Season to Sleep - Story Excerpt

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Pete is snoring so fucking loud I’m amazed I ever fell asleep. I tighten the moldy blanket around myself on the bare mattress. Water is leaking somewhere by the window, the blinds are bent and cocked. Outside the streetlamp’s orange light gives the room an eerie glow. I turn to the wall. I’d kill for just one of those pillows from the Macy’s. Ray, that colossal asshole, says if I want something I’ve got to earn it myself – including blankets and boots. It’s no use; can’t sleep. Standing up off the floor, blood rushes through my head and things go dark for a second. I stay very still and let it pass.

The linoleum is cold, and spikes like lightning up my legs. The kitchen is small; a bald bulb attracts a moth above the stove. At the round wooden table, my back against the cabinets, I watch soft, orange snow drift outside. Footsteps, and Angie materializes in the kitchen. Her ratty pink and green robe is open, revealing a black thong and tank top. She’s not wearing a bra. Mascara smudged and sparkling across her eyes, like some trailer park sorceress. She might transform into a fire-breathing bird and soar away at any moment.
            Hey Jules, she says. Joining the League of Insomniacs and Serial Killers tonight?
            Guess so.
            Right on. She pours some Cocoa Puffs and wipes off a spoon with her robe. No milk, fuck, she says.
            There’s some beer on the bottom shelf, I offer.
            She considers it, and lets out a laugh. Yeah, why not? You want one?
            Sure.
            Setting down the cans with a hollow tap, blue and brown curls drape over her freckled skin. God, she’s beautiful.
            When do you turn 21? she asks.
            I gulp the brown liquid, almost choking to hold in a cough. Tomorrow, I say.
            She laughs. It comes so easy to her. Liar, she says. You wouldn’t be here if that were true.
            You got me.
            So really, when?
            Four years. Another lie, though not by much. She doesn’t seem to notice.
Heat pours down my throat and sits comfortably in my bones. She is Pete’s older sister, but you’d never know it by looking at them. First off, Pete’s a massive jock with a ruddy face like an alcoholic, and a temper like one too. The only thing me and Pete ever agree on is how much we hate Ray and his fucking car, and his fucking mustache, and his fucking house with its cigar smell that clings to our hair and clothes. The state must be pretty desperate if they’ve got to approve sleezeballs like him.
Angie even crunches her food in a sexy way. Ringlets of color fall along her breasts. I reach out to touch, but my hand only makes it as far as the cereal bowl.
            What happened to your parents? she asks.
            I shrug. Why’s she bringing this up now?
            Come on, Jules, she whispers. Tell me. I want to know.
            I can never resist when she calls me that, and she’s well aware. I never knew my Dad, I say, taking another gulp of beer. I think he’s in Mexico or something.
            What about your Mom?
            I snap the tab off the beer can. I dream about her a lot. Well, not her, her funeral. I dream about her funeral, I say in a lower voice than I mean to.
            She passed?
            Yep, I reply. This isn’t so bad. I drink again.
It comes out of nowhere. A chill; my heart shuddering wildly in my chest. All the blood in my body is trying to get to different places at once. I see cold, blue hands and sightless eyes. A slack mouth with a rivulet of spit. It’s filling my brain. I hold my head, my gut clenching, trying to bury it. Angie is speaking, but I can’t hear her. All I hear is my pulse, pumping in my ears. She’s hugging me, rocking. No, stop. Stop. I don’t hug her back.

Angie waits until the tears dry on my face, and lets me go. Standing up, she bends down and presses her lips to my forehead. So gentle, I close my eyes and breathe in rum and strawberries, only a hint of smoke. Let me love you, Angie, I say. She laughs, but this time it stings. She takes the rest of my beer. I can hear the liquid fizz as it slips down the drain. Don’t grow up too fast, boy, she says. I keep my eyes shut, not wanting to watch as she disappears.

I don’t go back to bed. Shoving on Pete’s boots and coat, I walk out into the snow. Krumph, krumph. Krumph, krumph. Cold January air runs its fingers through my hair and around my neck. I pull out his cigarettes and light one, holding the flame from the wind. Breathe out and up at the sky. The stars look like bowling pins, aligned and teetering. I’ve never been bowling.

