leftover stones

Sometimes in the night, I can feel it. Whatever noise from this side of the door that startled me awake vanishes, and a door from somewhere else opens.

It crawls like black water along the basement floorboards. Silty specks of black sand suspended in cold foam.

I sit up and listen.

Silence.

I roll over and drift between to-do lists and sleep. Then again, a noise, a memory, I sit up and try to feel the night. Is it out there? I return to tossing and turning.

It crawls up the stairs like tar. It seeps in around the bed, rising as high tide in a shallow marina. The bed, a rowboat in the sea.

I can put a name on it. Label the fear. Give it hands and feet. Give it claws and intentions. But when I do, it only causes me to draw the blankets and move into the center of the bed.

I know it seems silly to be afraid of nothing, but it also seems silly to take the chance.

These waking nightmares have become more common again. My sleeping dreams teaming of people like an amusement park in July. So crowded and hot, so mashed up, it pushes me to the edges of dreaming. So far, the bubble pops, and I find myself awake and listening to the nothingness of the night. Listening to the tide in the trees.

Then the lists: 2 thank you cards, a phone bill, an ER bill, a credit card bill, did the cats go out enough during the day? It was raining, a bag of popcorn, how to defrost bananas, what setting should the crockpot be on when I leave for work? Is it okay to mop the kitchen floor with bleach, or is it too close to leaving for Regionals because there is a strong link between children getting respiratory illnesses and houses that use bleach to clean with, a line from The Book Theif, wait, I am forgetting something important, how many times has the heater kicked on in the last hour, I wonder if the dog opened the back door? Can I really pass turkey chili off as dinner, or are they just going to know that I am totally fucking up and need to go to the grocery store again? Didn't I just go?!?! was that an earthquake or part of a dream?

The night is a lake. It stretches long from one sliver of lit shore to the other. No one really knows what lies beneath it or how deep it goes.

The moon casts white shadows. It pulls at the silky cover, undoing the waves one thin string at a time. It spins a watery dark web in the sky, catching and feasting on stars.

I skip stones of sleep across the night, standing beneath the giant white spider's lair.

The black rings ripple across the darkness. Eventually, they roll out onto the far beach and fade into purring kittens under the light of a rainy morning.

But I start my day slowly because the night is never long enough to throw all the stones it would take to clear the ground at my feet.