Sleep
Sleep slithered up out of a hole in the floor. His horns were rubber and his tails were silver. Leaving damp spots on the carpet, he moved from here to there, making motion with his belly. When he got there, he turned his form into a balcony. He felt quiet and central as a balcony, so he rested. His mental spaces alternated with iron spirals, making a structural stability and a barrier to distraction. She came over to kneel at his railing. Sleepwalking. Her senses were lax and hair unfurled around her neck. She came to kneel in the presence of the fog.
“Remember oh most gracious fog that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”
Fog came close out of curiosity, but then resumed his implacable distance. No one had ever spoken to him that way before. Balcony felt her praying elbows in his neck and wanted to dissolve. When the pressure became too intense, he did. She fell down and down into the upper flower bed where the workmen had already trampled the peonies. “Ah, my peonies, you are dusty,” she said. She shared their dust by rubbing it into the skin of her breasts. “I kiss you, my dirt, my underground alertness,” she said.
Catherine Ednie (louder) works as a systems analyst in the New York metropolitan area. Her work appears in In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Literature (Impassio Press), and in various locations online.
qarrtsiluni 