 I turn left down the street for no particular reason. Garbage spills out over the bins. Wrapping paper and broken ornaments blow and glisten. One house on the street’s already taken down their decorations, their home is all naked and exposed in the night lights. It’s better that way. They’ve got nothing to hide. This holiday garbage, it’s just a distraction. It isn’t real. I see the comfort in it though – the comfort in something warm and beautiful when the world is so cold and shitty.

I haven’t thought about Mom for a long time. I get those nightmares when I’m unconscious, but in the waking world, she never crosses my mind. Who has time to remember things that don’t even exist anymore? Who’s to say they ever did? Fuck, I haven’t thought about Gabe for a long time. It’s like remembering a movie you saw once, years ago. That’s not your life. Just a plot, rehearsed and rehearsed. Ask me if I have a brother, I could say no, and it wouldn’t feel like a lie. That’s terrible, isn’t it? I’m a terrible brother, a terrible son. He’s been searching –

You know what? No. Time to give up the fantasy. I don’t know where he went; just that he never came back. I wish he had gone to prison, at least then there would be a record of him. Grow up Julian. No one’s coming to the rescue.

All the way down to the filter, I flick the cigarette into the snow. Don’t be a victim. I turn the corner and familiar headlights make spots in my eyes. A billow of toxic smoke rolls out as he puts down his window. It’s Ray. Want a lift home? he says. I imagine his filthy mustache on Angie’s neck and I feel sick. Why doesn’t she move out on her own? She’s old enough. Ray blinks his eyes hard at me, impatiently. Normally I’d say no, but Pete’s coat isn’t as warm as it looks. Parking, he puts out his cigar but misses the ashtray. I leave him cursing at the quarter-size circle burned into his fake leather seats. Tonight wasn’t a total loss.
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The Lake

Her hair was golden, illuminated through the deepening twilight by a few soft, pulsing lampposts which marked the edge of Winnetauk Lake. Her gloves, and scarf, and long, wool coat vanished into the depths of that starry surrounding darkness, leaving only the sharp white of her figure skates to pierce through the winter night. Slowly, the young girl scratched her silver blades through the ice, weaving from side-to-side as a form possessed by the enchantments of moonlit snowfall. Circling, drifting, she watched her chilly breath join the current of some invisible breeze which kissed her cheeks pink in its passing. Absorbed in the world of her mind, time was measured only by the thin, looping cursive she wrote upon the surface of the lake. There is a moment which exists just before a child learns what loneliness is, before she loses the imagination to be so solitary, and so free.

The medical gurney blasted into the ER, ramming the steel bed frame through the swinging hospital doors and vibrating the lights passing overhead; each bar of fluorescent yellow seemed to tick above her like the small red hand on a clock. Several itchy brown blankets were wrapped around her body, but she still shivered and heaved, unable to move her eyes from the ceiling. Her lips were blue and drooling. Her limp hair lay wet on her shoulders in a tangled mess of darkness and dirt. There was blood. All around, people shouted orders in loud voices, and all she wanted was for someone to whisper; for someone to stop the rushing of movement and blood and to reach down for her hand and whisper pretty things into her ear.

“Stop the ride, I want to get off”, she thought. With a tiny pang of fleeting memory, she saw a carnival, and being too scared, and crying until Mommy had said it was okay to go home. Crying until Mommy had scooped her up and carried her back to the car; back to her bed with cotton candy colored sheets, and tucked her in, and kissed her forehead, and she was asleep before her Mother’s lips had left her. Now, all she wanted was to drift away like that again, but every few minutes or seconds or less than that, a man or woman would loom over her, telling her not to sleep – to keep her eyes open – she mustn’t sleep. She knew about white lights at the end of tunnels from movies she wasn’t supposed to watch late at night, but now she figured those people were just mixed up, confused by all the bright things people had kept burning into their faces too. Confused by all the pinching needles, and smelly staleness, and the way time keeps blowing through doorways, following the screams and the crying.

“There’s been an accident”. He poured some more water into a glass of clinking ice, his back to her. “Your Mother was driving and she flipped the car over a snow bank, and the car rolled into a lake.” The kitchen seemed darker than usual, as though a light bulb must have burned out. Mommy was coming back from the supermarket now though, and she probably had some more or knew where they were. Daddy was always asking Mommy where stuff was. “This time of year, the lake is usually pretty solid, but the car broke through.” The little girl tried hard to listen, she knew what Daddy was saying was important. She looked down at her feet; her thick white shoelaces had come undone. “Can you tie my shoe Daddy?” His silence startled her. Maybe she had not been polite enough, “Please? Pretty please?” He turned around to face her. His whole body was rigid and seemed to stretch light years above her, untouchable. “Don’t you understand?!” – He began, she winched at the cut in his voice, and he sunk to his knees before her, “Mom is dead. Mom is not coming home, baby. She’s never coming back home.” He stood and went upstairs, and she understood. She cried for a long time, alone, on the kitchen floor.

