By August Niehaus, April 2016
I’m so tired.
I go into the house as quietly as I can. I don’t want to wake either of them. I’m tired all the way to my fingers, deep in my wrists, heavy in my ankles. I’ve pulled double shifts every day for enough weeks in a row, I’ve lost count of what day it is. My wife is the only one who sleeps. I’m the one who walks around with the colicky baby from dusk until it’s time to go to my first job. I’m so tired.
I go upstairs. I realize I’m carrying something refrigerator-cold, a sandwich or a burger. It’s flat, limp, bready. I register that I intended to eat it. The idea turns my shriveled stomach. I bring it to my nose. It’s a sandwich. It’s a sad copy of what my wife would make me for lunches.
I put half of it in my mouth. I’m so tired. I can hardly chew, swallow, take another bite. The stairs seem tall. My legs are leaden. The bannister is grainy and I have a splinter, but it might be from my second shift today. I was stupid to pick up that lumber without help, but no one was answering my page.
But but but. My life’s a series of buts. Buts, ifs, and therefores. Forgotten forks off the path I’ve doggedly taken. I’m so tired I can’t even crack a smile at “series of butts.” Once, maybe. Not now.
Now, I’m tired. I dust sandwich crumbs onto my pants and creep past my wife’s room so I don’t wake her. My footsteps are careful, a force of habit. My wife doesn’t stir. Not since the baby came. She sleeps so much. I miss her. I take care of her, of both of them. My wife and the baby. My family. My everything.
I’m so tired. I reach my room. I crawl under the warm sheets of my own bed.
I’m freefalling towards sleep when I realize: The sheets should be cold. As cold as my blood runs now.
I’m still tired, but I’m very awake. I’m convinced no one has been in my room for three months, no one I’ve known about, not since the baby arrived. The fussing keeps everyone else away. Even my wife. She went to her room and never comes out.
I jerk my thoughts away, back to the danger. This must be a home invasion. Some poor fool wants the nothing that I’m worth. Nothing that slips between the exhausted fingers working three jobs for it.
Well. He can’t have it.
I’m still driven by some blunt force of survival. I ready myself to reach for my machete, praying it hasn’t fallen out of reach, as usual.
Something touches my foot. My blood freezes.
Something is in my bed. My every nerve is alive. Something is touching me.
I’m terrified for my life. Yet… I crave the sensation. A living being touching me of their own free will, with intention. I’ve only felt an infant’s fretful flailings for twelve weeks. It’s been so long. Since my wife went to sleep.
My brain renders the touch into the impression of fingers. Those fingers slip between my toes and I moan. It isn’t pleasure, it isn’t fear. I muffle it into my pillow. I don’t want to wake my wife.
The fingers are velvet and honey. They melt between my toes, down my ankle, around my heel. They begin to ooze up my leg.
I’m still tired, but I’m very awake.
The sandwich becomes lead in my gut. I’m afraid to lift the blanket, afraid of what I’ll find. It could be my fantasy or it could be my nightmare. Either way, I’m terrified.
Then a word, just one, slithers up from beneath the sheets. “Wisssssssh…”
My nerves sing with it. Wish. A command, an invitation. I need no further explanation. I know what the visitor offers me.
I arch my back as those fingers travel up the outside of my leg, brush with feather-softness on my hipbone. Even as I rise to that summons, blood rushes to my tired brain.
What do I want?
What do I wish for?
It’s been a long time since I’ve been touched, but it’s been much longer since anyone asked me questions like these.
The fingers play me like an instrument, and I am helpless under the visitor’s touch. My thoughts whirl. My heart races.
My jaw trembles with the force of holding in my moans. I don’t want to wake the baby. She’s finally gone to sleep. I don’t want to wake my wife. She needs her rest.
There’s a stranger in my bed and the house feels peaceful. And I’m so tired.
The things I should wish for swirl in my mind. My baby’s health. Enough money to stop working two of my jobs. My wife, holding me in the night again. No ambitious wishes, just simple ones. Simple joys returned to my life. My lips part and I draw in breath to whisper a chosen wish.
The very air betrays me.
“S-sleep,” is the word that my tongue presses gently to the roof of my mouth, the word carried forth on the wind from my lungs.
The visitor’s fingers stop moving. I stop moving. I can barely breathe.
I’m so tired. My own selfishness, my betrayal stabs me in the gut. Even as I abhor myself for such a greedy request, I can’t give myself over entirely to self-loathing. My exhausted brain floods with relief.
Rest is near. Rest is near.
I sit up and the sheets rise up with me. I dare to look into the face of the visitor.
Three luminous green eyes blink at me. A shock of short dark hair, pointed ears poking through. Craggy, hauntingly beautiful features. Not a nose, but a tiny, delicate muzzle.
I fall back onto my pillow and close my eyes.
“Sssssleeeeep.” The visitor’s sibilant words caress me as the fingers once again do the same.
I’m so tired. I’m so terrible. Sleep sounds like heaven. Perhaps sleep will be my hell.
I open my eyes.
The visitor rises. The sheets cling to its dainty bones, to the muscular wings lying against its back. The moonlight renders the visitor’s skin gold and blue. Those three green eyes fix on my face and slowly close.
Only the eye in the visitor’s forehead opens again.
The house is still. The house is full of sleep.
Rest is near. Rest is here.
I fall willingly into that incandescent green.
I am far from my body. The visitor hovers above the bed. The sheets whisper to the floor as leathery wings fill the room. Everything glows from within.
The visitor wraps those wings around my body, fingers still playing across my skin. I am far from my body, but I feel the visitor tugging at the very fabric of me, pulling at the threads of exhaustion knitting me together.
With every stitch loosened, I feel my tiredness falling away. Three months of snatching catnaps between shifts, of rocking the baby until we both nod off for a few moments, all of it lifts away. The weight of my burdens no longer drags at me, no longer anchors me to my corporeal form.
I begin to float away.
My baby, my wife: I think of them abandoned with no one to care for them, and I try to fight against the drifting. I grasp at the window with formless fingers. I try to fling my insubstantial body against the wall, the roof. I pass through it all, ethereal.
The visitor rises with me. Its wings pump once, twice. We are out into the night.
The stars greet me like an old friend. They’ve kept me company through nights when no one else would, or could, be there with me. I hear their collective song, the thrum of the universe.
I turn to scream to the stars. To tell them how I’ve failed my family, in the end. I will let them bear no false witness of my final selfishness.
The visitor floats, a slender shadow blocking the heavens. One gentle hand cradles my baby, peaceful in sleep. Its other hand is twined with my wife’s.
My wife hovers like I do, like my baby does. For the first time in three months, my wife’s eyes are open. She is smiling at me. She is reaching for me.
I understand. She has been waiting for me. Rest is here.
The visitor cloaks us all with leathery wings.
I understand, and in my understanding, I take my wife’s hand across the stars, across the air, across the lifetimes.
__________________________
Inspired by a line
about the peri from Wikipedia: “exquisite, winged fairy-like spirits
ranking between angels and evil spirits.”The draft of this
story has been posted solely for the purpose of critique and feedback, which
may be used later in editing. This should not be considered a publication of a
final work.__________________________
As the dog is to the
wolf, so is the wyvern to the dragon, and this wyvern is no different: August’s
teeth look sharper than they bite, and she can spit sparks but she’ll rarely
breathe fire. Spending most of her days flitting between conversations and
emails, she returns each night to her hoard of shiny ideas, testing them on her
fangs to find true gold amongst the fool’s…Find August on:
And the rest of the
Scribblers’ Club:Jill – @JillCorddry
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