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.

———

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.

I crawl my over­tired body out of bed, and slink down the stairs to finagle some coffee out of the pot. It hits my lips, warm and seductive, then punches my brain and my eyes begin to better translate my surroundings. My wife strolls over and kisses me on the cheek.

“I love you, woman.” I say this casually, as if I say it to her a hundred times a day, which I do. She giggles a little, embraces me, and walks out of the kitchen shaking her head.

My day progresses. I head to work.

———

I’m home, but I don’t announce it like on those old sitcoms from the nineteen­seventies; I don’t get off on the idea of sounding like Archie or Dick. I kiss my wife, and tell her goodnight. The bed is calling my name. I hope the dreams are good ones. I’m going to try the wife’s side again.

My wife is lovely in lace. Her eyes gaze into mine, then flick down toward my lips. When her eyes return, I kiss her deep, full on the mouth, and slide my tongue gently along her lower lip. I take her slowly, then more quickly, and I hear her breathing faster and I feel her slide against my skin. She screams once or twice, then collapses against the pillow. I lie next to her, squeeze her body against mine, and realize that the sheets are the wrong color. For the life of me, I don’t know why I put up with pink satin, but these sheets are neither pink, nor satin, but a deep sultry red. Like blood or roses.

What is wrong with me? I push the idea out of my head and take my wife two more times before the dream fades away.

———

“Good morning, love,” I say as I pour the afternoon coffee into my mug. “I had a wonderful dream about you today.” She glares at me because she already knows where this is going.

“Why can’t you be a regular guy, and think about cars or tools sometimes? Your mind is always in the toilet.”

“Cause you wouldn’t think I was so cute if I did.” And I’m right. She’d wonder why I cared to spend more time with my stupid tools than with my beautiful wife.

I pinch her butt as she stalks away.

———

After a dinner of roasted chicken breasts – which I make plenty of comments about – she corners me in the kitchen and asks about my dream. She leans in close at first, but as I tell her in great and sultry detail, she hides a subtle and controlled look of fear behind her eyes. The aura she wafts toward me is almost accusatory. Nothing ever unfolds the way it does in dreams, I suppose.

———

Work is, as every other day, the same. I take the same phone calls from the same users having the same problems with the same email addresses. This computer can’t see that one, that one can’t see this, why can’t they all play nice?

“Yes, sir. It’s as simple as that.” Pause. “Okay, talk to you tomorrow.” I hang up the phone, put my elbows on my desk, let one forearm fall and raise the other to massage that small bundle of nerves in my temple that tells me I am too old for this shit. You know, another day at the office.

———

I walk in the door and my wife doesn’t even say hello before asking where I got this crazy idea about red sheets on our bed. I tell her I’ve got no clue, but I’m dog tired and need to hit the hay before I fall over. She doesn’t say another word, but watches me all the way up the stairs. I can feel it.

———

Today I sleep on my side, and the nightmares return. I see a dragon, drawn in tattoo ink, and the background is a deep­, tanned flesh color. The dragon first sits, back arched and neck bent, as still as a bum firecracker, but then, slowly, deliberately, the head turns to me and the eyes pierce mine and stare through me. The dragon’s mouth opens, the teeth glimmer for a moment, and I hear a reedy sucking noise. I feel my skin warm, as if the sun had just come out after a bleak rain.

As the tidal wave of flame begins to envelope the flesh of my cheeks, I wake in my bed, screaming. My wife does not come upstairs, and I wonder if the scream was real or not. I think it was.

I meander downstairs and find no coffee in the pot, no wife in the house, and too much paranoia, too much dread scratching at the back of my eyes. I step outside and have a smoke on the stoop. Just as I am drawing the last puff of deadly tar from my cigarette, I see her car pull around the corner at the end of the block. Wonder where she’s been.

She parks the car, grabs three bags from Krueger’s, and heads into the house without a word spoken.
I follow her in, acting likewise.

———

“I guess I just don’t understand why I have to do everything around here. You can’t even make coffee without me.”

She says this as she freshens the water in the coffee maker. She takes the caraffe to the sink, pours cold water from the tap into the pot, and carries it back over. After she pours the water into the tank – she spilled a little on the counter – the caraffe goes on the burner, and she pushes the start button.

I watch her perform this whole scene, awestruck. At least in her mind, awestruck.

“You don’t do everything. I am capable of washing my own socks.”

“Then why don’t you?” She stops preparing her cup, turns to me, and leans one hand on the counter. The other finds it’s home on her hip, and she taps one set of toes on the linoleum. She doesn’t say anything, only looks at me expectantly.

“Uh, well, I…” I don’t know what else to say.

“That’s what you say every time, dear.”

She only glares at me for a moment before going back to making herself a cuppa, and I’m left standing there, mouth open like a fool.

The only thing I can think in this moment is that I don’t know where the love has gone. The next moment, I wonder if the love was ever there in the first place.

———

The flashing lights are incredibly bright tonight, I think as we walk through the fair gates, tickets in hand. She’s wearing that purple dress I like, the one with the above­-the-knee split on one side. It’s modest enough, but man she’s got great legs, so I don’t have anything to complain about. I look over, and she’s got this big grin on her face, and her eyes are so wide they might see everything all at once. And she is even brighter. Then she looks at me, and speaks.

“Oh, Jerrod, thank you. This is going to be a wonderful evening.”

———

I sit up in bed. Beads of sweat stream down my cheeks. Sweat, or maybe tears, I’m not sure which. But I am sure that she called me Jerrod. Why did she call me Jerrod?

I crawl out of bed and pull on a T­shirt. I go downstairs, and I look questioningly at my wife. She rolls her eyes, and I pour myself a cup of coffee.

“Who’s Jerrod?” I ask.

I look at her expectantly, and she only gapes back at me. The tables have turned.

Her face seats three looks, one after another: it starts at confusion, melts into worry, and stagnates at anger.

She stands there, as if expecting me to cry or something. I only look at her. She stares back at me, hatred brewing in her eyes. Yeah. I’m the paranoid one, I think.

“So how’s it feel to know, buck­o?” She asks.

———

I don’t remember having a gas can in the garage, but the police say I did. And they say I emptied it onto the wife’s side before I set it alight. She was asleep, and never felt a thing, they say. And they found me walking down 2nd Avenue in my bathrobe and boxers, with my fly open for the world to see.

September 15, 2009
Canyon Lake, TX