Spills

The winterscape outside was barely habitable. The creatures I found there were just masses of fabric, with eyeglasses and bits of hair the only hints that humans sat inside, operating the clumsy cloth limbs. Out among them, shivering in my autumn blazer, I quickly realized that I needed a hat for my face—perhaps even a hat for my hat. Cold in itself is shocking to a man like me, raised among pine barrens and humid peat swamps. But today the wind cut so brutally. Of course, it didn't help that I was woefully underdressed. I haven't left the house in quite some time, you see, and it seems I've let myself go a bit. I didn't realize exactly how far until the wind caught me by the pajama pants—making them into a kind of sail—and sent me careening back and forth across the narrow road, into and out of oncoming traffic.

By the time I made it back to the sanctuary of the attic, my hands were raw and red, and the skin on my face had begun to peel and flake off. I decided to draw myself a hot bath. Unfortunately, this required a painstaking process of thawing ice over the hotplate. And since my vessel—a lovely ceramic chamberpot from the turn of the century—couldn't hold more than two liters at the time, I wound up, hours later, with a lukewarm soak that nearly covered my ankles and buttocks. Shuddering fetally in the galvanized washbin, I realized how far I'd fallen—from international traveler with suitcases of cash and a seemingly inexhaustible line of credit, to self-employed scrivener with little more than the frighteningly inadequate clothes on my back. And I began to weep, rocking my body back and forth, gently at first, then more violently as the tears leapt to my eyes. I rocked so hard that I rocked myself out of the washbasin, smacking my head against the filthy floor. And as the soap-scummed water pooled around me, I suddenly found myself laughing out loud, slapping the tiles as my voice rose up and the corners of my eyes wrinkled in ecstasy.

For this is all I ever wanted, ridiculous as it may seem to some—a small room, populated with the instruments of my artform, and the time and quiet to hone my craft. Of course, if I admit all my adolescent fantasies, I have to include taking the world by storm, but that can come later, once the dull stone of my song cycle is polished and gleaming. In the meantime, I have Mia to help keep me above water, and enough bread to last me until February, and this pen, which feeds me until I am overflowing.