Unable to Sleep
For several nights now he had believed himself unable to sleep. Each morning he would rise remembering having spent the previous eight hours staring at the ceiling. It was unbearable. And yet when he mentioned this to his wife, she affirmed on the contrary that she herself had been awake for long portions of the night, worrying about their daughter who was away now doing social work in Indonesia, while he, her husband, had slept like a log. She had even left the bed on one occasion, an event he had no memory of, to make herself a cup of chamomile tea. And so apparently he had slept, even, in her words, “like a log,” and yet the next night he found himself again experiencing the awful duration of staring up at the ceiling while his wife slept beside him. Perhaps then he was asleep, and this was a dream. What would happen in that case if within this dream he chose to get out of bed, wander down the hall? Would he discover the duplicate of everything exactly in its place—the kitchen where the kitchen should be, the sofa and the love seat at the proper angles to each other, the picture of his daughter, who somehow did not exist in the dream, still atop the bookshelf? He remembered, from some otherwise forgotten college class, the story of the man who asked the gods for immortality, and was granted it in the following manner: each night his dream became longer, so that he experienced first years, then decades while asleep, and soon the few hours he spent each day awake in his aging body felt like little more than blinks between centuries. Until at last in the brief unconsciousness before his death his final dream stretched out before him, as the gods had promised, forever. Was this, the professor had asked the class, a gift or a curse?
A Loss
While cleaning out her mother’s house in Brevard, North Carolina, not long after the hurricane had come and improbably washed most of the town away, she discovered, among her mother’s things, photographs of what appeared to be herself and another child, younger than her, who she did not remember but who resembled her so closely that it was impossible not to think they must have been related. She did not have any siblings; her mother, who had run away from home just before graduating high school, hadn’t had any contact with her family for years. Now, with her mother gone, she couldn’t think of who she might possibly ask about these photographs, about this other child. There was nothing written on the backs of these photographs, not even a date. She sat on the floor, amidst the boxes of paper and binders her mother had kept stacked in the living room, the dust glimmering in the late fall light, and tried to imagine herself into the moment these photographs were taken. She felt almost as though she could remember the dress she was wearing, the book she was holding, the expression—as though seen from outside of herself, somehow—she was making, serious, unwilling to placate the camera or its holder with a smile. But of the boy beside her, who so resembled her it was impossible not to think he was her brother, she found nothing, not even a hole where a memory might once have been. She brushed his face with the back of her finger, feeling a sense of loss, not for him or her mother but for some part of herself which she had not previously known and now could not describe.
Extraction
She’d had a dream the night before, or perhaps just before awakening, in which she was attempting to extract, without puncturing herself, a long needle from her throat, which she remembered this morning with a clarity uncommon for her dreams. Her partner, with whom she had lived for the past seven years, had recently died following a briefer than expected illness; previously, they had been trying to get pregnant. They had continued to discuss names even while he was in the hospital, assuming, since he was so young, that his illness would go into remission and their lives would continue, each of them wiser, perhaps, for having faced death and overcome it. The names during this period, nevertheless, became more and more fantastical, as if each understood on some level they were naming children who would never be. Now as she makes her breakfast in this apartment which had seemed so small with both of them in it, she bestows these names on the items she plans to give away, the picture frames, the sweaters, the houseplants owned so long she can no longer say whose houseplant originally was whose, the favored mugs she can no longer bear to look at: each to be placed carefully in a box and sent away.
~
James Tadd Adcox’s work has previously appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Granta, and n+1, among other places. He is the managing editor of the literary magazine Always Crashing and author, most recently, of Denmark: Variations, a collection of sixty sets of instructions for variations on the play Hamlet.