I wrote this one in a fit one afternoon after a crazy dream I had. Lucky for me (but unlucky for the other guy) the story isn’t really based on my wife. Well, not directly. –C.L.S.

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All I want to do is sleep. I toss and turn, and stare up at the ceiling in the darkness; I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. I hear my pocket watch across the room ticking away the quarter­seconds. It’s a Waltham, late­-90s model, removed a hundred years. My wife gave it to me for my birthday eight, ten years ago? I can’t remember. Let me sleep, dear God, and I might. But now? Now, all I get are splotches of color in my vision as it rolls across the warbled tick of the fan, the tocking tick of my watch, and the tick, tick, tick of my eyes as they twitch, sometimes the left, sometimes the right. All I want to do is sleep.

And then it comes. All I had to do was roll over, wouldn’t you know it? And the lilac scent of my wife’s aroma fills my nostrils, and her soft pillow engulfs my head, and the smooshy sleep indention where her body lies on any given night wraps it’s arms around me in an embrace of deepest passion. I’m out like a tenth grader on NyQuil.

But there she is, floating encased in silken scarves that hug and tease her body the way I’ve only dreamed of, and she is beautiful. I have only to reach out and touch her, grasp her fingers, reach the way David reached for God in Michaelangelo’s collective works, take her hand – but she melts away into the darkness, then into the flame, then into my mind as I drift back into my body, hovering over my side of the bed, my wretched, uncomfortable, hard side of the bed. My feather pillow so old that only the stems remain. I hate the way they gouge my eyelids while I sleep. (more…)