Sleep Mattress Quotes

In Paris she found Magnus, who was living in a garret apartment and paiting, an occupation for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. He let her sleep on a mattress by the window, and in the night, when she woke up screaming for Will, he came and put his arms around her, smelling of turpentine. "The first one is always the hardest," he said. "The first?" "The first one you love who dies," he said. "It gets easier, after.

Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your mattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights

Right now I want you naked against me," Dean says. "I want to wake up cold because you’ve hogged all the blankets. I want to feel your leg between mine, your hair in my face, your arm flung across my chest. I want to find myself on the edge of the bed in the morning because you’ve sprawled all over the mattress. I want to sleep with you.

I don't want to hear any bullshit about how 'forgiveness' helps you sleep better at night,' because that's not true. (My seven layer mattress is amazing.)

That was some first kiss,” she said with a tired, contented expression. I scanned her face and smiled. “Your last first kiss.” Abby blinked, and then I fell onto the mattress beside her, reaching across her bare middle. Suddenly the morning was something to look forward to. It would be our first day together, and instead of packing in poorly concealed misery, we could sleep in, spend a ridiculous amount of the morning in bed, and then just enjoy the day as a couple. That sounded pretty damn close to heaven to me. Three months ago, no one could have convinced me that I would feel that way. Now, there was nothing else I wanted more. A big, relaxing breath moved my chest up and down, relaxing slowly as I fell asleep next to the second woman I’d ever loved.

She was on the far side, leaving two cold feet of mattress between them. He knew that she'd fall asleep like that... and then gradually move over until she was plastered against him. Then he could go to sleep, too.

Some people are like that - always searching fro something better, never satisfied.,Makes you wonder if they ever get a good night's sleep. They must toss and turn, dreaming about a softer mattress or a plumper pillow.

I felt bad for Lulu because I've been Lulu. It's really hard when you realize the guy you've been dating is basically a high schooler at heart. It make you feel like Mary Kay Letourneau. It's the worst. Until I was thirty, I only dated boys, as far as I can tell. I'll tell you why. Men scared the shit out of me. Men know what they want. Men make concrete plans. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn't on the floor. Men tip generously. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men go to the dentist. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they're thinking of kissing you.

Men know what they want. Men make concrete plans. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men tip generously. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men go to the dentist. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before. (Okay, maybe men aren’t exactly like this. This is what I’ve cobbled together from the handful of men I know or know of, ranging from Heathcliff Huxtable to Theodore Roosevelt to my dad.) Men know what they want and they don’t let you in on their inner monologue, and that is scary.

I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us.

The blaring of an alarm jarred me out of sleep. I shot up in bed, and for a second, I couldn’t see anything. Fear punched through me. Had the contacts rolled into the back of my eyes while I slept and severed my optic nerves? Was that even possible? Aly groaned somewhere nearby. “What is that sound?” “I don’t know. I’ve gone blind,” I said, voice laced with panic. Fuck, that was the second time I’d forgotten to disguise it. “What?” she yelped, and the mattress shifted with her movement. “Help me,” I whimpered, Batman-style, and yes, it was just as pathetic as it sounds. “Oh my god,” she said with a shaky laugh. “You’re not blind. Your dumb baklava slid sideways.

I think, maybe, I fell in love with your patterns and inconsistencies, like the way you squeak in your sleep. And the way your heart beats. I want to be your heartbeat just to be that much closer to you, living there inside your chest, making a home under your flesh. And waking up to sunshine is nice, I guess, but waking to your smile is like having sunshine in my bed every morning, warmth radiating from your side of the mattress. And I would love to make you a regular thing; pillow talk in evenings, coffee and muffins in the morning, making everyday as stunning as this one. take me in small doses; I'll take you all at once.

I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.

Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window -- or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls.

Julian guessed even murderers needed regular mattresses and didn’t actually sleep on platforms made of skulls.

Then they, too, lay down on mattresses stuffed with straw, hearing the music of the flies to buzz them to sleep, holding each other's hands as they dozed, thinking of the miracles by which love works its will in the world.

I want to sleep in your bed." Her thighs tingled. "You must really like my mattress." He grinned. I never heard it called that, but yeah.

Dark swarmed behind her eyelids and, in jerky seconds of sleep, she dreamed the dark came into her. Dark came insidious, up her nose and into her ears, damp fingers of dark proposed themselves to each of her body openings. She put her hand over her mouth and nose, put her other hand over her vagina, clenched her buttocks, turned one ear to the mattress and sacrificed the other ear to the intrusion of the dark.

(On differences between men and boys) Men know what they want. Men make concrete plans. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn't on the floor. Men tip generously. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men go to the dentist. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they're thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before.

He had slept next to her for thirty-six years, and the mattress felt different without her weight, however slight, and without the rhythm of her breath the dark had no measure. There were times he woke feeling cold from the lack of the heat that once came from between her thighs and behind her knees. He might have even called her, if he could have momentarily forgotten that he already knew everything she could possibly say.

I am lying in the same bed where my mother died so long ago; on the same mattress, beneath the same black wool coverlet she wrapped us in to sleep. I slept beside her, her little girl, in the special place she made for me in her arms. I think I can still feel the calm rhythm of her breathing; the palpitations and sighs that soothed my sleep. . . . I think I feel the pain of her death. . . . But that isn't true. Here I lie, flat on my back, hoping to forget my loneliness by remembering those times. Because I am not here just for a while. And I am not in my mother's bed but in a black box like the ones for burying the dead. Because I am dead. I sense where I am, but I can think. . .

In living this way, we discover new opportunities for comfort and enjoyment. Where the younger person may have tossed and turned throughout a sleepless night, the older man or woman can possibly feel the pleasure that comes from lying on a good mattress, resting one's weary bones and overcharged intellect, whether or not one sleeps throughout the hours of darkness.

Her straw-colored pigtails did not qualify her to be Rapunzel and could not be spun to gold by imp fingers, she was too active to be Sleeping Beauty, too outspoken to be Cinderella, too keen on tall fellows to be Snow White. She held little carriage with sleeping upon legumes to display her regal daintiness and imagined that the only result would be a mushy, green stain on the underside of her mattress. Her eyes met the criteria only of the evil, ice queen.

How necessary Sundays have become. I reach for them like sleeping lovers on the other side of my earth or my mattress.

This bed was a piece of shit when you were used to sleeping on a mattress that was sourced from Sri Lankan unicorn feathers.

If I end up with a cricked neck, you’re giving me a massage tomorrow,” he said, leaning his head against Tipp’s mattress, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He closed his eyes and said, “Go to sleep, Kiva.” She couldn’t keep the tears from welling this time, knowing he was only staying there for her. “Gods, don’t start crying again,” Caldon mumbled, somehow sensing her overflowing emotions, even with his eyes closed. “Come here.” He reached out blindly and drew her closer until her head rested on his shoulder, and only then did he repeat, “Sleep, Kiva.

There are many different things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them. It is difficult to hide an airplane, for instance, because you generally need to find a deep hole or an enormous haystack, and sneak the airplane inside in the middle of the night, but it is easy to hide a secret about an airplane, because you can merely write it on a tiny piece of paper and tape it to the bottom of your mattress any time you are at home. It is difficult to hide a symphony orchestra, because you usually need to rent a soundproof room and borrow as many sleeping bags as you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about a symphony orchestra, because you can merely whisper it into the ear of a trustworthy friend or music critic. And it is difficult to hind yourself, because you sometimes need to stuff yourself into the trunk of an automobile, or concoct a disguise out of whatever you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about yourself because you can merely type it into a book and hope it falls into the right hands. My dear sister, if you are reading things I am still alive, and heading north to try and find you.

I remember waking up that first morning and seeing you next to me in your sleeping bag, all curled up, and I felt so…so pleased to see you. It was like the feeling you got when you were a kid and you had a friend stay the night. While you were sleeping you’d forget he was there and then you’d wake up and see him sleeping on the mattress on the floor and you’d remember and you’d feel all happy. You’d think, Oh that’s right, good old Jimbo’s here—we’re gonna have fun today!

