Several weeks ago, I began waking at dawn and carrying a large bait bucket up our dirt road past the neighbors’ hurricane-stripped live oaks, Bismarck palms, and slash pines to an old pile of fill right where Tahiti Drive hits Papua. Papua gets horrific potholes, and Tahiti already used the dirt to patch theirs, so I slowly go about doing the same to our deepest pits. Working only minutes here and there, I’ve made real progress without pulling any muscles yet.

I head out at dawn because I’m not looking for any credit. Doing something productive, being of use to others gets me out of myself. Even helps tamp down the morning terrors now common since the cancer returned. I’m unable to get more surgery thanks to a useless “silver” insurance plan that no longer covers a single facility in Florida. Covers a few specialists, sure, which means exactly dick when they can’t perform the surgery anywhere.

This morning, I was out hoping to finish the job when Scotty the commercial fisherman drove down Tahiti in his run-down white Ford truck. He stopped at the dirt pile and yelled at me, “That ain’t your fill! That’s Tahiti’s. We bought it!”

Jesus, I thought. You’ve already filled your potholes. I’m using a trace of leftover dirt.

But last year, Scotty’s son OD’d, so I relented. Tilting under the bucket’s weight, I turned, and the bucket slammed the baseball-sized patch of necrotic skin on my leg where the graft failed, where dead black skin mottled with pale-yellow melted cheese. I limped over to their precious dirt pile to dump out while friendo there glared at me.

I said, “Thanks.” Then louder, “Neighbor,” reminding him.

“Buy your own damn dirt,” he spat and made a U-turn back down Tahiti, raising dust.

I carried my empty bucket home down Papua, squinting into a sunrise of pink and teal.

Outside my door, I noticed the graft weeping fluorescent yellow juice into my brand-new sock. I stomped my sneakers on the mat and regarded the treads of leftover sand, and sure, the crank had a valid point. In Florida, dirt is money. There’s enough financial fears to spare, but five half-filled buckets would have finished the damn job, something insurance won’t even let my doctors do, so fuck Scotty, fuck the rest, and fuck everybody else. Fuck their block. Fuck this place.

I am broken.