Cypress Branches Literary Journal - Lamar State College-Orange

53
Bed Check
Andrew B. Preslar – Faculty
for my Louis—
with daring hope, and trepidation
After the crest breaks and thunders down into the
shadows in the corner across from the eastern window, moving like the
treacherously deceptive drift of spume above a cold green current that would
unaware draw me as so much krill into the insatiable maw of the leviathan, into a depth
without light or air, should it, so disinterested, even consent to take me at all,
before my eyes can open, I struggle against my body’s inertness,
the sleep paralysis, and I feel the presence, the
moisture of fear like the rank shingle, hissing, dully
luminescent from the corruption breathing through to the surface,
revealing nothing of the gasping shapes just beneath,
smelling of dead and dying creatures consigned to the dank blackness that would accept
all, the promise of drowning itself insubstantial as a fleck of grey foam
floating on the press and heave
I didn’t lose him—
I strain not to inhale as I rise into awareness, strain to hear his
breath over hers, under the
tympani of my own rushing blood, while the next crest
gathers itself into a shapeless mass of terror rising amorphous,
a demagorgon to break upon me in a violent overthrow, or perhaps
to simply resolve itself into a hiss within which I sink
without resistance, again to depend from the inexorable wave of despair,
relentless, grinding even the stones into grains of corrosive sand,
ubiquitous and unarguable emblems of the final doom:
but I will; it is inevitable, and she and I
will be overborne by it, all our love and terror,
all our hopes, the pitiful straws we clutched,
thrown down and utterly annihilated by it . . .
today I did not hold his hand (he is getting so big! last year’s teacher says through an artificial smile as
she rushes past us through the bank of automatic glass doors into the parking lot) and only moments
later in housewares I turned and he was gone,
flitting, elusive, a flash of scarlet the color of his light-up shoes,
the fading sound of his abrupt, self-pleased laughter
sinking indistinguishable into the murmur of the demanding dead
moving through the toxic bowels of the giant concrete and steel box,
the voices of the women in my wife’s support network tinny and distant in my ears, their heads nodding
sagely
they usually start around eight;
if he hasn’t done it yet, he will run—
they all run
I found him standing in front of a peg rack on which hung a silvery plasticized cap pistol
newer than the one he surreptitiously slips under his Spiderman pillow every night;
he was smiling his enigmatic smile, reveling in his moment of
solitary pleasure into which no adult voices could penetrate.
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