Some nights the bed is endlessly wide, some nights it contains all the loneliness in the world. Some nights it is soft and promising, when waiting for sleep is the best part of the day. Some nights, like this one, the bed is hard, the mattress an enemy that wants to force your thoughts into the wrong track, that seems to want to mock you for lying there alone, without another body to rest into and against.

They arrived home again to a most peculiar sight. The small garden at the front of the Banana House had been transformed. A tidal wave of cushions, beanbags, quilts, hearth rugs, and sleeping bags appeared to have swept up the lawn and broken at the wall. From Indigo's window a multicolored rope of knotted bedsheets came snaking out and ended among the cushions. As Micheal and Caddy watched, a mattress emerged and fell to the ground, followed by a rain of pillows. "Indigo!" shouted Caddy, jumping out of the car. Indigo's and Rose's heads appeared in the window above. "It's all right, Caddy!" Indigo called cheerfully. "We've been doing it all the time you've been gone." "We keep finding more stuff to land on!" added Rose. "Look!

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters' huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

She didn’t note the time of moonrise or when a great horned owl took a diurnal dive at a blue jay. From bed, she heard the marsh beyond in the lifting of blackbird wings, but didn’t go to it. She hurt from the crying songs of the gulls above the beach, calling to her. But for the first time in her life, did not go to them. She hoped the pain from ignoring them would displace the tear in her heart. It did not. Listless, she wondered what she had done to send everyone away. Her own ma. Her sisters. Her whole family. Jodie. And now Tate. Her most poignant memories were unknown dates of family members disappearing down the lane. The last of a white scarf trailing through the leaves. A pile of socks left on a floor mattress. Tate and life and love had been the same thing. Now there was no Tate. “Why, Tate, why?” She mumbled into the sheets, “You were supposed to be different. To stay. You said you loved me, but there is no such thing. There is no one on Earth you can count on.” From somewhere very deep, she made herself a promise never to trust or love anyone again. She’d always found the muscle and heart to pull herself from the mire, to take the next step, no matter how shaky. But where had all that grit brought her? She drifted in and out of thin sleep.

The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that American will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure...

On Sunday morning, I awoke to find two cockroach corpses crushed on my mattress. I must have rolled on top of them in my sleep. Two

It’s late when I wake up, past breakfast. Yet my limbs are still heavy with sleep, aching, pinning me to the mattress.

When the Moon is your pillow, And your blanket is the ground, And your mattress is the willow, You are sleeping upside-down.

My lips steadily inflate, reminding me of the air mattress I sleep on every night.

Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress and wall—even in sleep, a tableau of friction.

I folded my pillow in half to support me as I sat up. Sleep still felt far away, and I was in need of soothing. I reached down into the gap between the mattress and the wall and sought my old faithful, its edges rounded and softened with years of handling. Jane Eyre. I could open up the novel at any page and immediately know where I was in the story, could almost visualize the next sentence before I reached it.

Sleep still felt far away, and I was in need of soothing. I reached down into the gap between the mattress and the wall and sought my old faithful, its edges rounded and softened with years of handling. Jane Eyre.

Lying on the mattress, the soft susurrations of breath surrounded her as the others succumbed to sleep. But Charlie’s mind couldn’t stop racing, couldn’t stop worrying, wouldn’t stop assembling and reassembling the information she had.

We got lots of secrets, Will. You Apollo guys can't have all the fun. Our campers have been excavating the tunnel system under Cabin Nine for almost a century. We still haven't found the end. Anyway, Leo, if you don't mind sleeping in a dead man's bed, it's yours-Jake Suddenly Leo didn't feel like kicking back. He sat up, careful not to touch any of the buttons. The counselor who died-this was his bed-Leo Yeah. Charles Beckendorf-Jake Leo imagined saw blades coming through the mattress, or maybe a grenade sewn inside the pillows. He didn't, like, die IN this bed, did he-Leo No. In the Titan War, last summer-Jake The Titan War, which has NOTHING to do with this very fine bed-Leo "The Titans," Will said, like Leo was an idiot. The big powerful guys that ruled the world before the gods. They tried to make a comeback last summer. Their leader, Kronos, built a new palace on top of Mount Tam in California. Their armies came to New York and almost destoyed Mount Olympus. A lot of demigods died trying to stop them-Will I'm guessing this wasn't on the news-Leo It seemed like a fair question, but Will shook his head in disbelief. You didn't hear about Mount St. Helens erupting, or the freak storms across the country, or that building collapsing in St Louis-Will Leo shrugged. Last summer, he'd been on the run from another foster home. Then a truancy officer caught him in New Mexico, and the court sentenced him to the nearest correction facility-the Wilderness School. Guess I was busy-Leo Doesn't matter. You were lucky to miss it. The thing is, Beckendorf was one of the first casualties, and ever since then-Jake Your cabin's been cursed-Leo

One of my favourite stories is about an old woman and her husband – a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims. She was only able to keep him satisfied with her unparalleled cooking, to which he was a complete captive. One day, he bought her a fat liver to cook for him, and she did, using herbs and broth. But the smell of her own artistry overtook her, and a few nibbles became a few bites, and soon the liver was gone. She had no money with which to purchase a second one, and she was terrified of her husband’s reaction should he discover that his meal was gone. So she crept to the church next door, where a woman had been recently laid to rest. She approached the shrouded figure, then cut into it with a pair of kitchen shears and stole the liver from her corpse. That night, the woman’s husband dabbed his lips with a napkin and declared the meal the finest he’d ever eaten. When they went to sleep, the old woman heard the front door open, and a thin wail wafted through the rooms. Who has my liver? Whooooo has my liver? The old woman could hear the voice coming closer and closer to the bedroom. There was a hush as the door swung open. The dead woman posed her query again. The old woman flung the blanket off her husband. – He has it! She declared triumphantly. Then she saw the face of the dead woman, and recognized her own mouth and eyes. She looked down at her abdomen, remembering, now, how she carved into her own belly. Next to her, as the blood seeped into the very heart of the mattress, her husband slumbered on. That may not be the version of the story you’re familiar with. But I assure you, it’s the one you need to know.

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters’ huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his forefoot raised and then go on carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

The thing was,I knew exactly how I had survived.Mary had been on to something with her anchor theory,but she was a little unclear on the logistics. Jack told me he dreamed of me every night, and it was as if I were really there. I was in a dark place,and he helped me see. Now Jack was invading my dreams every night. Not a dream Jack,but the real thing. I know this because during one of the first dreams, he told me what the tattoo on his arm said. Ever Yours. The next morning,I rushed to draw the image from memory, and then I researched it. The symbols were artistic versions of ancient Sanskrit words.They stood for eternity and belonging. Ever Yours, just as Jack had said. There was no way my subconscious could have come up with that explanation on its own. I'd finally found the connection Meredith had longed for,the tether from an anchor that kept a Forfeit alive. They were bound together through their dreams,sustaining each other during sleep. When I was asleep,Jack would come to my bedroom and sit on the end of the mattress and face me.He came to me every night,talking about his uncle's cabin, the Christmas Dance, how my hair hides my eyes,how my hand fits in his, how he loves me.How he'll never leave. I spent the first few dreams saying "I'm sorry" over and over and over, until he threatened to stay away if I didn't stop.

To change that thought process, state the obvious: “I was/am terribly depressed.” Now for the different thought. Say to yourself, “So how depressed am I?” Now go for the less obvious. “I am so depressed…” Now think of something not obvious. How about, “I’m so depressed I sleep under my mattress”?

Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah, Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decesion of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending into your bosom Stupid relationship inflted in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all into pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter into the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora Into the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum-flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appeareance Today it seems there is nothing so treacherous as Women and Art Now my ferocious heart is rinning towards an impossible death Vertigoes of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth I will die Oh what are these happening within me? I am failing to fetch out my hand and my palm From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings 300000 children are gliding toward the district of Shubha's bosom Millions of needles are now running from my blood into Poetry Now the smuggling of my obstinate leg is trying to plunge Into the death killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom of words In violent mirrors on each wall of the room I am observing After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings.

