I'm exploring some flash fiction that I forgot I wrote. Working on stitching them into something more comprehensive. Until then, enjoy.
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Bedtime
Now that I am the kind of insomniac that daydreams about
sleep, I sometimes wonder what was so terrible about bedtime when I was
little. At the appointed hour, my mother
would walk into the den with a flourish, clap her hands three times as though
she were summoning the palace guards and that was it. Bedtime.
There was no such thing as arguing or tantrums or any of the
time-honored tactics that proved themselves effective in other households. She simply wasn't that kind of a mother. I resisted with the empassioned fervor of an
unjustly incarcerated inmate awating a twelfth hour pardon, feverishly watching
the clock, holding out, hope against hope, only to be sent to my room, to my
bed, to sleep. I resented it, of
course. Each night found me wide awake,
staring at the ceiling and stewing in my five year old rage. Later, I could hear my mother's high pitched
squeal of a laugh, promptly followed by my father heh-heh-hehing over the din
of applause on the TV set: they were watching The Johnny Carson Show -- and I hated
them for it. Obviously, the good life
began after bedtime.
Summers in Charleston with my grandparents were basically
more of the same, thanks to my grandmother's uncanny sense of timing. My brothers and I were usually bathed, pajama-ed,
prayed up and tucked in before we realized what hit us. As everyone sat on the porch and ate boiled
peanuts and crablegs, their lively conversation would ebb and flow through my
open window. I would watch their words fall and crash against the ceiling. Sometimes I would sit up and lean against the
headboard of my bed to look out the window, in an effort to steady myself
amidst this sea of verbal chaos. Within
the confines of this strange and powerful lullaby, I fell asleep with wide open
eyes, eyes that saw so many ideas unfold within me that I would often wonder,
for days on end, how they would emerge.
In my world, dreams were for the sleepless. I was quite young, but old enough to realize
that no dreamlike state could compare to the world I inhabited when my
imagination unleashed itself. This was
the time to be awake, I thought to myself each time I fell asleep at that
windowsill, while so much in me was alive.
I knew that I couldn't go on like this.
I had to think of something. I
had a lot of living to do.
Strong reading material seemed to be the only available
remedy.until adulthood offered other more suitable options, so an innocuous
little scheme was hatched: I sandwiched books inbetween the mattress and the
box spring of my bed and read them when everyone assumed that I was
asleep. The wee hours of the morning
would find me writing little vignettes by the light of a huge industrial sized
flashlight that I had "found" underneath the kitchen sink. The light was so powerful, I would attempt to
conceal it by playing "tent", a precarious undertaking which involved
propping up pillows against the sheets to create a secret cubbyhole, lined with
comic books, typing paper and hardbacks galore.
I couldn't have been happier.
From the doorway, it looked as though the bed was attempting to digest a
sunbeam. I lay there quietly in the
light and the darkness, wallowing in a wordy undertow that spun about the room
and into my head, languishing there.
I should have known that nothing that good could last for
very long. It took her awhile, but my
grandmother caught me one night, sitting amidst a pile of Jet magazines,
reading an encyclopedia. This incident,
like so many others I starred in, became something else to sit on the porch and
laugh about, but for me it confirmed what I already knew: being a child meant having to endure the
necessary indignity of constantly being told what I could and could not do,
where I could and could not go, what I could and could not have, what I was and
was not capable of.
Nowadays I can watch my dreams come true but bedtime happens
whenever it happens. I have my days,
days when I wake up in my loftbed fully dressed and surrounded by paperwork, my laptop still on and running and resting in my lap, the TV going, the phone
ringing me into a semi-conscious state.
I also have days when I go through the ritual of bathing and putting on
my bedclothes and calling it a night, even if it is noon and I have to pull the
shades to do it. As I lie there, wide
awake and dreaming, somewhere in the netherregions of my subsconscious thoughts
I can still lean against that windowsill to see bright stars in a blue-black
sky. I realize, as I begin to fade
that in all the years since childhood,
there are moments when I have found myself wishing that someone would walk into
the room and clap their hands and say that word. More often than not, I am left to clap my own hands as I fall
asleep to the lull of the cityscape and it's mourning tide.
