As Roy Peter Clark says, most nonfiction writing falls into one of two categories: the story and the report. Many articles are hybrids. They use elements of both. They have narrative lines and long expository sections. Anyway, a while ago I read something that I wouldn't put in either category. Matter of fact, I think it needs its own category: the painting.
The piece, by Justin Heckert, is called Our Man Skip:
Again, his dogs are at the door. Pawing, whimpering, scratching at its wooden frame with front legs spinning in desperation, three of them—returning just now to be let in, returning from wherever they have been inside the fence in the reaches of his back yard and demanding to be let in, fur specked with dust and dirt like the gold in a sifter’s pan: Cleo, a mixed breed, Sam, the retriever, and Newman, also a mix, who had been blind in both eyes, and who his wife had fallen in love with, restoring his sight—$1,000 an eye. And the dogs are panting, with tongues that drag from their mouths like strips of strawberry gum, because, outside, well, it’s been a sauna, wet-hot and muggy. From the air-conditioned inside he has watched them for the last ten minutes or so come into view near the birdfeeder at the edge of the rock pond to bound clumsily up to the door while crashing into one another, grunting and barking, chasing through and over the perfectly trimmed grass, a scene he has watched intently through a large rectangular window that consumes nearly an entire wall of his kitchen (a window that shimmers as if it has been recently and thoroughly cleaned) and his neck is bent while looking out, and his arms rest together on the table beneath the pictures his wife has painted, left hand rubbing his right forearm, eyes lost behind glasses, just like his father, the beloved Harry, the legendary baseball announcer; and at this moment out of the humid afternoon and in the cool hum of his kitchen Skip Caray looks like his father, down to the pinch of nose and the scrub of red cheeks and pillowed bottom lip and pouch chin and at times, that smirk sketched so perfectly near the bottom of both their faces—
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