He used to call sleep to him, talking to it as he might a pretty girl, sweetly, with a teasing smile that women really found attractive if his luck in that department was any gauge. He would coax it to come to him, to take him really, as those sweet girls so often did, and he’d fill its ears with gentle thoughts and extravagant promises he always meant when he said them. The words coaxing sleep were not always uttered out loud, they didn’t need to be, but they were there, in that constant roll of chatter that streamed inside his head. That’s where he stitched all his words together, turning them into what he needed or wanted or desired—sleep, money, a woman. It’s what he did, this talk, how he got by, and yet, while those honeyed phrases worked elsewhere, sleep had begun to resist even his slyest flatteries.
The words he depended
on, that were his gift really, had begun to dissolve in his mind on those
sleepless nights and unbidden images rose in their place, unspooling in his
mind’s eye, driving language away. Sweet words meant to seduce sleep became
images of snow melting on the surface of spruce swamps in late fall and he’d
end up looking at how white the flakes looked on the black water before they
dissolved. He’d see how that water absorbed falling leaves the same way it did
snowflakes only it chewed them into muck and as the muck thickened and grew it
pushed the water out of the swamp in thin creeks that joined into wide rivers
that pulsed over the earth the way the blood pulsed through his veins. He saw
himself as a swamp then and a swamp never slept, he could see that. Even under
the ice in the dead of winter, it just kept chewing dead leaves into living
muck, just as his words were now being dissolved into living images that pulsed
within him, dream-like as it happened, only he never dreamt them.
