I stacked three cardboard boxes against the only window to block the streetlight, then sat and waited. Against the uniform blackness of deep attic corners I saw patches of darker darkness, amorphous and phantasmal but in the end still lacking the definition and presence of true specter. I had a place to spread out, a short line of boxes slid together to approximate some kind of mattress. I’d begun coming up here when sleep in my bed proved unfeasible, which I could now safely conclude was not the fault of the squirrels that had disappeared altogether. I lay across the boxes and let my sight be drawn into the attic’s gloomiest recesses, drifting into and out of shallow sleep. Even without Freddy, there was a therapeutic timelessness up here, my clever stack of boxes voiding the effect of sunrise. Still, I kept my cell phone in my pocket, alarm set, just in case I did sleep heavily. Increasingly, my job had become something I relied on, and I feared the potential calamity of losing it.
