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+--- Thread: Pieces of Night (1973) (/showthread.php?tid=2286)
Pieces of Night (1973) - Simon - 12-09-2025
The first thing I remember as a child is feet. There were always two of them, both on me and on the others in the big bed. I was about three at the beginning of my memory and my crib was at the foot of that bed and either the room was tiny or my father was tall or both because I remember reaching through the bars many times to touch his toes. But father didn’t sleep at home very much. I know this not from an absence of feet; there were always lots of them to touch on that bed, mother hated to sleep alone; but with him I had merely to reach out my fingers, and with all the others, the much shorter ones, both in height and in temper, I sometimes had to reach all the way out with my arms to make that touch.
Our apartment in East Haven, Connecticut, had five small rooms. It was reached after kindergarten and first and second grades by walking many blocks and up three flights of outdoor wooden stairs that still creak and sway in my memory. The door at the top was always a screen one. (Could it be I only lived there in summer? But no, because I remember once getting hit in the face with a snowball.) And I remember the door was always locked as if mother was trying to tell me something, but that the hook could be lifted with something in my hand that was slim and silver. Beyond that door, which opened to the kitchen, there was sometimes a lunchtime sandwich or, if not, a tiny red box or two of raisins in the cupboard, or at least some sugar in a yellow tin can that lived so high on a shelf I would have to use a chair. After picking out the ants from the sugar, either dropping them tenderly to the floor or squeezing them red in my fingers depending on how my day had gone, I would wipe my hands on my pants and eat.......