One Bed, Two Stories
by Shellie Zacharia

Her side of the bed is empty. The pillow pushed and propped, the indentation of her head just barely there. She’s scuffling across wooden floors, wincing at creaked boards. She slips from the room without glancing back, leaving him in a cloud of white-cotton dreams, easy to wash clean.

*

He sleeps on his belly, head thrown awkwardly to the side, like a broken marionette. In his dream, he is sizing things. A tailor’s white measuring tape around his neck, he wanders, guessing inches, feet. He measures and is often right. A picture frame, a chair, a windowsill of a house which is his and not his.

*

From the kitchen window, the night sky is crisp darkness. She waits for variation, for black to crack into bands of purple, blue, the mauve of pre-dawn. She is awake, woken by something she isn’t sure of – a howl in the night, a ghost from a repeated dream, a movement like knocking of knuckles. A suitcase is packed, hidden in the hall closet, behind the red metal record case that holds old 45s inherited from her father.

*

He steps outside, moving toward the sweetgum. So wide around the trunk, he calculates, pulling at the measuring tape, scraping knuckles. He thinks of pi – 3.14159 – and then stops. This is not his yard, not even in dream, and he can’t remember the next numbers. This worries him. 6, 3, 2, 9, 5. Out of sequence, all wrong.

*

From her kitchen chair, she can see a bare hint of the sweetgum tree. Dark. And then a shot of white. She wants it to be something unpredictable.

*

He cannot determine what is right when the numbers are all wrong. He returns to the house. Inside, he measures the table, one side, then the other, but nothing matches up, two sides off, by inches. The table appears square, nothing odd about it at all. He measures again and the numbers are different. He sits in one of the rocking chairs, flicks a small snail from the arm rest, and weeps.

*

She sits in the kitchen, facing the snail’s pace of the clock, its tick growing louder. She wonders why she never noticed it before – every so often, a shudder in the system, a hiccup of the mechanism. She watches the clock, waiting for the brief fissure in time, and hopes she might fall into a space unlike this one.

*

Waking from dream, just barely, he reaches his hand out to her side. There is the brief moment of possibilities. If he opens his eyes, he might see her just a few feet away, at the bedroom door, moving toward white-cotton sleep. Or, he might not see her at all. The distance from bed to driveway is just too far.

Shellie Zacharia teaches in Florida. Her stories have appeared in Potomac Review, Inkwell, Washington Square, The Pinch, Hobart, Keyhole, Opium, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Now Playing, is forthcoming from Keyhole Press.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com