I trust you are enjoying your stay in our castle?” I asked at last. “Would that I were, Your Highness. But I am afraid my sleep last night was quite troubled. This morning I identified the source of my bruises” – here he reached into a pocket of his waistcoat – “as a pea that had been tucked beneath my mattress.

If it had been my decision, you would still be sleeping, and I would be hoping every hour of every night you lived was filled with the foulest of dreams.” “My only nightmare in this moment is the quality of the mattress you saw fit to place me on,” said Simon. “Really, brother, have you never heard of lumbar support?

She seems to be resuscitating me from far away as soon as I start to weaken. I close my eyes and see myself fleeing from the bed to the mattress on the floor, and from there to the couch, and the rug, and Melanie following me sleepily from one place to the next. I shout that I can’t fall asleep within the magnetic field of another body, and she mumbles, half asleep, “Come on, try a little longer.” And so for a few bleary-eyes, sleepwalking weeks—and as if having no knowledge of it the next morning—she gave me the nocturnal portion of a withdrawal treatment from the loneliness: one night we spent a whole hour together, the next night two hours, then a week of regression and crisis as I tried to adapt to the horrific idea of a shared blanket. Until suddenly, out of utter exhaustion, I discovered that our bodies had already reached an agreement—even mine, the illiterate one, must have caught on, because one night I woke up from a deep sleep and realized how beautifully we turned over together in bed, embraced.

A sudden gust of wind made the branches outside shake and jitter. He couldn’t help imagining the long, bony fingers of the trees scraping against the glass. When he was a little kid, he’d had a firm belief in universally observed monster rules. He’d been sure, for example, that if he kept all parts of himself on the mattress and shrouded beneath blankets, if he kept his eyes closed, and if he pretended to be asleep, then he’d be safe. He didn’t know where he’d gotten the idea from. He did remember his mother saying he’d smother himself if he kept sleeping with his head under the comforter. Then one night—quite randomly—he fell asleep with his head above the covers like a normal person, and no monster got him. Over time he got spottier about observing his safety precautions, until he routinely slept with an arm dangling off the side of his bed and his feet kicked free of the sheets. But right then, at the sound of the wind, for one panicky moment, all he wanted was to burrow under the blankets and never come out. Tap. Tap.

Once the corpse had been dressed, complete with a nightcap which kept the jaw closed and created the impression that the dead person was but sleeping, it was placed in an open coffin. This was lined with a sawdust mattress, to absorb the by-products of early decomposition, and scattered with pungent herbs such as rosemary to disguise the smell.

he had developed a system that enabled him to sleep in clean sheets every night without the trouble of bed changing. He’d been proposing the system to Sarah for years, but she was so set in her ways. What he did was strip the mattress of all linens, replacing them with a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine. He thought of this invention as a Macon Leary Body Bag. A body bag required no tucking in, was unmussable, easily changeable, and the perfect weight for summer nights. In winter he would have to devise something warmer, but he couldn’t think of winter yet. He was barely making it from one day to the next as it was. At moments—while he was skidding

As a teenager, he made screaming noises at night in his room, like a deranged person. He threw his electrical pencil sharpener at the walls. His mother was downstairs in bed, crying a little, mostly asleep. Brian, in his room, felt as if he might explode, might already—in a slow and minuscule and lingering way—be exploding. He needed to explode. He lay there motionless, but he also lay there exploding. He smooshed his head into his mattress, making sounds like, 'aaaghh,' and 'ngggg,' and then went downstairs. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom. He started yelling things. His mother woke, warm and puffy from sleep, and—after Brian finished yelling—whispered that she was sorry for being a bad mother. Her face, ensconced in hair and pillow, was dramatic and friendless as something cocooning. She looked like a little girl, and Brian stood there, taking this in—trying to get at the meaning of things, to fit at once into his mind all the false and watery moments of his life. He stood there, and he looked. He looked some more. And then he went back to his room. He wrote down on paper: 'Don’t hurt any­one again.

I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed a ton more weight to make me sleep.

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.

I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.

In Paris she found Magnus, who was living in a garret apartment and painting, and occupation for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. He let her sleep on a mattress by the window, and in the night, when she woke up screaming for Will, he came and put his arms around her, smelling of turpentine. "The first one is always the hardest," he said. "The first?" "The first one you love who dies," he said. "It gets easier, after.

Deeply lost in the night. Just as one sometimes lowers one's head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around people are asleep. It's just play acting, an innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on mattresses, in sheets, under blankets; in reality they have flocked together as they had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a people, under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsed where once they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the ground, breathing quietly. And you are watching, are one of the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning stick from the brushwood pile beside you. Why are you watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.

He pointed out that the mattress in the master boudoir was handspring with each spring wrapped in cashmere It’s like sleeping on air, Miss Williams, he said as he showed her the suite’s ‘menu of pillows’ on a silver-embossed card As if she was the kind of woman who’d amputate her aspirations to become one of his decorative appendages She had to politely extricate herself from his intentions without jeopardizing the business

Well, what do you think?” said Ford. “It’s a bit squalid, isn’t it?” Ford frowned at the grubby mattresses, unwashed cups and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear that lay around the cramped cabin. “Well, this is a working ship, you see,” said Ford. “These are the Dentrassis’ sleeping quarters.” “I thought you said they were called Vogons or something.” “Yes,” said Ford, “the Vogons run the ship, the Dentrassis are the cooks; they let us on board.” “I’m confused,” said Arthur. “Here, have a look at this,” said Ford. He sat down on one of the mattresses and rummaged about in his satchel. Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.

We sleep and nap in bed--my two piled up mattresses on the bare wooden floor. We are silent, dreamy. She surveys my photographs crowded on the wall. I have no particular subject, no special theme. The Brooklyn Bridge at dawn will do, tugs and their milky wake, elms fading in the fading light, my postman and his green mailbag. It's the shooting the excites me. Printing is the fatiguing task after the action, the dressing of the game after the hunt.

Johnny's Sh*temare by Stewart Stafford Amber did sh*t in Johnny's bed, She did it while he was sleeping, Right by Johnny's head. Stank awake on a mattress lumpy, He saw what Amber had left him, A hot, steaming grumpy. Browned off, he leapt to his feet, No dogs stained his manhood, Or crapped on the sheet. Now he's sued her for defamation, And they call her Amber Turd, For her reckless defecation. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Out of all the cells you've been in, your first cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered others like yourself, doomed to the same fate ... I had been dueling for four days with the interrogator, when the jailer, having waited until I lay down to sleep in the blindingly lit box, began to unlock my door ... I wanted to lie for another three-hundredths of a second with my head on the pillow and pretend I was sleeping. But ... the guard ordered: 'Get up! Pick up your bedding!' ... [B]y the time I arrived, the inhabitants of Cell 67 were already asleep on their metal cots with their hands on top of the blankets. At the sound of the door opening, all three started and raised their heads for an instant ... And those three lifted heads, those three unshaven, crumpled pale faces, seemed to me so human, so dear, that I stood there, hugging my mattress, and smiled with happiness. And they smiled. And what a forgotten look that was - after only one week! 'Are you from freedom?' they asked me.

system that enabled him to sleep in clean sheets every night without the trouble of bed changing. He’d been proposing the system to Sarah for years, but she was so set in her ways. What he did was strip the mattress of all linens, replacing them with a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine. He thought of this invention as a Macon Leary Body Bag. A body bag required no tucking in, was unmussable, easily changeable, and the perfect weight for summer nights.

One morning Profane woke up early, couldn't get back to sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn't turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slipped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and another fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as he was tying it. All the rests of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn't that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemihl, he'd known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.

