Read Online Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) by Sam Savage - Free Book Online

know which is more revolting, the little pink hands or that long, hairless, strangely sinister worm. I stared at it lying there, placid and slightly curled, and it occurred to me that it was only pretending to be inert, that any second it was going to whip about. The sun had just come up and I was back at my post, but I was not typing yet—I was drinking coffee and thinking about typing, adumbrating the various items I would want to type up once I got started—when I heard Potts leaving, suitcase thumping down the stairs to the street—thirteen stairs, thirteen thumps—and clicking over the tiles in the vestibule, the street door opening with a faint whang and closing with a sigh and a click. A car door slammed, a car engine became loud, then soft. The morning was very quiet. Today is Sunday. Potts does not in the normal course of things make noises that I can hear from my place, except in winter when she goes down the stairs wearing boots with hard, racketing heels. Even so, now that I know she is gone a different kind of silence has descended on the building; not the silence of no noise, I want to say, the silence of no person. In the back of my mind I must always have been aware that she was somewhere about, just under my feet, busy with her life. And I ought not to have said that a different kind of silence descended, when actually it is rising out of the apartment below me, seeping through the floor on which my chair is sitting; rising, I want to say, like smoke. Thinking about the silence down there, I have a mental picture of the aquarium and the fish swimming quietly back and forth, with drifting fins. I wonder if Potts thought to open the curtains before leaving. In my picture the fish are swimming in dense twilight. They can wait until tomorrow for their breakfast.
    I slept last night with the door shut and the fan running. This morning I went down and fed the fish and then walked around the block to the other side of the ice cream factory, to the diner for breakfast. Walking that way I sometimes see groups of workers standing in the parking lot, taking a cigarette break, dressed in snowsuits even in the warmest weather, but there was no one this morning. The waitress said she was surprised to see me on a weekday. I told her I was on vacation. After breakfast I walked to the park and sat there, and then I came home and had lunch. I had meant to lie down for a few minutes after lunch but slept half the afternoon instead. The rat has come out of its tube; I can hear it behind me scratching in the shavings. I don’t understand why people want to keep rats as pets, or any animal for that matter, except cats and dogs. And parrots, I suppose. When we were in Venezuela we stayed part of the time in a hotel where there were parrots everywhere. They were wild parrots—the hotel put out food to encourage them to hang around in the courtyard and gardens, where they kept up a tremendous racket, such a potpourri of hoots and whistles. I thought it was lovely, but Clarence, who was trying to work the whole time we were there, complained about it to the management, and they promised to try and quiet the birds but of course did nothing. I said, “What do you expect them to do, shoot them?” We were in Venezuela because they were making a movie there. They were working from a script that everyone agreed was atrocious, when the chief writer, whom they all blamed for the problems they were having with the shooting, went off in a huff, leaving Clarence to fix the script up by himself, even though he did not know the first thing about film writing and had only gotten the job because he was a friend of the main writer, the one who left even after Clarence had begged him to stay. I don’t recall the name of the movie, or if it even had a name, since it was never finished, but it involved human sacrifice. Clarence was having a terrible time with the script, being obliged to retain all the awful parts they had shot already. The