Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) Read Online Free PDF Page A

had just stepped outside for a smoke. Last year when my toilet was clogged I went down to use the bathroom. The plaid robe he wore when he descended to the street to fetch his newspaper in the morning was still hanging from a hook on the inside of the bathroom door, and I noticed one of the pockets bulging with balled-up Kleenex. I would not like to have Clarence’s stuff lying all over the place. I can just imagine coming home, in the dark perhaps, with my arms full of groceries, and tripping over his shoes. I am sure I would not think, “Oh dear, there are Clarence’s shoes on the floor in the middle of the room again.” That is the sort of thing I might have thought at one time, when he was in fact leaving his shoes all over the place. By “at one time” I mean all the time we were together—there was just no changing him when it came to his shoes. But if after he was gone I had kept his shoes lying around the way Potts has with Arthur’s things and tripped over them then, I would think instead, “Oh dear, there are Clarence’s empty shoes.” And then, of course, I would get a pang. When I moved to this place, I did not bring anything that had belonged to Clarence. I looked in every one of our books before packing, and if he had signed his name on the flyleaf, as he invariably did when he bought a new one, I left it behind. Opening a book and finding his name, you can just imagine the pang.
    We stood side by side in front of the aquarium, while Potts talked about the proper way of feeding the fish—strange deviant goldfish with short egg-shaped bodies, bulging eyes, and long drooping tails. They swam diaphanously back and forth. Climbing on a stepstool and inserting her arm up to the elbow in the water she demonstrated the correct method of removing algae from the glass with a little scraper she had purchased just for that, for me to be able to do that in case the algae becomes too much for the snails to handle, while the fish darted frantically this way and that. They did not dart, actually. Their thick bodies and overdeveloped fins made impossible anything as swift as darting, or as graceful as swimming either; they jerked themselves forward, looking like bright tadpoles trailing scarves. When she had asked me if I would water the plants, weeks ago that must have been, she did not say anything about fish; I would remember had she mentioned fish. She had written out a page of instructions about the plants and another about the fish and posted them on her refrigerator with magnets. We faced the refrigerator and read them over together—she read them aloud, and I followed with my eyes, nodding, I mean, not that we read them in chorus. I could not understand a word. We walked around the apartment, Potts in front with short quick steps, a toy that had been wound up and let run, chattering about the plants, and I a few paces behind, straining to listen, bent. Being taller than Potts I couldn’t help noticing a bald spot on her crown, a salmon-colored circle the size of a half dollar on the apex of her dome. She must have developed it recently or I would have noticed before. I could not stop my mind from drifting to it, wondering what it was a symptom of and whether I ought to mention it to her, in case she had not noticed yet, or not mention it, in case it was something she was doing to herself, neurotically tugging, for example. I paused to peer into the rat’s cage—not a cage, really, just an ordinary aquarium with a wire lid, like the fish tank but larger—a terrarium, properly speaking, or perhaps a vivarium. It looked empty at first, until I noticed the depilated tail protruding from a white PVC tube lying on its side in the wood shavings. “Nigel’s asleep,” Potts said. She tapped the wire top of the cage. Nothing moved. “He had a busy night.” “I am not taking care of the rat,” I said. She brightened: “Oh no, dear, a friend from the Rat and Mouse Club is taking him over to his house. Nigel