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

of the keys (I am tempted to write “thunder of the keys”), when I pause to think before going on (or before going back in order to bury something beneath a chain of x ’s), I notice how quiet everything has become, where “everything” I mean the city, or at least the portion of it beneath my window, though earlier someone in the street was shouting “Martha” again and again. I want to explain about the silence: it is the silence of a roaring, a roaring that goes on all day long and for some parts of it all night as well—roaring of compressors on the roof of the ice cream factory, ocean-like roaring of traffic on the Connector, amalgamated cacophonous roaring of people and cars mingled in the street below. I am so accustomed to it that I don’t even hear it most of the time, especially in the colder seasons, when I have the windows closed, as they are now. I hear it when it stops. This is not at all what I meant to do. I intended just to mention Potts, notice her parenthetically, so to speak. “Edna, in passing, dropped a few words about Potts, a neighbor” is how it was supposed to be. I thought I would use the encounter with my neighbor as an example of the sort of thing that can happen in the blank spaces. It was not a good choice; I can see that now. It thoroughly fails to convey the depth of the tedium that defines those places, that, in fact, constitutes their blankness. I made it happen too fast, for one; and for two, even though lugging the fern up the stairs was quite taxing in a physical way, it was not boring in the least. Thanks to Potts’s glasses it was even comical in a feeble way. In fact and for the most part nothing happens in the blank spaces, and when a blank space goes on and on for years, so long it would take thousands of blank pages even to hint at how long and tedious it is, an hour with Potts cannot even begin to convey it, and I don’t know why I keep saying tedium, when it is actually much worse than that.
    I am at my station early this morning. The sun is not yet above the roof of the factory, but the buses are running and the street is already choked with cars, as I can tell by the noise, and the compressors are hard at work. If I were to open the windows now, I would have to wear muffs. By “station” I mean my table, of course; I could also call it my post or even my outpost. I am on guard here, finger on the trigger, meaning the keys, in a final stand against melancholy. I am tempted to say final desperate stand, as in Custer’s Last. I have propped the photograph against my coffee mug, where I can look at it while typing—the one of Nurse and me that I was about to discuss when I became distracted by Potts, among other items. Seven spins ago that would be. I did not type anything yesterday or the day before that, those being the blank space above. Nurse is wearing a long plain dress with big puffy pockets in front (the pockets are a different color from the dress), while I am in a short dress with ruffles and no pockets that I can see. The photo is in black and white, so my dress looks white, though I remember it as pale yellow. I have a large bow in my hair, which looks black, but it might have been dark blue or maroon—the ribbon looks black, that is, my hair was auburn, and I don’t recall a bow. Neither of us is smiling. We stand next to one of the tall hedges that bordered our driveway at home, some of them carved in European fashion into the shapes of animals. My father designed them, but the actual bending and clipping was done by a gardener on a tall wooden ladder, my father shouting instructions from below. The animal in the hedge beside us seems to be a bear. In fact the bear is pretty much at the center of the photo, with Nurse and me standing off to the side, so perhaps I should not have said that the photograph is of us—it is of the bear, and we are just in it. Behind the bear is the house we lived in, a big brick house on a hill—you cannot see the hill