Sometimes the laughter rolls in waves up the spiral staircase, spilling through the cracks in the floorboards, the cracks in the doorframe, the cracks lining the edges of the ceiling. Someone once told me they imagined, as the years came and went through the house and each new tenant pasted and painted his nest in new shades of home, the rooms gradually getting smaller, closing in on their inhabitants. Sometimes I imagine the room getting smaller around me and sometimes it is my own body shrinking into the room, into the cloud of smoke that sometimes pools on my books and throws my mind back at me from their pages.