Now Dad was sitting in an uncomfortable blue chair, next to her bed. “Hey”, he tried to speak softly as she opened her eyes toward him, but it was just turning the volume down on a lion. He waited for her smile apprehensively at him – a tiny, weak slant on either side of her mouth - before he asked, “Why?” Why had she gone ice skating of all things, alone and in the middle of the night? Why had she been so careless; exposed herself to such danger? Why had the ice cracked and dragged her down into a frosted hell? Why had she gone to the one place he had specifically forbid her from going to?
She turned her head away from him. “I’m tired. Can we talk about it later?”
“What - where you trying to join her?”
“Daddy, please don’t be mad.”
“Tell me what you were doing out on that lake!”
“I just…” She hated looking weak in front of her father, but tears stung in her eyes.
“I told you never to go to Winnetauk, and you know damn well what it means to us – how I feel about it. You’re lucky to be alive. I’m severely disappointed.”
“I just miss her. I’m sorry. I just miss Mom.”
The soundlessness that followed pressed on both father and daughter like a cobra filled with bricks. This was a conversation, one of many conversations, he was never meant to have with his daughter. Of course he loved her. He had also loved her Mother, but she was taken by the very same force, the very same goddamn lake, that had tried to take his little girl tonight. How could he possibly lose them both? How could his own child betray him like this – leave him like this? Life might go on, but what’s the point if the greatest, most important things in your life exist only in the past?

She watched him stare at his feet. She watched him stare at the door. At the television on mute. At the bedspread. At the nurse who came in and out of the room like the tide. Her mother had loved the ocean. Actually, her mother had loved everything that involved water. She had been the one who insisted that they go to the beach each summer, despite how badly Daddy would sunburn. And even on the bitterest February day, she had held both her little hands and inch by inch taught her to slide across the ice. Maybe Dad couldn’t understand, but skating on that lake was like skating with her again. Just being where she had been, when her last breath escaped into that gentle breeze, was like reliving every moment before that day.

There is a moment which exists just before a child learns what loneliness is, before they lose the imagination to be so solitary, and so free. Once that moment passes, no matter their age, the child cannot return to the peace of pure, white snow. Fairies die in the garden. Mermaids wash up on the shore. By witnessing the destruction of life, life gains the necessity of meaning. Under the stress and responsibility of such meaning, the imagination breaks like a treasured object, smashing under the terrible weight and forcing the child to live their life in the reflection of those glass shards. We may try to stick the pieces back together for only a moment, to see a whole person looking back in that sparkling sheet of ice, and yet, these remain just simple moments, strung together along the soon broken path of an endless line etched on the surface – just waiting to break and drown us all.

The Fish

Next to the curb, snow was falling on the oversized orange and green fish shoved unceremoniously between the community garbage cans. Full of last month’s Thanksgiving paraphernalia, people forget to recycle at Christmas time, as though the only synonym for “useful” was “new”. As wide as the cans were tall, the fish was one of those prizes you win at a carnival game; the kind where you spend hours sending a little hoop clanking over old-fashioned green glass soda bottles just for the victory of it. Even I was guilty of begging my father to win me something like it once.

This particular fish’s stringy fins must have held sequins not long ago, and surely it didn’t come with that ketchup stain on its belly – or was it a heart? Gray, fluffy stuffing was escaping from the side of its fat lips, which where perpetually puckered in style of an Aunt’s big, wet kiss. The most pitiful part of its appearance, however, was the enormous brown eyes. Bigger than even the lips, the eyes protruded as giant globes. Like crystal balls which tell only the past. At one point they had said, “Love me! Fight for me! Win me! Take me home!” But now they stare at me, shocked and betrayed; making me feel guilty – as though the whole creation of itself was my entire fault.