We got lots of secrets, Will. You Apollo guys can't have all the fun. Our campers have been excavating the tunnel system under Cabin Nine for almost a century. We still haven't found the end. Anyway, Leo, if you don't mind sleeping in a dead man's bed, it's yours-Jake Suddenly Leo didn't feel like kicking back. He sat u, careful not to touch any of the buttons. The counselor who died-this was his bed-Leo Yeah. Charles Beckendorf-Jake Leo imagined saw blades coming through the mattress, or maybe a grenade sewn inside the pillows. He didn't, like, die IN this bed, did he-Leo No. In the Titan War, last summer-Jake The Titan War, which has NOTHING to do with this very fine bed-Leo "The Titans," Will said, like Leo was an idiot. The big powerful guys that ruled the world before the gods. They tried to make a comeback last summer. Their leader, Kronos, built a new palace on top of Mount Tam in California. Their armies came to New York and almost destoyed Mount Olympus. A lot of demigods died trying to stop them-Will I'm guessing this wasn't on the news-Leo It seemed like a fair question, but Will shook his head in disbelief. You didn't hear about Mount St. Helens erupting, or the freak storms across the country, or that building collapsing in St Louis-Will Leo shrugged. Last summer, he'd been on the run from another foster home. Then a truancy officer caught him in New Mexico, and the court sentenced him to the nearest correction facility-the Wilderness School. Guess I was busy-Leo Doesn't matter. You were lucky to miss it. The thing is, Beckendorf was one of the first casualties, and ever since then-Jake Your cabin's been cursed-Leo

People in developing countries frequently do all of the things that make us fear for our backs: they engage in hard physical labor, sleep on primitive mattresses, walk long distances in worn shoes, ride in uncomfortable vehicles on bumpy roads, and receive limited medical care. If chronic back pain were really due to structural damage, we would expect them to have terrible back problems. They don’t. Doctors working in these areas report that people rarely complain of back pain (in the United States, back pain is second only to colds and flu as a reason for physician visits).

Sophia had been hard pressed not to laugh when MacLean had tripped over one of the floorboards she and Angus had pried loose. Better yet, MacLean had ripped his lace-edged sleeve on a broken nail in the doorframe of his bedchamber. She knew because she'd heard his loud curse from the hallway. Sophia had expected him to roar at the servants and demand things be repaired, but all he did was ask Angus for a hammer to protect himself from the loose boards and stray nails that seemed to plague MacFarlane House. To Sophia's delight, Angus had gloomily replied that there weren't enough hammers in the whole of Scotland to do that. Since Angus had left MacLean in his bedchamber, they hadn't heard a word from him. Perhaps the man was sleeping, although how could anyone sleep in such a damp room and with such a lumpy mattress and smoky chimney? More likely, he was awake and seething at being forced to endure such horrid conditions. She wished she had been there to witness his reaction to the threadbare furniture with broken springs and flat cushions, the inadequate bed coverings for the chilly chamber (it faced north, where the wind was fiercest), a window that was nailed slightly open, and more.

It was still dark when Jack left on Friday morning. He sat beside me on the bed and pulled my sleeping body upward, holding me. I awakened with a murmur, and he held my head in one hand, long fingers cupping firmly around my skull. His rich baritone was soft in my ear. “You do what you have to. I won’t stand in the way. But when I come back, you’re not shutting me out, you hear? I’m going to take you somewhere . . . a nice long vacation . . . and we’re going to talk, and I’m going to hold you while you cry until you feel better. And we’ll get you through this.” He kissed my cheek and smoothed my hair, and lowered me back to the mattress.

Ms. Mori offered me her cheek to kiss and Sonny offered me his hand to shake. He showed me the door and I slid home through the cool sheets of night and into my own bed, Bon asleep and hovering above me in his rack. I closed my eyes and, after a spell of darkness, floated on my mattress across a black river to the foreign country that needed no passport to visit. Of its many gnomic features and shady denizens I now recall only one, my mind wiped clean except for this fatal fingerprint, an ancient kapok tree that was my final resting place and on whose arthritic bark I laid my cheek. I was almost asleep within my sleep when I gradually understood that the knot of gnarled wood on which my ear rested was actually an ear itself, curled and stiff, the wax of its auditory history encrusted in the green moss of its twisted canal. Half of the kapok tree towered above me, half was invisible below me in the rooted earth, and when I looked up I saw not just one ear but many ears swelling from the bark of its thick trunk, hundreds of ears listening and having listened to things I could not hear, the sight of those ears so horrible it hurled me back into the black river. I woke drenched and gasping, clutching the sides of my head. Only after I kicked off the damp sheets and looked under the pillow could I lie down again, trembling. My heart still beat with the force of a savage drummer, but at least my bed was not littered with amputated ears.

Oscar hung his jacket on the back of a chair and undid the first few buttons of his checked shirt. Camille’s fingers trembled as she reached for the lamp on the dresser and twisted the knob, lowering the wick until the light it gave off was that of a small candle’s flame. She sat on the bed, and the other side of the hand-rolled mattress dipped with Oscar’s weight. She didn’t know how to look at him, if she should lie down or just come to her senses and ask him to leave. God, she wasn’t doing any of this right. “You sleep sitting up?” he asked. Camille smiled, thankful he’d lightened the moment enough for her to lean back onto one of the pillows. Turning on her side, she saw he’d already taken the same position. They lay without touching, without talking, only looking. His eyes grazed her body, slowly absorbing the pink skin of her neck, the slight curves of her breasts, and the arc of her hip. He didn’t need to lay a finger on her for the breath to stall in her lungs. He breeched the few inches between them by sliding his hand atop hers, his skin warm and dry while beads of nervous sweat formed hot on her back. Camille reached out and let her fingertip travel along the fullness of his lower lip and down the curve of his chin. With one sweeping movement, Oscar pulled her tight against his chest and kissed her. A sensation kindled between her hips, spreading to every nerve ending in her body. This was it, the fire and heat she’d always yearned for. All these years, and Oscar had been right in front of her the whole time.

Gradually he covered his chiseled self, sitting in the armchair at last to pull on his boots. When that was done he came to the bedside and sank all the way down on his knees. His arms folded atop the mattress. His chin sank onto his arms. He looked at her, wordlessly. His eyes wore the raw marks of too little sleep. His hair bent in odd directions. He needed to shave. Her hand, without awaiting her permission, strayed from the mattress and settled against his cheek, to know what that texture was like. He turned his head and pressed his lips into her palm. Soft, unutterably soft, his kiss, where her skin tingled from the coarse touch of his tiny beard-bristles. Eyes closed, he stayed just so for several seconds, as though breathing in her hand’s particular scent.

The careful, embroidered stitches delineated a coil of some sort. It looked rather like a halved snail shell, but the interior was divided into dozen of intricate chambers. "Is that a nautilus?" he asked. "Close, but no. It's an ammonite." "An ammonite? What's an ammonite? Sounds like an Old Testament people overdue for smiting." "Ammonites are not a biblical people," she replied in a tone of strained forbearance. "But they have been smited." "Smote." With a snap of linen, she shot him a look. "Smote?" "Grammatically speaking, I think the word you want is 'smote.' " "Scientifically speaking, the word I want is 'extinct.' Ammonites are extinct. They're only known to us in fossils." "And bedsheets, apparently." "You know..." She huffed aside a lock of hair dangling in her face. "You could be helping." "But I'm so enjoying watching," he said, just to devil her. Nonetheless, he picked up the edge of the top sheet and fingered the stitching as he pulled it straight. "So you made this?" "Yes." Though judging by her tone, it hadn't been a labor of love. "My mother always insisted, from the time I was twelve years old, that I spend an hour every evening on embroidery. She had all three of us forever stitching things for our trousseaux." 'Trousseaux.' The word hit him queerly. "You brought your trousseau?" "Of course I brought my trousseau. To create the illusion of an elopement, obviously. And it made the most logical place to store Francine. All these rolls of soft fabric made for good padding." Some emotion jabbed his side, then scampered off before he could name it. Guilt, most likely. These were sheets meant to grace her marriage bed, and she was spreading them over a stained straw-tick mattress in a seedy coaching inn. "Anyhow," she went on, "so long as my mother forced me to embroider, I insisted on choosing a pattern that interested me. I've never understood why girls are always made to stitch insipid flowers and ribbons." "Well, just to hazard a guess..." Colin straightened his edge. "Perhaps that's because sleeping on a bed of flowers and ribbons sounds delightful and romantic. Whereas sharing one's bed with a primeval sea snail sounds disgusting." Her jaw firmed. "You're welcome to sleep on the floor." "Did I say disgusting? I meant enchanting. I've always wanted to go to bed with a primeval sea snail.

