Written by AG (A Ghost)
I’d been getting sleepy for a while now – months, maybe a year. Without realising I’d racked up a serious cosmic debt, compounding weekly. That’s how they get you. Miss one payment and your whole damn gestalt is in default. It’d been like this ever since don’t think about it.
Ergo I was in bed, very sleepy, gaining mass. I was getting so heavy I was waiting for the bed frame to crack but it held strong. “Modelled on the same bed frame Canute the Great used, little lady,” the salesman had pitched me, with a tone that was too chipper for the historical gravity of the statement. So the Vikings were conquering the bedroom now. I just nodded and handed over my Diners Club, trying not to inhale. He was wearing an aftershave that had recently been discontinued – some class action about spams. I watched him closely but he seemed self- possessed in physiological terms at least. Brand loyalty stronger than dystonia.
Anyway I was gaining weight on Canute’s bed frame. My mind s l o w e d right down and started to judder. “Suppose I’m falling asleep then,” I noted astutely. But, as with many things in life, when you suppose you make a supp out of o and se. I was in a pickle. My body was asleep but my brain wasn’t. I gave nodding off a few more goes but the two-stroke in my head was still sputtering. I thought about a lot of things, like sleeve garters and where good peaches went and what I dreamt about when I was a dog, but I did not think about the picture on the mantel between the flowers and the ceramic Basset Fauve.
I lay like this for a while, thinking but not-thinking (about the XX on the M). I opened my eyes. The light was a dark, metallic blue. I knew it was eternal somehow. It was a light with no momentum, empty of transition. When I was a child I was on a swing that just stopped dead mid-swing. I flew 5 metres and broke my wrist, but the adults seemed more interested in the Swing Event. Children break their wrists every day, I suppose.
I thought I should get up. In many ways my life has always been about trying to get up. I checked my wrist – not broken (but sore??) – and seeped into the lounge room. It looked strange at this hour and seemed unhappy to see me, like I was a parent interrupting a sleepover. I apologised and lay on the couch, deciding to look at everything in the room once. Curtains, books, table, mantle, flowers, NOTHING, ceramic Dachshund. I could have sworn it was a Basset Fauve…? Jack
Ruby’s wife was a Dachshund. Contemporary accounts of the Kennedy/Oswald imbroglio have not reckoned with this fact. Curtains, books, table… I was sweating, I realised. It was trickling out of my pits like espresso from a portafilter.
To the window, then. I opened it and more of the eternal-blue-metal light rushed in and splashes over everything. I shook it off my arms. There was no sound from outside but the wind’s ragged hiss and the clattering of leaves. The houses were strewn and empty; dead husks. I once heard of a man who was looking for love in a field of corn. At the time I thought him optimistic but misguided. On the street a figure moved. I watched it drift along. Where was it going? It stopped outside my window and turned slowly. Under the ragged strands of black hair was a face like a bag of milk with two black holes in it. Something dripped from its chin.
“Can’t sleep?” it asked from one of the black holes. I shook my head.
“Do we know each other?” it asked.
“I don’t think so. What’s your name?”
“Prunus the Closed-Hearted Ghost.”
I shrugged and said I didn’t know again. The espresso sweats were back.
“Funny,” P the C-HG said, “I could have sworn…” And sloshed off.
It wasn’t good that he recognised me. I looked out over the dead city with the no-moon not-shining and shut the window but I could still see it, and I closed the curtain but I still knew it was there, and I could go back to bed but I would never sleep again, I could avoid looking at the photograph on the mantel but I couldn’t… I was out of OPTIONS and I really wanted more OPTIONS. I wanted to cry but nothing came. Months passed, maybe a year, waiting in the cold blue. I was out of options. And yet… I moved to the mantel and picked up her photo and held it and looked at it. “I really miss you,” I said. And something brightened behind the window; something wet my cheeks.
The Coburg Meddler 