Jacob Austin

The Bed

The mattress swells until the sheets are strained taut and the usual number of pillows look small and pathetic. It grows so that it presses against the entire perimeter of the room. Standing in the doorway, the man prepares himself for the climb. He first hoists himself up on the boxspring, clinging to the grooves in the design for support, and then pulls himself up the sagging portion of the new and monstrous blanket which must have come by mail that very afternoon.

Climbing slowly, hand over hand, he eventually reaches the summit.

There she lay, a tiny figure in the acres of softness. The man treks across the great Duvet Plains to reach her. She is sleeping uneasily in a stray pool of light sneaking through the blackout curtains, her mouth slightly open, foul breath escaping. Nudging her only slightly, the man wakes the sleeping woman. She does not open her eyes, but instead hums a sort of greeting. He sets in to tell her about his day, but realizes quickly that she is not listening.

“Did you get out of bed today?” he asks.

She curls up tighter, pulling her knees neckward, and he registers that as a no.

“Do you feel okay?” he asks stupidly and she meows like a sarcastic cat.

“Do you want to do anything tonight?”

The woman turns her face upwards and opens her bleary eyes. She seems to study him as a baby might study something new. A small crop of bedsores have manifested as acne across her forehead. When she turns away, the man feels her answer transmitted into his brain.

“Are you hungry?” he starts to ask, but, looking around, he identifies an empty box of Goldfish, the wrappings from a couple Taco Bell burritos, and a carton of orange juice wedged beneath one of the pillows. So she must have left the bed at some point after all, he thinks.

“Okay,” he says to the womanly lump. He bends and extends a hand, tries to stroke her back, but she responds with a prickling which relaxes only slightly beneath his persistent touch.

Leaving her, the man heads south across the mostly flat landscape. Outside, it is burning bright late afternoon, but in this dim room he cannot see very well and nearly trips over the laptop which is open to Netflix and playing at low volume. He guesses it had been closer to her before she fell asleep and the divergent boundaries of the bed’s tectonic plates carried it away, leaving it out here, playing an episode of Friends to no one. He picks it up and tucks it in an armpit.

The stretch of plains gives way to a bog that divides the bed into his side and her side. Reaching the border, the man must shuffle through thick muck as he is no longer able to lift his feet. In this way, he wades through the swamp. In places, it rises all the way to his waist, yet he does not feel much panic as the bed does not allow for such strong emotions. Something in the air seems to subdue everything. Perhaps it is the daintily suspended cat dandruff, or else some more sinister force discharged by that which dwells in the unexplored caverns below.

Away from the bed, the man finds he can think more clearly. Each day, he dreads leaving work, not wanting to return home, but there is just enough of that old idea to bring him back: that of himself as a divine knight on a hero’s journey in these strange lands, tasked with defeating the evil spirit and saving the sleeping princess. That old, foolish feeling still flares up from time to time even though his spirit has mostly waned. In his darker moments, he even views the woman as the enemy. She has such a connection with the bed that he sometimes convinces himself she has control over it, that it does her bidding.

On the other side of the swamp, the man reaches his camp. The small place he has built for himself in the inhospitable landscape requires constant upkeep or else it will be lost to the bed. He feeds the fire torn pieces of whatever discarded life exists in these parts, and then guards it with his body. Sudden gusts of wind are known to rise from nowhere before dying out just as mysteriously.

Sitting close to the fire, the man fishes a beer from his secret cooler. This, too, he has to guard closely. The bed can skunk a beer in an instant. He huddles around it, making sure to stay within the light.

As the afternoon dies outside and night replaces it, the darkness deepens further. The man opens the laptop and puts on a show, but he can feel himself being watched. Slowly, he turns and peers into the darkness behind him, fearful and shivery, but it is only her. She had been watching the screen from the dark beyond the fire, half-submerged in the bog. The man invites her in closer. She comes a little closer, but stops short of the ring of heat emitted by the flames.

The two fall asleep, with all that distance between them.

In the morning, the man awakes and leaves the bed. It clings to him with one of its invisible tendrils which he slowly kicks loose throughout the morning. Still, the bed is growing and it will beckon him back at the end of the day. Thinking of its occupant, he will begrudgingly return although there is little he feels towards her beyond duty. All the love there once was has been feasted on by the bed.

That evening, he accepts an invitation to happy hour with some of the people from his office, and is late returning home. Only after many rounds does he find the will. On the drive home, he grows angry with the woman. If it weren’t for her, he thinks, I could go to happy hour every day. How nice it had been to be surrounded by such vital human energy. She’d been like that, once, the woman, when they first married. They’d gone to bars, out to restaurants, even on vacations to other countries, visited museums, attended concerts and sporting events. Sure, she’d have her bad spells, but never for more than a few days, a couple weeks tops. Nothing like this, he thinks angrily, losing the road a bit as he swerves onto his street. He doesn’t even know her anymore. What is there to know? And the worst thing, he sneers, working himself up into a real rage, is that she doesn’t even want to get better. She scoffs at any of my attempts to help, as if I am some sort of imbecile.

He slings the car into the driveway, knocking over the recycling bin with his front bumper as his attention is stolen by something else. He fumbles with the handle before pouring out the door. Gaining his balance he rounds the car and slowly backs into the street, all the while his eyes fixed on the front wall of the house. The bed had busted through and is completely visible from the yard. For a long moment, the man can do nothing but gawk at the display, feeling utterly ashamed, not only for himself, but for her. How long ago had this occured? How many of their neighbors have driven by?

It is more than he can take.

Entering the house, there is a low hum in the air, and drywall dust hangs heavily in the hallway leading to the bedroom. He walks through it, towards the base of the bed frame which has pulverized the interior of the house, crashing through walls, knocking loose the toilet in the adjoining bathroom and flooding the house past his ankles. The man splashes slowly through the mess, squeezes into the bedroom to stand alongside the bed, and cranes his neck.

It has become to him, finally, insurmountable. He would have to stretch even to reach the boxspring, leaving his torso completely exposed to that yawning maw beneath the bed. No, he thinks, as he looks up towards the pillowy plateau high overhead, no more. He can just make out the face of the woman looking down at him. It is as soft and out of focus as a bowl of melting ice cream. For a moment, they watch each other, and then she pulls back, retreating into the boundless depths of the bed.