With one final flip the quarter flew high into the air and came down on the mattress with a light bounce. It jumped several inches off the bed, high enough for the instructor to catch it in his hand. Swinging around to face me, the instructor looked me in the eye and nodded. He never said a word. Making my bed correctly was not going to be an opportunity for praise. It was expected of me. It was my first task of the day, and doing it right was important. It demonstrated my discipline. It showed my attention to detail, and at the end of the day it would be a reminder that I had done something well, something to be proud of, no matter how small the task. Throughout my life in the Navy, making my bed was the one constant that I could count on every day. As a young SEAL ensign aboard the USS Grayback, a special operation submarine, I was berthed in sick bay, where the beds were stacked four high. The salty old doctor who ran sick bay insisted that I make my rack every morning. He often remarked that if the beds were not made and the room was not clean, how could the sailors expect the best medical care? As I later found out, this sentiment of cleanliness and order applied to every aspect of military life. Thirty years later, the Twin Towers came down in New York City. The Pentagon was struck, and brave Americans died in an airplane over Pennsylvania. At the time of the attacks, I was recuperating in my home from a serious parachute accident. A hospital bed had been wheeled into my government quarters, and I spent most of the day lying on my back, trying to recover. I wanted out of that bed more than anything else. Like every SEAL I longed to be with my fellow warriors in the fight. When I was finally well enough to lift myself unaided from the bed, the first thing I did was pull the sheets up tight, adjust the pillow, and make sure the hospital bed looked presentable to all those who entered my home. It was my way of showing that I had conquered the injury and was moving forward with my life. Within four weeks of 9/11, I was transferred to the White House, where I spent the next two years in the newly formed Office of Combatting Terrorism. By October 2003, I was in Iraq at our makeshift headquarters on the Baghdad airfield. For the first few months we slept on Army cots. Nevertheless, I would wake every morning, roll up my sleeping bag, place the pillow at the head of the cot, and get ready for the day.

Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes - but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit ; as though your dress maker' s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines' alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats' wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you're sunbathing or taking grass.

It's okay, Harley. I'm just down the hall." He didn't say anything but I could tell he was afraid. I closed the door gently behind me and tiptoed down the hall. I stood in the kitchen, my heart pounding. I was listening for his cry, but there was not sound at all. I went back into the hall. Harley had got out of bed and put his hands under the door. His fingers were coming out from underneath. They were blue and luminous, like starfish. When I opened the door - I was careful not to scrape the skin off the back of his hands - he looked up from where he lay on the floor with saucer eyes and implored me, "I want to sleep with you." I put out my arms and he climbed into them. I carried him down the hall, in his singlet and his Kermit underpants. I put Harley down in the middle of our mattress. He curled like a kitten into the hollow.

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora In to the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize S

I prop my guitar up against the nightstand. Then I turn toward the bed and fall into it face first. The mattress is soft but firm, like a sheet of steel wrapped in a cloud. I roll around, moaning loud and long. “Oh, that’s good. Really, really good. What a grand bed!” Sarah clears her throat. “Well. We should probably get to sleep, then. Big day tomorrow.” The pillow smells sweet, like candy. I can only imagine it’s from her. I wonder if I pressed my nose to the crook of her neck, would her skin smell as delicious? I brush away the thought as I watch her stiffly gather a pillow and blanket from the other side of the bed, dragging them to . . . the nook. “What are you doing?” She looks up, her doe eyes widening. “Getting ready for bed.” “You’re going to sleep there?” “Of course. The sofa’s very uncomfortable.” “Why can’t we share the bed?” She chokes . . . stutters. “I . . . I can’t sleep with you. I don’t even know you.” I throw my arms out wide. “What do you want to know? Ask me anything—I’m an open book.” “That’s not what I mean.” “You’re being ridiculous! It’s a huge bed. You could let one rip and I wouldn’t hear it.” And the blush is back. With a vengeance. “I’m not . . . I don’t . . .” “You don’t fart?” I scoff. “Really? Are you not human?” She curses under her breath, but I’d love to hear it out loud. I bet uninhibited Sarah Von Titebottum would be a stunning sight. And very entertaining. She shakes her head, pinning me with her eyes. “There’s something wrong with you.” “No.” I explain calmly, “I’m just free. Honest with myself and others. You should try it sometime.” She folds her arms, all tight, trembling indignation. It’s adorable. “I’m sleeping in the nook, Your Highness. And that’s that.” I sit up, pinning her gaze right back at her. “Henry.” “What?” “My name is not Highness, it’s fucking Henry, and I’d prefer you use it.” And she snaps. “Fine! Fucking Henry—happy?” I smile. “Yes. Yes, I am.” I flop back on the magnificent bed. “Sleep tight, Titebottum.” I think she growls at me, but it’s muffled by the sound of rustling bed linens and pillows. And then . . . there’s silence. Beautiful, blessed silence. I wiggle around, getting comfy. I turn on my side and fluff the pillow. I squeeze my eyes tight . . . but it’s hopeless. “Fucking hell!” I sit up. And Sarah springs to her feet. “What? What’s wrong?” It’s the guilt. I’ve barged into this poor girl’s room, confiscated her bed, and have forced her to sleep in a cranny in the wall. I may not be the man my father was or the gentleman my brother is, but I’m not that much of a prick. I stand up, rip my shirt over my head. and march toward the window seat. I feel Sarah’s eyes graze my bare chest, arms. and stomach, but she circles around me, keeping her distance. “You take the bloody bed,” I tell her. “I’ll sleep in the bloody nook.” “You don’t have to do that.” I push my hand through my hair. “Yes, I do.” Then I stand up straight and proper, an impersonation of Hugh Grant in one of his classic royal roles. “Please, Lady Sarah.” She blinks, her little mouth pursed. “Okay.” Then she climbs onto the bed, under the covers. And I squeeze onto the window bench, knees bent, my elbow jammed against the icy windowpane, and my neck bent at an odd angle that I’m going to be feeling tomorrow. The light is turned down to a very low dim, and for several moments all I hear is Sarah’s soft breaths. But then, in the near darkness, her delicate voice floats out on a sigh. “All right, we can sleep in the bed together.” Music to my ears. I don’t make her tell me twice—I’ve fulfilled my noble quota for the evening. I stumble from the nook and crash onto the bed. That’s better.

(From Chapter 9: Hearts and Gizzards) I’m lying on the hard and narrow bed, on the mattress made of coarse ticking, which is what they call the covering of a mattress, though why do they call it that as it is not a clock. The mattress is filled with dry straw that crackles like a fire when I turn over, and when I shift it whispers to me, hush hush. It’s dark as a stone in this room, and hot as a roasting heart; if you stare into the darkness with your eyes open you are sure to see something after a time. I hope it will not be flowers. But this is the time they like to grow, the red flowers, the shining red peonies which are like satin, which are like splashes of paint. The soil for them is emptiness, it is empty space and silence. I whisper, Talk to me; because I would rather have talking than the slow gardening that takes place in silence, with the red satin petals dripping down the wall. I think I sleep. [...] I’m outside, at night. There are the trees, there is the pathway, and the snake fence with half a moon shining, and my bare feet on the gravel. But when I come around to the front of the house, the sun is just going down; and the white pillars of the house are pink, and the white peonies are glowing red in the fading light. My hands are numb, I can’t feel the ends of my fingers. There’s the smell of fresh meat, coming up from the ground and all around, although I told the butcher we wanted none. On the palm of my hand there’s a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go. When he touched me, the bad luck came off on him. I think I sleep. I wake up at cock crow and I know where I am. I’m in the parlour. I’m in the scullery. I’m in the cellar. I’m in my cell, under the coarse prison blanket, which I likely hemmed myself. We make everything we wear or use here, awake or asleep; so I have made this bed, and now I am lying in it.

