An uneven room, this, five walls if you don’t count the kitchen, seven if you do, a long lowercase q with a refrigerator and a sink at one end and bookshelves at the other. Bookshelves along three of the walls: one drilled into the wall over the credenza, one in black Ikea finish on the short wall, one of some red finished wood put together by the grandfather that died just after I was born. No system of organizing the books, neither title nor subject nor author nor size nor color; some vertical, some horizontal, wherever they’ll fit between the dust and the supports. The black shelves have three skulls on them, one alligator head, one wooden model of a clitoris, one ecorche bust, two snow globes, one puzzle box, one paper model of a potato bug, one paper model of a jelly fish, one severed slender green hand of uncertain utility, six tiny hearts preserved in lucite.

Four automata: a head that opens, a scene that scrolls, a couple that flies in circles, a wooden centipede that wriggle when you turn the handle.

The wooden chest in front of the couch is filled with unnecessary winter coats, held against cooler weather that is less likely to come every year.