A short story

A dog walked down the road. It could have been a thousand dogs on a thousand different roads. It made no difference. He didn't know how to feel about that. He sort of wanted it to matter, and wanted to wonder where the dog came from and where it was going. He wondered about that kind of stuff all the time. Where did that scrap of paper come from, getting kicked up in the wind? He thought there was a story behind everything, and even if it wasn't worth reading, it was worth something. The dog was gone now. All that time wondering about a fucking dog in the road, and he was still standing in the vain shelter of a bus stand.

Three hours passed while he sat on the bus and guessed all sorts of things he had no way of ever knowing about the dog he'd seen in the road. There was that, the constant squeak of the seats all around, the noises of the road and the sounds of people. Conversations came and went at every stop, sometimes repeated, like the woman who told everyone that the earth was angry and spinning fast to spite us. He thought about that one, and the dog again, and he thought the dog made everything seem so slow. He couldn't see it. And how many dogs had they passed in this bus? Had he even noticed, or cared how many stories he'd missed wondering about? A thousand dogs, a thousand different roads, and none of it mattered.

Eight hours in he was drifting in and out of sleep, watching the dog watch him as it wandered down the road, and all the sounds of the road and the noises of the people disappeared. The only sound left was the woman wondering again about the angry earth and time moving more quickly. "I think children feel it, too."

He'd lost track of time, but made it to Kentucky and wondered how he'd find a meal.