Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies Read Free

seemed appropriate to call him by a name like everyone else, even if she had raised him from paper and ink, from a dictionary.
    â€œWebster,” she said, nodding sharply at the obvious. “I’ll call him Webster.”
    She returned to the living room and looked at the man. He seemed to be resting peacefully. How could she move him to a more comfortable place? The couch was too small to hold his ungainly body; he was very tall. She measured him with the tape from her sewing kit. Six feet two inches. His eyes were still shut; what color were they? She squatted beside him, face flushed, thinking thoughts she warned herself she must not think, not yet.
    She wore her best dress, wrapped in smooth dark burgundy, against which her pale skin showed to best advantage. It was one o’clock in the morning, however, and she was exhausted. “You seem comfortable where you are,” she told the man, who did not move. “I’ll leave you on the floor.”
    Abigail Coates went into her bedroom to sleep. Tired as she was, she could not just close her eyes and drift off. She felt like shouting for joy and tears dampened the pillow and moistened her pepper hair.
    In the darkness, he breathed. Dreaming, did he cause the words to flow through her drowsing thoughts? Or was it simply his breath filling the house with the odor of printer’s ink?
    In the night, he moved. Shifting an arm, a leg, sending atoms of words up like dust. His eyes flickered open, then closed. He moaned and was still again.
    Abigail Coates’s neck hair pricked with the first rays of morning and she awoke with a tiny shriek, little more than a high-pitched gasp. She rolled from her stomach onto her back and pulled up the sheet and bedspread.
    Webster stood in the doorway, smiling. She could barely see him in the dawn light. Her eyelids were gummy with sleep. “Good morning, Regina,” he said.
    Regina Abigail Coates. Everyone had called her Abbie, when there had been friends to call her anything. No one had ever called her Regina.
    â€œRegina,” Webster repeated. “It reminds one of queens and Canadian coins.”
    How well he spoke. How full of class.
    â€œGood morning,” she said feebly. “How are you?” She suppressed an urge to giggle. Why are you? “How... do you feel?”
    A ghost of a smile. He nodded politely, unwilling to complain. “As well as could be expected.” He walked into her room and stopped at the foot of her bed, like a ghost her father had once told her about. “I’m well-dressed. Too much so, I think. It’s uncomfortable.”
    Her heart was a little piston in her throat, pushing up the phlegm that threatened to choke her.
    He walked around to her side of the bed, just as the ghost once had.
    â€œYou brought me out. Why?”
    She stared up at his bright green eyes, like drops of water raised from the depths of an ocean trench. His hand touched her shoulder, lingered on the strap of her nightgown. One finger slipped under the strap and tugged it up a quarter of an inch. “This is the distance between OP and OR,” he murmured.
    She felt the pressure of the cloth beneath her breast.
    â€œWhy?” he asked again. His breath sprinkled words over her face and hair. He shook his head and frowned. “Why do I feel so obliged to...” He pulled down the blind and closed the drapes and she heard the soft fall and hiss of rayon dropped onto a chair. In the darkness, a knee pressed the edge of her bed. A finger touched her neck and lips covered hers and parted them. A tongue explored.
    He tasted of ink.
    In the early morning hours, Regina Abigail Coates gave a tiny, squeezed-in scream.
    Webster sat in the overstuffed chair and watched her leave the apartment. She shut the door and leaned against the wall, not knowing what to think or feel. “Of course,” she whispered to herself, as if there were no wind or strength left in her. “Of