Better, it’s that dream Ben’s been having, that’s been having Him: one eye fluttering, one two three then, poof — she’s gone like never was. Only a wisp of skirt, a flash of heel, a taste of tongue, then nothing…His sisters, too, and father, them and their promises made. Any other morning upon waking — to rise an immediate rush down the hallway to their room as if expelled from the Paradise that is sleep, banished forcibly forever from its rest and so condemned to wander an eternity down the deserted halls past the mirrors and windows draped, and the framed photographs, too, and the shoescuffed, handprinted walls whiter than ash being the death of ash, the rooms of His sisters their doors shut, locked even and the carpet between them what’s patterned in stellated hexagons of blue on white down to its other end and the humpbacked trunk that floats there, the treadle sewing machine antique and decoration only aside the top goatskinned, meeklegged table topped with a vitric but plastic vase of baby’sbreath, its icewhite blooms seasonally intermarried with an abundance of lavender hydrangea made in Asia, crowded around with the silence of unread books, a stray shoe this loafer, a pair of His father’s old glasses, wireframed round and without lens, a forgotten, shattersheathed thermometer, a bowl of shells from beaches south…then, a quick last left to the door and He’d open it into another temperature zone, the alternate universe of a thermostat no one was ever allowed to know, let alone touch. It’d be freezing in there; His breath would come like shvitz, to take the air like faces. To lie down at the edge of their bed, which is made and empty, which was always made and always empty, and there on the pillows that still smell of her hair, His mother’s skin’s comforter, too, discomforting, in that it still feels like her legs and arms, to pray for sleep again. This was a week, had been. His sisters would have been up for hours. His parents, forever.
And then to sleep there at the foot of their sleeps between their twin nightstands topped with more books, yearold magazines, and the forfeited frontpage of the newspaper, their wedding photographs and telephones their cords tangled with those of the lamps and the 06 blinking 59 clocks, it’s another dream: to lift the shroud on another night, this different from all other nights…a maid’s wifely sheet, He peeks — and there’s a woman, standing just outside the lone wide window of His parent’s room, this great green monster in the robe His mother mourned the night when she, and that other time that, the once then don’t forget…O to be born too late for memory, waterswaddled, as naked as metal. Liberty’s her name. He stands on His Island next to hers. They match. Are twins. They’re just friends. Good friends. They’ve been married by the moon. Tell the truth, they’ve been forbidden from each other. It wouldn’t work, won’t, not to say it never does.
A love, it’s this…Ben and her, they never touched, they couldn’t have, can’t: His arms are too short and hers, they’re holding stuff. A book. A torch. Commandments. In reward for their keeping, an icecream cone of ten scoops, their flavor’s bronze, and its melt, molten — who knows to ask, who would ask to lick. Anyway, she couldn’t speak, never did. She’s without tongue as if guilty, He can never look her in the eyes. His are shut, He’s sleeping. Still. To be born too late for waking. Sh. He’s pretending. All night, they’ll drift further away from one another, then far beyond the dream. And then one morning — her crown will be the sun. A gloriole. Another day.