Xavier looked at Shane's outfit of pants, pistol, and no shirt, and then glanced up at the porch. "You sleep outside?" Shane turned and looked through the screen door. There was no sign of Agnes or the sheets that had been tumbled there. A woman who could wake up fast and then remove evidence slightly. His kind of girl. "Yep. I like fresh air." Xavier nodded, his exasperation evaporating into amusement. "Right. Miss Agnes up yet?" "I wouldn't know." "Right." Xavier gave a lazy grin and walked around Shane. "Quite a woman, that Miss Agnes." "Yep," Shane said, following him up the walk. "Bit sharp-tempered, though." "I'd call her fiery." Xavier turned his head toward Shane and nodded amiably. "Fiery. That's good." They walked up the path, Rhett ambling with them. Xavier trooped up the steps to the porch and spared a glance at the air mattress and Shane's T-shirt, crumpled in a ball. "Restless night, son?" "Slept like a baby." "I bet you did," Xavier said, and went into the kitchen.

Stopping outside my brother’s bedroom door, I take a deep breath and try to prepare myself for whatever happens next. I knock on his door and hear an unhappy groan echo from inside the room. I grin despite the reason for my visit. Where I have always been an early riser, my brother will sleep the day away if he’s allowed. I knock again and call out, “Eir, can I come in? I need to talk to you.” I hear muffled sounds that indicate he most likely has his head buried under his pillow in an effort to block out my voice. I knock again anyway. “Eirnin — come on, it’s after ten. Time to start your day.” I hear something soft thump against the other side of the door and have to bite my lip to keep from laughing. I count to ten in my head and then shout, “I’m counting to five and then I’m coming in, Eir!” We call this fair warning in our house. “No counting!” I hear him bellow, no longer muffled. The mattress groans, I hear two large feet hit the floor and he says, “Why do you hate sleep and the people who enjoy it?

Stopping outside my brother’s bedroom door, I take a deep breath and try to prepare myself for whatever happens next. I knock on his door and hear an unhappy groan echo from inside the room. I grin despite the reason for my visit. Where I have always been an early riser, my brother will sleep the day away if he’s allowed. I knock again and call out, “Eir, can I come in? I need to talk to you.” I hear muffled sounds that indicate he most likely has his head buried under his pillow in an effort to block out my voice. I knock again anyway. “Eirnin — come on, it’s after ten. Time to start your day.” I hear something soft thump against the other side of the door and have to bite my lip to keep from laughing. I count to ten in my head and then shout, “I’m counting to five and then I’m coming in, Eir!” We call this fair warning in our house. “No counting!” I hear him bellow, no longer muffled. The mattress groans, I hear two large feet hit the floor and he says, “Why do you hate sleep and the people who enjoy it?

You don’t have to sleep on the floor. I know it’s uncomfortable.” “I think I owe you more than a night on the floor.” “You broke your arm tonight. It’ll be stiff, even if you healed it. I don’t want my ally wounded.” She knew, after all the ways she’d flirted with him before, that any invitation could be misconstrued. Especially in a bed with little space between them, entirely in the dark. But there was no misconstruing the way her stomach somersaulted when she felt the mattress shift as he sat down. When he lay beside her and warmth like fire spread through her from her head to her toes. Nothing good would come of this. This was Alistair Lowe, she reminded herself. The one everyone had declared her greatest rival. The boy her mother had warned her about. After they’d slain all the other champions—her ex-best friend among them—it would only be the two of them left. Maybe that would be months from now. Maybe it would be days. But that was what this alliance led up to. Not a kiss stolen in the dark, or a priceless gift given without being asked. A duel. Sobered, Isobel turned so her back was to him. Several minutes had passed, and Alistair hadn’t moved. She wasn’t even sure if he was still awake. “Tell me a monster story,” she whispered. He stirred, then drowsily murmured, “Have you ever heard of a nightcreeper?” “I haven’t.” “They’re drawn to places with complete darkness because their bodies are made of shadow.” Isobel noted the complete darkness around them and slid deeper beneath the blankets. “They can see in the darkness no better than you can, but their eyes are burned away by the faintest light. That’s what they search for—eyes. New ones that don’t scorch in the daylight, that they pluck out and use to replace their own. So they can finally feast outside.” Isobel’s dread receded, her fears replaced by make-believe ones. When she did fall asleep, she didn’t dream of Briony’s demise. She didn’t dream of how it would feel to kiss Alistair or to curse him. She dreamed of fears that, for once, felt surmountable.

Just meat on a stick with the vague sense that somewhere between lavish femininity And state violence lay a mediocre thing called liberty. Still, to be able to sleep at all’s a procedure of waking. Everybody Has to live somewhere being that we are here where most Of us are not welcome. Did you know transcendental Homelessness was a thing. But I dreamed this dream On a physical mattress. On an actual floor in a room with a door That I pay and pay for. If you write you can forge A substance that is other than the woman of substance You are. If you do it to such a point you can find Yourself declining substance altogether. It happens. It is a danger. But there will Always be the idea of a bath or a sleep in a bed or a dream In the head of a woman who is even beautiful visibly Or at least groomed, or somewhat fresh Or like that most domestic of bugs the cockroach Dragging his ponderous suit of armor across the floor Or clean sheets when it’s raining and I love you so much And I think Gimme Shelter, which is a movie I’ve never seen.

I loved my mother so much during that time; if I’d had the language I would have called her the love of my life and no uttered words in all of time could have been more true. We must have spent nearly every minute of our lives together—I don’t remember any babysitters—and in the hours we were apart, when she had to teach or attend a meeting, I missed her so much I felt as if an arm or a leg had been taken away—no, more, a heart or brain, some part of me that was undoubtedly the best of what I had to offer. But the separations were delicious in their own way, because they made our reunions all the more sweet. Upon my mother’s return I was showered in praise and love. I was so good and brave, not crying or getting myself in trouble, successfully completing whatever game or task she’d assigned before leaving me alone. My mother picked me up and kissed my head and let me wrap my arms around her long neck. She called me guai. At night we went to sleep on the same twin mattress, her arm flung casually over my shoulder, my hand clutching a strand of her hair.

Yawning, I crawl into bed as Aron sharpens his knives, and I'm just about to drift off to sleep when the lumpy hay mattress sinks in on one side, and then a big body crawls into bed next to me.   "For real?" I groan as Aron promptly shoves his way onto the narrow mattress and proceeds to take up most of the bed. "You don't even have to sleep."   “You know this is how I protect you best.”   "What's going to attack me while I sleep?" I ask, yawning.   "A wizard could send poisonous snakes to rise up from the floor, creep into bed and kill you."   Jesus. I'm awake now. I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling as Aron shifts next to me, trying to get comfortable. "So undead, snakes from the floor, gods wandering the earth…anything else I should know about in this world of yours so I can never sleep again? Dragons? Killer mermen?"   "Don't be foolish. Mermen are long dead."   "You didn't say dragons were."   "Do not go looking for dragons, then," he says, and I don't know if he's joking or not.   "I'm not a big fan of this whole place, just so you know."   "Neither am I. 

