7days7authors

Monday - Tickets in September - David McGovern

He woke, the black comforter tangled in his bare, pale legs.  The ceiling fan did little to evaporate the sweat from his exposed chest.  Looking to his right the man thought:

“No one is there.”

He shifts his eyes’ bleary focus from the foreground to the nightstand in the background.  The green electric numerals on the black backdrop of the clock radio coupled with the room’s darkness render the time unreadable.  He reaches out to the table on his left and picks up his slim cell phone and flips it open.  The sudden light of the screen temporarily blinds the man and bathes the bed in a blue eerie glow.

3:31 A.M.

He reads the clock several times to make sure sleep is not muddling his thoughts.

“I’ve still got a few hours”

His throat, unused for hours, croaks the parched sentence out ceiling-ward - toward the hum of the fan. 

Setting the phone back in its original position on the table he rolls from his back onto his left side and curls into the fetal position.  An open window allows the traffic of the street fourteen stories below to trickle into the room.  The ebb and flow of traffic emulates waves.  The man imagines he is sleeping on a beach, or next to a beach, or owns a wave machine.  He rocks himself slowly back and forth keeping time with the rush of traffic, hardly moving at all, but just enough to create slight gentle soothing motion.  The rocking and white noise set the man gently back into sleep.

As he drops into the first few stages of sleep the black of the inside of his eyelids slowly creep into colorful life.  Red, orange, yellow, all hot colors, slither from the corners of his eyes towards the center.  They swirl and mingle forming first vague shapes: squiggles, squares, cones … and then the indistinct forms into people: women, men, children, old and young.  Crowds of people sit in watercolor bars, stomping through impressionist streets, the lamps bathing and blurring the lines between each soul.  They are busing tables at cafes, darning socks in the gutter, making grilled cheese sandwiches in basement kitchens …

Drool escapes the dam of lips and dribbles down a cheek.  The movement of liquid startles the man from shallow sleep into wakefulness.  He coughs and rubs his nose vigorously with his forefinger.  On the wall, hanging in the dim light, the man rests his eyes on a poster of football players high-fiving after a touchdown, or sack, or blocked punt …

“I wonder what Florida is like in Fall?”