Some freaks sleep when they go to bed. No tossing and turning. No dread. No rehashing bad choices and personal humiliations. No plotting endless revenge.
Such monsters can’t be trusted. They inevitably have parents they admire, who are their best friends, who never spanked or raised their voices, and collected spare bikes from the town dump and fixed them up for needy kids, thereby teaching their unicorn children both the zen of bicycle maintenance and the grace of generosity and philanthropy.
Screw them. You’re my people. You have ghosts that keep you gloriously interesting. You have bags under your eyes. You give head like you’re saving a life through artificial resuscitation. Your smile is wretched, broken, and shy. Your drooping lids snap wide at the night gossips: whispering wind, creaking floorboards, cranky radiator, a sharp bare branch etching a window pane.
We know better what bed’s for: Passion. Regret. Dying. Wrestling. Clutching. Blood. Sweat. Fever. Tears. Bedsheets knotted like a rope for hanging. Pillowcases slicked damp with sweat when we sit bolt upright at precisely the same time and blurt, “What the fuck was that?”
The punch of a snapped bedspring pushes through your heart. The bedside radiator wakes with a vicious hiss. Pipes pound. Candle- or crayon-stench combines with damp cloth. Scatter-motes dust the moonlight. A distant audio stream quietly drones. The neighbor’s television-flicker penetrates our blinds.We consider whether we deserve to be other than alone. No matter whether it’s a queen or a California king, in our heads, they’re all ultimately single beds.
I first knew you and I were partners in crime when I found you sleeping standing on a subway car. Jolt after jolt.
“Come back to bed,” I whispered.
I didn’t mean to sleep, perchance to dream, the least bad of all possible alternatives. I meant doorknocks and footfalls, whimpers and groans. Roach skitter. Mouse patter. Rocker creak. Braincase rattle. We’d have been compelled to invent these sounds in our heads if they weren’t real. We wouldn’t ever be satisfied.
Haul up the ladders. Mount the bed high with storage beneath for shoes, for go bags, for bedding, for lice. In light of the moon’s careful inspection, you snatch a quarter from the air, so it doesn’t bounce twice. You put it away for a rainy day.
We brave intruders we never invited. We watch shadows slough from the walls. We hunker down, we cup flame, we tell stories to faces we barely see. It’s all very communal. If someone ever offered to grant us the peaceful sleepers’ freakish sickly-sweet dreams, we’d have called them pirates.
We speak housecreak. We breathe moonbeam. We hike the midnight bedsheet dunescape. We endure the cold fingers of perennially spinning ceiling fans.
We say, Remember the time…?
We rarely allude to the future. We sleep only when we’re dead. After feeding the young and living. We’ll beatify every single one of those goddamn freaks.
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Scott Pomfret is author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir; Hot Sauce: A Novel; the Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and over fifty short stories published in magazines including Ecotone, Smokelong Quarterly, The Short Story (UK), Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. An MFA candidate in creative writing at Emerson College, resident in Provincetown MA, Scott is at work on a comic queer Know-Nothing alternative history novel set in antebellum New Orleans. More at www.scottpomfret.com.