Worse, the long, sleepless night in a room stored with mementoes of Alton's life confronted Rusty with the tracks of a ghost. Like a mattress sagging under the weight of an unseen body and a fluffed pillow impressed with the indentation of its head, the room seemed to mold itself around Alton's absence. The shirts that hung over creased pants in the small armoire remembered the boy's shoulders. Toy soldiers, headless and one-legged after a childhood of tabletop battles, did not desert the formation Alton had last ordered. A half-finished model airplane on his desk did not complete itself. As Rusty pitched from side to side in the narrow bed, his eyes fell upon object after object, which each in its own voice seemed to utter Alton's name as a kind of question--a question, he well knew, that would never be answered. THe chorus of Alton's things, silently protesting their perplexed abandonment, disturbed Rusty's sleep like crickets chirping in the dark. It felt to him as if everything is the room was hardening around Alton's absence And what was a ghost, anyway, he began to understand while lying in a dead man's bed, but a felt absence, a keen unpresence?

Men should not sleep on beds; they shall sleep wherever their tired knees gave up. We are stars! And stars produce heat! Let that never translate to a boring life. There is one object in the universe that eats up more light than any other design and that is a mattress that loves you too much. Things can kill without being crafty. The bedsheets are warm and kind and yet their comfort has killed more man than any murderous hand in history. A star that knows it is a star looks like a person who is always in transformation, figuring things out, exploring identities, and making a mess. They brush their hair back and rub their eyes. A heart in debate. A tongue that agreed on humor. Tired feet. A juggled mind. He might be a police officer turned trapeze artist turned pilot. A father who is also a volunteer, a brother, a warrior, a companion, a neighbor, a rival, and a student. We can see sweat leave our pores and so grow discouraged that we cannot see the progress of internal efforts. But do not be disheartened. Our souls do sweat. It just looks a lot like mundane life incidents that break us, such as the first step of the morning or simply walking home again.

Laughter greeted Clint’s ears at the open doorway—rich, soft laughter, like the creamy center of a melted caramel. The kind of laughter that made you want to wrap yourself up in it and stay a while. Clint stopped in the doorway, spellbound. The boys sat on different sides of an antique four-poster bed, sunk knee-deep in patchwork quilts, sheets and what he would swear was an old fashioned feather-tick mattress. But it was the vision between the little boys that held Clint’s attention. Emma Lewis had the same rich, dark, burnt-copper hair as her sons, and the burns-if-she’s-out-in-the-sun-longer-than-one-hour skin of most redheads. Beneath the wrinkled T-shirt and jeans she’d fallen asleep in, he could tell she was neither too thin nor too heavy, just the luscious type of figure Clint decided long ago he liked on women. She also possessed that wonderful laughter that had stirred more than his heart to life. But when she raised the deepest cornflower-blue eyes to him, Clint nearly moaned. If he let himself, he could get lost in that open, clear gaze forever. “Can I help you?” The remnants of sleep in her voice brought on visions of hearing her voice after a night of endless passion.

Melinda Pratt rides city bus number twelve to her cello lesson, wearing her mother's jean jacket and only one sock. Hallo, world, says Minna. Minna often addresses the world, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud. Bus number twelve is her favorite place for watching, inside and out. The bus passes cars and bicycles and people walking dogs. It passes store windows, and every so often Minna sees her face reflection, two dark eyes in a face as pale as a winter dawn. There are fourteen people on the bus today. Minna stands up to count them. She likes to count people, telephone poles, hats, umbrellas, and, lately, earrings. One girl, sitting directly in front of Minna, has seven earrings, five in one ear. She has wisps of dyed green hair that lie like forsythia buds against her neck. There are, Minna knows, a king, a past president of the United States, and a beauty queen on the bus. Minna can tell by looking. The king yawns and scratches his ear with his little finger. Scratches, not picks. The beauty queen sleeps, her mouth open, her hair the color of tomatoes not yet ripe. The past preside of the United States reads Teen Love and Body Builder's Annual. Next to Minna, leaning against the seat, is her cello in its zippered canvas case. Next to her cello is her younger brother, McGrew, who is humming. McGrew always hums. Sometimes he hums sentences, though most often it comes out like singing. McGrew's teachers do not enjoy McGrew answering questions in hums or song. Neither does the school principal, Mr. Ripley. McGrew spends lots of time sitting on the bench outside Mr. Ripley's office, humming. Today McGrew is humming the newspaper. First the headlines, then the sports section, then the comics. McGrew only laughs at the headlines. Minna smiles at her brother. He is small and stocky and compact like a suitcase. Minna loves him. McGrew always tells the truth, even when he shouldn't. He is kind. And he lends Minna money from the coffee jar he keeps beneath his mattress. Minna looks out the bus window and thinks about her life. Her one life. She likes artichokes and blue fingernail polish and Mozart played too fast. She loves baseball, and the month of March because no one else much likes March, and every shade of brown she has ever seen. But this is only one life. Someday, she knows, she will have another life. A better one. McGrew knows this, too. McGrew is ten years old. He knows nearly everything. He knows, for instance, that his older sister, Minna Pratt, age eleven, is sitting patiently next to her cello waiting to be a woman.

When the light was off, I would put my hand under my pillow, searching for the photo of my mother that I had taken from my father’s dresser. In it, my mother is lying in a hammock in our backyard, holding me and smiling at the camera. There is an orange tree above us. I am asleep in her arms, her chin is resting on my head, her hand is on my back. Her hair is long and her curls soft. I used to run my finger over the photo, the length of her dress, from her shoulders to her feet. I would hold the photo to my chest and then tuck it back under my pillow and go to sleep. One night when I was about eight years old, I went to find the photo and it was gone. I threw my pillow onto the ground. I jumped off my bed and lifted the mattress onto its side. How could I have lost it, something so important? I started screaming, tears falling down my cheeks. My father came in and saw me sitting there, red-faced, my eyes wet, my room torn apart. He calmly put my mattress back on the frame and took me in his arms. “Pichoncita,” he said. “No te preocupés. The photo is fine. I put it back in my dresser. It’s time to stop looking at it every night.” “Pero I want to look at it every night.” He shook his head and held me tight. “Cariño, put it out of your mind. It is too heavy of a weight for you to bear.

And these two very old people are the father and mother of Mrs Bucket. Their names are Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina. This is Mr Bucket. This is Mrs Bucket. Mr and Mrs Bucket have a small boy whose name is Charlie Bucket. This is Charlie. How d’you do? And how d’you do? And how d’you do again? He is pleased to meet you. The whole of this family – the six grown-ups (count them) and little Charlie Bucket – live together in a small wooden house on the edge of a great town. The house wasn’t nearly large enough for so many people, and life was extremely uncomfortable for them all. There were only two rooms in the place altogether, and there was only one bed. The bed was given to the four old grandparents because they were so old and tired. They were so tired, they never got out of it. Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine on this side, Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina on this side. Mr and Mrs Bucket and little Charlie Bucket slept in the other room, upon mattresses on the floor. In the summertime, this wasn’t too bad, but in the winter, freezing cold draughts blew across the floor all night long, and it was awful. There wasn’t any question of them being able to buy a better house – or even one more bed to sleep in. They were far too poor for that. Mr Bucket was the only person in the family with a job. He worked in a toothpaste factory, where he sat all day long at a bench and screwed the little caps on to the tops of the tubes of toothpaste after the tubes had been filled. But a toothpaste cap-screwer is never paid very much money, and poor Mr Bucket, however hard he worked, and however fast he screwed on the caps, was never able to make enough to buy one half of the things that so large a family needed. There wasn’t even enough money to buy proper food for them all. The only meals they could afford were bread and margarine for breakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbage for lunch, and cabbage soup for supper. Sundays were a bit better. They all looked forward to Sundays because then, although they had exactly the same, everyone was allowed a second helping. The Buckets, of course, didn’t starve, but every one of them – the two old grandfathers, the two old grandmothers, Charlie’s father, Charlie’s mother, and especially little Charlie himself – went about from morning till night with a horrible empty feeling in their tummies. Charlie felt it worst of all. And although his father and mother often went without their own share of lunch or supper so that they could give it to him, it still wasn’t nearly enough for a growing boy. He desperately wanted something more filling and satisfying than cabbage and cabbage soup. The one thing he longed for

