Arts
It was sometime in the second grade when I stopped sleeping well. And sometime in my early twenties when I fixed the issue, temporarily. But I can't seem to discern when it got bad again. I would occasionally find some peace in the night. On occasion, it would be a week or two at a time. But in the scheme of a life, fleeting is not the right word for a week or two. What is an appropriate amount of time? I do not know.... "Seven years," I said to Margaret. "Seven years, what?" "Seven years of sleep." "You want to sleep for seven straight years?" "No. Well... no. I don't want to be asleep for seven years. Not for the duration. I think I need seven years' worth of good sleep to feel good again." "Henry, dear..." Margaret paused. "You're an old man as it is. What is this talk about seven years, how do you even come up with a number like that." Margaret resumed her knitting of a pot holder embroidered with a swastika. She knit one swastika pot holder every single day. At the end of every month, she would take the pot holders–sometimes thirty or thirty-one, or twenty-eight in February, or twenty-nine in February in a leap year–and she would amble on down to the fire by the creek and throw all of them in. It never rained in Red Sparrow Falls and the fire never went out. Margaret claimed her relatives were Holocaust survivors, or perhaps it was victims. But she was not Jewish and they were not. She was a compulsive liar. Though the gesture remained the same, and it seemed in bad faith and somehow anti-Semitic to deter. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/myspace/support