jmgoyder

Are you asleep yet, my beautiful husband?

Midnight approaches me with dark, unfamiliar claws, so I go outside to find some moonlight but it is pitch black out there and, when I can’t find the moon, I race back inside frightened.

The dogs are barking at a moonless sky but they will soon settle.

Are you asleep yet, my beautiful husband?

You said the other day that you just wanted to sleep wth me but you have forgotten that we have not slept in the same bed since the evening when you could no longer reach the height of the bed and I wasn’t strong enough to lift you into it, and we had to put you into the smaller, lower bed in what we always called the spare room.

I know.

I know you have forgotten those years of tortured, sleepless nights for both of us -, me in the big bedroom, you in the spare room but calling me, calling me, knocking on the wall with your walking stick until, finally I began to sleep in the other small, low bed in the spare room, so that I could help you during those moonful and moonless nights – to pee, to turn over, to be warmer, to be cooler, to get your knees inside the covers, to sleep….

Your dreams were terrifying and you would yell out in your sleepless sleep and I would lie in my bed next to yours hoping it would stop.

Is that what is happening now? Are you still hallucinating about the girl with the bleeding eye, the mob who are chainsawing all of your palm trees to death, the calves on top of the television, the phantoms in the dairy?

The peacocks are crying, crying, crying and their sound is a haunting lullaby.

Are you asleep yet, my beautiful husband?

Please say yes. All you have to do is whisper it and I will hear you, I will hear you.