Carrying her over to his bed, he slowly laid her on it. She sank into the mattress with a dreamy murmur of a sigh. Though the protective impulse he had felt toward her earlier had returned full force, the soft and sensual moan from her lips filled him with a moment's blinding lust. Dear God. A tremor of hunger ran through him. His stare traveled over her lax face and down her white neck to her creamy chest. He swallowed hard, gazing at her breasts. Somehow, he became fixated on them again. Heart pounding, he moved slowly and with caution sat on the edge of the bed. Desire slammed through his veins, but he only meant to look. She was a harlot, she wouldn't care, as long as he had money, which he did, lots of it. Yet it amazed him that such beauty could be purchased for the taking. She was exquisite, with the dusky fringe of her lashes fanned above her cheeks in sleep. The thick and wavy cloud of her satiny brown hair flowed back from the pale oval of her face and spilled across his pillow. He marveled at the creamy shimmer of her complexion in the firelight, her flushed cheeks like delicate pink-tinted porcelain. His gaze traveled over her smooth forehead, the delicate twin arches of her light brown eyebrows, and her small, prettily formed nose. He would not have guessed her any common sort of wench. Then his attention strayed to her pink lips in ever-growing desire, a gathering smolder darkening his eyes. She had a very charming chin, slightly pronounced, and hinting at a firm stubbornness of character. He wanted to nibble its smooth rounded curve.

He looks around in amazement, taking in the mess. 'Where- Do you really sleep here? Perhaps you ought to set fire to your rooms as well.' 'Maybe,' I say, guiding him to my bed. It is strange to put my hand on his back. I can feel the warmth of his skin through the thin linen of his shirt, can feel the flex of his muscles. It feels wrong to touch him as though he were a regular person, as though he weren't both the High King and also my enemy. He needs no encouragement to sprawl on my mattress, head on the pillow, black hair spilling like crow feathers. He looks up at me with his night-coloured eyes, beautiful and terrible all at once. 'For a moment,' he says, 'I wondered if it wasn't you shooting bolts at me.' I make a face at him. 'And what made you decide it wasn't?' He grins up at me. 'They missed.' I have said that he has the power to deliver a compliment and make it hurt. So, too, can he say something that ought to be insulting and deliver it in such a way that it feels like being truly seen. Our eyes meet, and something dangerous sparks. He hates you, I remind myself. 'Kiss me again,' he says, drunk and foolish. 'Kiss me until I am sick of it.' I feel those words, feel them like a kick in the stomach. He sees my expression and laughs, a sound full of mockery. I can't tell which of us he's laughing at. He hates you. Even if he wants you, he hates you. Maybe he hates you the more for it. After a moment, his eyes flutter closed. His voice falls to a whisper, as though he's talking to himself. 'If you're the sickness, I suppose you can't also be the cure.' He drifts off to sleep, but I am wide awake.

An extensive biomedical literature has established that individuals are more likely to activate a stress response and are more at risk for a stress-sensitive disease if they (a) feel as if they have minimal control over stressors, (b) feel as if they have no predictive information about the duration and intensity of the stressor, (c) have few outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor, (d) interpret the stressor as evidence of circumstances worsening, and (e) lack social support-for the duress caused by the stressors. Psychosocial stressors are not evenly distributed across society. Just as the poor have a disproportionate share of physical stressors (hunger, manual labor, chronic sleep deprivation with a second job, the bad mattress that can't be replaced), they have a disproportionate share of psychosocial ones. Numbing assembly-line work and an occupational lifetime spent taking orders erode workers' sense of control. Unreliable cars that may not start in the morning and paychecks that may not last the month inflict unpredictability. Poverty rarely allows stress-relieving options such as health club memberships, costly but relaxing hobbies, or sabbaticals for rethinking one's priorities. And despite the heartwarming stereotype of the "poor but loving community," the working poor typically have less social support than the middle and upper classes, thanks to the extra jobs, the long commutes on public transit, and other burdens. Marmot has shown that regardless of SES, the less autonomy one has at work, the worse one's cardiovascular health. Furthermore, low control in the workplace accounts for about half the SES gradient in cardiovascular disease in his Whitehall population.

No,” she croaked, trying to shrink away from him. “You’re not supposed to be here. Don’t come near me; you’ll catch it. Please go—” “Quiet,” Kev said, sitting on the edge of the mattress. He caught Win as she tried to roll away, and settled his hand on her forehead. He felt the burning pulse beneath her fragile skin, the veins lit with raging fever. As Win struggled to push him away, Kev was alarmed by how feeble she had grown. Already. “Don’t,” she sobbed, writhing. Weak tears slid from her eyes. “Please don’t touch me. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you to get sick. Oh, please go. … ” Kev pulled her up against him, her body living flame beneath the thin layer of her nightgown, the pale silk of her hair streaming over both of them. And he cradled her head in one of his hands, the powerful battered hand of a bare-knuckle fighter. “You’re mad,” he said in a low voice, “if you think I would leave you now. I’ll see you safe and well no matter what it takes.” “I won’t live through this,” she whispered. Kev was shocked by the words, and even more by his own reaction to them. “I’m going to die,” she said, “and I won’t take you with me.” Kev gripped her more closely, letting her fitful breaths blow against his face. No matter how she writhed, he wouldn’t let go. He breathed the air from her, taking it deep into his own lungs. “Stop,” she cried, trying desperately to twist away from him. The exertion caused her flush to darken. “This is madness. … Oh, you stubborn wretch, let me go!” “Never.” Kev smoothed her wild, fine hair, the strands darkening where her tears had tracked. “Easy,” he murmured. “Don’t exhaust yourself. Rest.” Win’s struggles slowed as she recognized the futility of resisting him. “You’re so strong,” she said faintly, the words born not of praise, but damnation. “You’re so strong. … ” “Yes,” Kev said, gently using a corner of the bed linens to dry her face. “I’m a brute, and you’ve always known it, haven’t you?” “Yes,” she whispered. “And you’re going to do as I say.” He cradled her against his chest and gave her some water. She took a few painful sips. “Can’t,” she managed, turning her face away. “More,” he insisted, bringing the cup back to her lips. “Let me sleep, please—” “After you drink more.

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.

Stark Electric Jesus Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide

Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it. Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least thirty minutes on most days but not later than two to three hours before your bedtime. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as eight hours to wear off fully. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it hard for you to fall asleep at night. Nicotine is also a stimulant, often causing smokers to sleep only very lightly. In addition, smokers often wake up too early in the morning because of nicotine withdrawal. Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off. Avoid large meals and beverages late at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion, which interferes with sleep. Drinking too many fluids at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate. If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep. Some commonly prescribed heart, blood pressure, or asthma medications, as well as some over-the-counter and herbal remedies for coughs, colds, or allergies, can disrupt sleep patterns. If you have trouble sleeping, talk to your health care provider or pharmacist to see whether any drugs you’re taking might be contributing to your insomnia and ask whether they can be taken at other times during the day or early in the evening. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night. Relax before bed. Don’t overschedule your day so that no time is left for unwinding. A relaxing activity, such as reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual. Take a hot bath before bed. The drop in body temperature after getting out of the bath may help you feel sleepy, and the bath can help you relax and slow down so you’re more ready to sleep. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. Get rid of anything in your bedroom that might distract you from sleep, such as noises, bright lights, an uncomfortable bed, or warm temperatures. You sleep better if the temperature in the room is kept on the cool side. A TV, cell phone, or computer in the bedroom can be a distraction and deprive you of needed sleep. Having a comfortable mattress and pillow can help promote a good night’s sleep. Individuals who have insomnia often watch the clock. Turn the clock’s face out of view so you don’t worry about the time while trying to fall asleep. Have the right sunlight exposure. Daylight is key to regulating daily sleep patterns. Try to get outside in natural sunlight for at least thirty minutes each day. If possible, wake up with the sun or use very bright lights in the morning. Sleep experts recommend that, if you have problems falling asleep, you should get an hour of exposure to morning sunlight and turn down the lights before bedtime. Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy.