bedtime stories

You sleep too much she says as he wipes the crumbs out of his eyes.
She didn’t understand the feathered doona offered him a feathered reality. He shuffled out of the sheets and into the late morning sun, blinking away the rays with the remnants of an all enveloping dream. He’d have gladly curled up a little longer like a hurt and wriggling worm in the belly of a dark numbness, but scratching the dog good morning behind the ears seemed like a stronger, manlier thing to do.
___________________________________________________________________
We stretch out on the Sunday sun canvas of your bed and paint the ceiling of your room with crayons that we have attached to long sticks, so that reaching up doesn’t jeopardize the position my hip is in laying next to yours. We’ve drawn a pathway between trees and a river that I can almost hear. You blink away specks of light traveling up and up in your eyes with each blink.Little fluoro diamonds. And you ask me where I think the helium balloons go when tired fingers release their strings.
Anywhere you want them to go darling, I say. Anywhere you want.
___________________________________________________________________

He took her milk wrists with the young veins and pinned them to the bed. She dug her nails into her palms until they bled red ribbons into the white sheet creases. Looking down at them as he nuzzled her raw with a gravel beard, she thought of them as baby whales being harpooned. She wondered if there was a ship over that crease there, that little big wave, just around the corner coming to rescue her, but as he reached right up to her wet little mouth and blew a cloud of smoke through her lips and his wheezing made the bed tremble and the sheets, the sheets, the waves were getting higher until she felt herself sink in them and knew they’d all be swallowed up under the force of his storm.