Stitched and stuffed for profit, without children, who would want such a thing? What motivation would any adult have for owning something so easily abandoned? Say they were pressured by friends to win it, just to prove they could. For a lover perhaps… no, true love would not need such a display of wealth and trivial eye-coordination skills. Of course, no one would take a person very seriously who entertained an oversized, hideously colored, stuffed animal in their office. A giant fish isn’t really a trophy to anyone but a child – the one thing that can relate to it the most.

There are children very much like carnival fish. Obtained as a means to hold together a relationship, for pride, by force, or by accident – they are more like discarded trophies than beating hearts. Each has their own set of torn threads and stained patches, each a personal set of eyes, averted in shame for their exposure. What makes an unwanted child any different than a carnival prize?

Of course, please excuse me; this example is far too specific. Most prizes are very much wanted and hard earned. The vast majority, in fact, are placed on little shelves in little glass boxes and admired for years. How few carnival prizes are actually ever won? How many could possibly be discarded in dumps and landfills, hardly distinguishable from all the real trash out there. Didn’t watching Rudolph at Christmas teach you anything? Didn’t your mother explain the significance of The Island of Misfit Toys – that’s where all the unwanted things go! No one ever expects them to come back.

Perhaps that is what happened to this fish. It isn’t being thrown away at all; it’s merely escaping from the island. So then, credit must be given where credit is due! This fish is not a victim of industry or human pride. This fish is a fighter. Those rips and stains are evidence of life, not ugliness or death. I should bring it some hot chocolate, like my father used to bring me, and it can tell me stories of all the places it has been and all the things it has done.

The snow is beginning to pile up, creating a little happy birthday-hat on the fish’s dirty head, and filling the creases of my father’s winter coat. I decide not to get the hot chocolate. Sometimes, the independent ones don’t want to be recognized.Besides, being a misfit is not something to be too proud of anyway. Once so clean and sparkling, swimming high in the air above prospective parents, owners, victors - among others so similar to itself - there was a time when it was a wanted thing.

Now, dragging through this frigid filth, the contrasting failure is the most hopeless and heinous of eyesores. It’s all too awkward and too difficult to understand – better to just leave it alone collecting snow.

Oh, but that’s no way to live, as though the comfort of others is the only goal! Rats gnawing at fins and eyes do so just to do something with them. They’ll eat and tear until everything disappears, and then move on to the next unforgivably existing thing, without a single thought paid to memory. I want to scream at the fish, “Get up! Show them what you can do! Recognize your past! Realize how far you’ve come!” But the carnival fish would not be able to understand me; it probably doesn’t even speak English.

And besides, it’s a fish.

Toys like these have a sense of timelessness. They don’t really belong to any particular place, and it’s easy to forget that they are just fabric and thread. Carnivals themselves are romanticized scenes of mystery, wonder and fantasy. This silly fish is just an extension of that. Illusions and embellishments – lies – there is no real story here, so I might as well go inside. On the other hand, from this distance the fish is my personal side-show. Snow is pressing and piling on the head and fins. Whether the inevitable trash pick-up day, or the molding, wet stuffing - it is a doomed thing. Maybe by watching it, I can learn something about disappearing. This must be an act picked up during its carnival days. A simple trick to make the crowed curious and then leave them waiting just on the edge of discovery.

I wonder if my blue eyes can be seen, spying from underneath my father’s hood, underneath the all-consuming snow. All I can see through the whiteness are bulging brown eyes. Those orbs are no longer pleading. They evoke neither pity nor idolization. In the time it took to win the creature, it is out of sight, lost to the snow. I stand up and heavy powder falls from my father’s coat. I had forgotten I was sitting down. Turning to go back inside, I see the door, closed and bare, to my father’s house. Suddenly, a force of dormant panic awakens and surges inside me, like the thousands of pins and needles electrifying my legs. I rush to the cluster of trash, pushing away the burning snow with bare hands. Can it be saved, the wretched creature? Breath escapes my purpled lips as fog obscures my vision, already impaired in the deep blue winter twilight. Try as I might to fight through the gray matter of snow and paper pilgrims, trying to reach an end to this mess of frozen waste; trying with every drop of heated blood pushing through my veins – the carnival fish is gone. Snow drifts and whispers across the black asphalt on its belly, curving and shifting with the night. Steadily, I retreat down the empty street; looking from window to window at lights and decorations, and shaking a little every so often, so the snow doesn’t have a chance to pile up.