Tag Archives: sleep

2017/01/02

An Attempt to Come to Terms

By dsholloway

Lying in the dark, a thought dances along the edges of his mind, carefully gliding over the puddles of vodka and sidestepping the scattered SSRIs.

He had always been careful to turn music on; it was the only way he could get her to sleep. He preferred a tomb-like enclosure. She was the opposite, but she was also loved by him. So he cued up gentle piano music and let it lull her to sleep. During the early days of their relationship, he slept very little, distracted by the sound and unable to settle down because of the presence of someone in his bed. He grew accustomed and eventually dependent on her body being next to his. But he never trained himself to sleep through the music, faint though it was.

When he woke to find her gone, he recalls now, there had been a power outage, or else he had been too wasted. Either way there was no music. There was, instead, silence. But it wasn’t the silence he wanted. It claimed her, unjustly.

He feels her in the silence. But he can’t sleep. So he turns her piano sounds back on. But he can’t sleep that way either.

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2016/12/31

The Fantasy of Being Absolved

By dsholloway

In her dreams, he was elusive and distant, staring at her with grave eyes. How she longed for his words, his words, once so sweet but now – when he did bother to open his mouth – unruly and hardened. But he said nothing, in her dreams, while she murmured something over and over again, inaudible to them both. Even she didn’t know their contents or intent.

Her dreams were her reality’s inverse. During her waking hours it was she who refused to speak, drifting through the long, masculine corridors of their home like a ghost ship. Her last words to him, spat from the foyer on her way to exercise class: “It is what it is.”

It was one of her favorite sayings. It made him cringe; he considered that turn of phrase a worthless tautology. In the days since she decided to stop speaking (thirteen and counting), he gradually forgot why she said that anyway.

He still tried, mildly and with condescension, to engage her in conversation. But to no real end. He, too, dreamed. He dreamed not of her words, or even his, but rather of an implicitly understood and forever sweet silence that needed no words at all.

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2016/07/13

Xenon

By dsholloway

Never did I think I would love, for love was a ridiculous, childish concept.

But I loved, finally, in spite of myself. I loved, I knew, because I thought only of her, always. Because she was my default, my origin.

She says, “Fuck you, K,” in a voice that craves verbal violence, disappearing from view even though I can see her, touch her. I reach, she recoils – a perverse dance. She looks at me with the eyes a stranger, yanking her engagement ring from her finger, throwing it out the window.

I go outside and sift through the bushes. I find her ring floating in a dog’s water dish.

I pretend I am not relieved and go back inside. She is dead, having swallowed my pain killers.

I put her ring on her lithe, cold finger. I press her lithe, cold finger to my lips.

Then I go to sleep, taking the same pain killers. I dream of our wedding. Our families are present. We are happy.

I wake up, see her dead body at the kitchen table, coax myself back to sleep. Again our wedding, our families, our happiness.

I wake, finish my pain killers, kiss my phantom bride.

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2016/01/15

The Supposedly Innocent Gaze

By dsholloway

“You have the most charming way of eating,” I cooed on my way past her table. “I don’t mean for that to sound creepy or anything,” I stopped to clarify. “You just caught my eye and I couldn’t look away until you were done with your spaghetti.”

 

She smiled and dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin: “Thank you.”

 

She said nothing further so I exited the café.

 

That night I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and watched her eat her plate of spaghetti. “Is she as dainty when she eats a medium rare hamburger,” I wondered, “or oysters on the half shell?” I closed my eyes and dreamed of the woman.

 

Every night thereafter she infiltrated my dreams, always seated at a table with a white tablecloth and always eating.

 

After a week, I grew concerned that she was growing fat.

 

I returned to the café. “Has the woman who eats spaghetti in a womanly way been in recently,” I asked the maître d.

 

“You’re the eighteenth man to ask of her today,” he scoffed before gesturing to the dining room, which was occupied by single men all waiting for the woman who ate spaghetti.

 

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2015/06/05

Between His Acts and His Beliefs 

By dsholloway

She was gone, leaving only a photo of her chubby adolescent daughter wearing a Batman mask and her collection of gilded objects. A cherub, a horse head–“found objects” is what she called them even though she bought each one at the mall. 

Due to her interest in “DIY” there had been a permant cloud of spray paint in our apartment and empty cans of gold spray paint next to the trashcan. After she left I opened all the windows. 

I put the photo of her child on my desk and moved her “found objects” into a pile by the door. It started to rain. I closed the windows. That night I dreamed she cut my torso open and gilded my insides. 

I woke to a thick haze of spray paint. 

I opened the windows. Once the haze lifted I found that everything in my apartment had been gilded: chairs, desk, mirror, toothbrush. Her “found objects” were gone.

The venomous scent of spray paint assaulted me. I clutched my stomach and fell to the floor. 

“Don’t be such a jerk next time.”

I looked up. Her chubby daughter was standing above me, a disapproving look peeking from behind her Batman mask. 

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2014/09/30

Teach Me to Grieve and Conspire

By dsholloway

K was convinced that she was the one hurting him during the night, that she was the one leaving knives in his body while he slept.

“She’s going to kill me,” he said to a friend once, refusing to elaborate.

She didn’t kill him. But one day she woke to find K dead, his head thoroughly severed from his body and covered in lipstick. She sighed. You men, you have no self control.

K had gone to the Isle of Women again.

He never told her of his dreamscape philandering. But he didn’t need to. Every night he went to the Isle of Women and every night from within her own dreamworld she watched him go.

The police told her he died by his own hand. Which would make since: those marks on his body he attributed to her were also self inflicted. One night she woke to find him pummeling his own face, shouting remorseful things about “the nature of men.” She never brought it up.

So she  believed the police. She also kinda believed he killed himself out of guilt. But she also kinda believed he killed himself so he could stay on the Isle of Women forever.

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