Free The Evening News by Tony Ardizzone

six big steps the long way and four-and-a-half big steps the short way. This does not count the bedroom.
    Counting the bedroom, there are six more steps. There are two desks. Two chairs. Two beds. Two desk lamps. Two dressers. A pair of bulletin boards. I feel like I’m inside Noah’s ark.
    Yet there is only one window. This fact depresses me. If there were two windows, perhaps the second would offer me a different view. I am speaking figuratively. There
are
two windows, one in the front room and one here in the bedroom. But their vistas are identical.
    I touched each at least one hundred times. I thought that by doing this I might change something. Six big steps, touch; six big steps, turn; six big steps, the same view. The only thing that changed was me. I got very tired. I sat down then and inspected the walls.
    They seem made of cardboard. The exception is a small area above the bedroom window, which seems made of something else. It is brown. It’s also circular, very much like a cloud, but unlike a cloud it doesn’t remind me of anything except perhaps a water stain, or perhaps a cloud. I’m sitting directly beneath it right now.
    On the front room walls are three pictures. The first has a young child running naked through a forest, looking as if someone or something is chasing it. In the treetops it reads TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE .
    So was yesterday. I cannot tell if the child is a girl or a boy.
    The second is a print of a very uncomfortable-looking blue old man who is strumming an equally uncomfortable-looking blue guitar. A larger canvas might have made the two more comfortable. I didn’t like this picture.
    The third finds W. C. Fields squinting at a fistful of playing cards. Once I saw the movie this picture came from, and, as Iremember, Fields was cheating. I cannot remember if he was caught.
    Marsha has an interesting arrangement of books on her bookshelves. She separates fiction from nonfiction, as do most libraries, but Marsha does so artistically, with élan, with empty wine bottles and rocks and little clay pots filled with paper flowers. She also alphabetizes the books by authors, but then she places the books on her shelves according to height, with the tallest coming first. Fiction begins with
Don Quixote.
It is followed by
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake,
and then the dictionary. Nonfiction begins with
The Divided Self
and ends with
I’m O.K., You’re O.K.
I did not agree. The shelves looked so smug and pleased with themselves that for a good half hour I found myself compelled to rearrange them, hiding a few books beneath the couch and chairs and in the kitchen and bathroom, and dropping several of the rocks out the window onto the roofs of parked cars.
    Then I indulged myself with one of my favorite and most profitable pastimes, sofa exploration. As I child I practiced this regularly in the restaurant, though there we had booths. The object of this activity is to make your hand as flat an instrument as is possible and then to insert it carefully into the crevices beneath the cushions, pulling out and keeping whatever items you may find. I found the following:
    Two packs of matches. Both were from my mother’s restaurant, Sarah Cooper’s Kitchen. Their flaps read Homestyle Cuisine, A Neighborhood Place, Bring the Whole Family, Grandpa and Grandma Too, You’ll Love Us.
    Eighteen bobby pins. Thirteen were brown (Marsha’s) and five were a kind of soupy yellow (Jo’s). I did not like touching them.
    Two pencils. The first was a newly sharpened yellow Number 2, from the university, NORTHWESTERN , with an abused eraser and a rather chewed back end. As I pulled itfrom the sofa I felt like I was stumbling onto something private; I imagined Marsha sitting there on the couch scratching out a story with it, or at least trying to, thinking, chewing the pencil’s end, then erasing. I suppose, since the