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By D.J. WALDIE

| t h e r o o m i s e m p t y | I have an intense recollection of a particular summer day. I'm very young and I'm playing hide-and-seek in our house with my brother. It's that time in the early evening when the air still seems light, but the shadows fill in completely. The house we live in is small — less than 1,000 square feet — and because I'm small too, this diminished space still seems large to me. I'm standing in the doorway to the bedroom I would go on sharing with my brother for nearly twenty years. The last of the light has just gone from the room as if the light had been condensed out of the air. My knees begin to knock out of fear. I'm afraid of what isn't in the room. + + + After my father's funeral in August 1982, I came home to that same house which my father and I had shared since my mother's death three years before. My brother brought me back, dropped me off, and drove away as I went inside. That day, and over the next few days, I deliberately sat and waited as the evening light drained out of each of the empty rooms in its turn. I continue to live in that house. I live there alone. + + + Next: The slow, insistent presence of objects.