Free Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) by Sam Savage

leather-covered books, and a leathery old butler named Peter who stood behind Papa’s armchair and poured. Those were all comfortable things, and I suppose they made Papa feel comfortable sitting there, even when he was unhappy, which would be the reason he could sit there for a long time, because he was unhappy but comfortable. We also had a large comfortable dog named Rupert who enjoyed listening to Papa talk even when he, Papa, was tight and no one else could understand him. But after a while Papa would have enough of the study also, and then, having had enough of one and not of the other, he would stumble back upstairs and beat on Mama’s door with his fist. This happened, it seems to me, a great many times, and then one night when it was about to happen again Mama had had enough of that too, and she threatened to shoot him through the door. I don’t suppose it really happened as many times as it seems, and it is possible she only threatened to shoot him once, threatened once to shoot him—fill him full of bullets, is what she said—and it only appeared to be happening all the time because it was so frightening. I don’t know if this is useful. My bedroom was across the hall from Mama’s, and when Papa began hammering on her door, I would think of places to travel, and after he had gone downstairs I would turn on the light and open the little box with the stamps and lay the stamps out on the bed and pretend that they were island countries scattered across the ocean of the bedspread. I would lay them out in different patterns, in a clump like Fiji or strung out in a line like the Marianas, and spend a long time considering the order in which I would visit them. I would imagine the king or president or whoever was pictured on the stamp coming down to the beach with his entourage to welcome me when I landed, and the entourage would include elephants and horses, usually, and I would fall asleep imagining this, and next morning the maid would have to help me retrieve my stamps from the tousled bedcovers.
    Sleepless nights filled with wild thoughts, distracted days, typing fitfully, with many long blank spaces. Sometimes I type and think; more often I think without typing, in the armchair or in bed or sitting on a bench in the park. I was not able to fall asleep last night. I lay in bed for hours, staring up at the dark where the ceiling was, eyes locked open, and I thought, This is how I will look when I am dead. I got out of bed, nearly fell out, sitting on the floor for a few minutes first before getting up and going into the living room. Dawn was hours away, and I could hear the rat moving about. When I switched on the light, it lifted its head and looked at me. I tried to imagine that it looked surprised at seeing me in the living room at that hour, but that was difficult: rats don’t seem to have much in the way of expressions, except, of course, agony and the like, which all animals can express—even insects can express that. I slid several pages across the floor with my foot, to a spot near the armchair. I sat in the chair and picked them up and read them over to see if they were up to snuff. Finishing a page, I dropped it next to the chair, the way I always used to in the evening, when I would read over the pages I had typed that day. In those days, after reading a page I would let my arm hang out over the side of the chair, dangle out over the floor, still absently clutching the page, while I read through the next, and then just before reaching the bottom of that one I would let the suspended sheet slip from my fingers and whisper slantwise to the floor, lackadaisically, in a gesture of casual disdain, I thought at the time, as opposed to Clarence’s frantic way of balling pages up and throwing them at the trash can or making neat self-congratulatory stacks. Sometimes he would yank a page out of the typewriter with such violence he would make the roller shriek and cause me to jump out of my skin. Clarence was