Tuesday began, as certain inconvenient Tuesdays do, at four in the morning. Guinea Pig woke with that unmistakable sense that sleep had quietly packed up and left without consultation. His body had decided that morning was already underway, though the hotel world, with its clerical devotion to proper hours, insisted that daybreak was still some…
Monday arrived and Guinea Pig was back to his involuntary waking hour. He felt refreshed. Much better, in fact, and this, he knew, was not a small thing but a signal. Sleep, when it had done its work properly, did not merely restore the body. It restored proportion. It returned the world to scale. As…
Sunday had not begun well. Guinea Pig had slept badly. The reasons were not entirely clear, though several candidates were circulating in the background: work, the persistent voice of Doodle Horse somewhere in the back of his head, and the growing suspicion that his internal batteries had been operating on reserve for longer than was…
He overslept. He got up at half past six instead of at his usual involuntary hour between half past three and four. But then the evening before had run later than was wise. He had been working on a report, and the mind, once engaged with duty, is not always disposed to release itself at…
There is a particular silence that settles in when the house empties. Not loneliness. Not drama. Just the absence of observation. When departures have happened and trains have left platforms and the motherland has reclaimed its citizens, the house shifts. And I shift with it. I become lighter. Looser. Slightly feral in an intellectual way….
