really need, and knew in that moment that his dream was true. So he steps from the bathroom, having washed his hairy chicken bony arms and legs, and brushed his pearly canines and acrylic crowns, puts on his white uniform in the blue-gray room, where the bed still groans for him come back, give up, sleep in. He knots his black rayon tie in the whispering darkness, four in hand, lets the tip fall against the buckle of his belt, and thinks about what families really need.

The ocean. Not all of it, just the serrated, sloshing frothy edge, just at that point where the last briny sheet slows in foam and indecision on the sand, thinks better of itself, and turns away. Put down your pasteurized vitamin D 2% and toast, he thinks, and meet the universe just there. Everything behind you dries like a leaf and falls away. But there, down, down past the kelp and the wharf light’s reach, down there is the fresh, refrigerated mind.

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