Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies Read Free Page A

course he doesn’t like the sun.”
    She walked down the hallway, passed the doors of neighbors with whom she had not even a nodding acquaintance, and descended the stairs to the first floor. The street was filled with cars passing endlessly back and forth. Tugging out wrinkles from her dress, she stepped into the sunlight and faced the world, the new Regina Coates, debutante .
    â€œ I know what all you other women know,” she said softly, with a shrill triumph. “All of you!” She looked up and noticed the sky, perhaps for the first time in twenty years; rich with clouds scattered across a bright blue sheet, demanding of her, Breathe deeply. She was part of the world, the real world.
    Webster still sat in the chair when she returned with two bags of groceries. He was reading her Bible. Her face grew hot and she put down the bags and snatched it quickly from his hands. She could not face his querying stare, so she lay the book on a table, out of his reach, and said, “You don’t want that.”
    â€œWhy?” he asked. She picked up the bags again by their doubled and folded paper corners, taking them one in each hand into the kitchen and opening the old refrigerator to stock the perishables.
    â€œWhen you’re gone,” Webster said, “I feel as if I fade. Am I real?”
    She glanced up at the small mirror over the sink. Her shoulders twitched and a shudder ran up her back. I am very far gone now.
    Regina brought in the afternoon newspaper and he held his hand out with a pleading expression; she handed it across, letting it waver for a moment above a patch of worn carpet, teasing him with a frightened, uncertain smile. He took it, spread it eagerly, and rubbed his fingers over the pages. He turned the big sheets slowly, seeming to absorb more than read. She fixed them both a snack but Webster refused to eat. He sat across from her at the small table, face placid, and for the moment, that was more than enough. She sat at her table, ate her small trimmed sandwich and drank her glass of grapefruit juice. Glancing at him from all sides—he did not seem to mind, and it made his outline sharper—she straightened up the tiny kitchen.
    What was there to say to a man between morning and night? She had expected that a man made of words would be full of conversation, but Webster had very little experience. While all the right words existed in him, they had yet to be connected. Or so she surmised. Still, his very presence gratified her. He made her as real as she had made him.
    He refused dinner, even declining to share a glass of wine with her after (she had only one glass).
    â€œI expect there should be some awkwardness in the early days,” she said. “Don’t you? Quiet times when we can just sit and be with each other. Like today.”
    Webster stood by the window, touched a finger to his lips, leaving a smudge, and nodded. He agreed with most things she said.
    â€œLet’s go to bed,” she suggested primly.
    In the dark, when her solitude had again been sundered and her brow was sprinkled with salty drops of exertion, he lay next to her, and—
    He moved.
    He breathed.
    But he did not sleep.
    Regina lay with her back to him, eyes wide, staring at the flowers on the ancient wallpaper and a wide trapezoid of streetlight glare transfixing a small table and its vase. She felt ten years—no, twenty!—sliding away from her, and yet she couldn’t tell him how she felt, didn’t dare turn and talk. The air was full of him. Full of words not her own, unorganized, potential. She breathed in a million random thoughts, deep or slight, complex or simple, eloquent or crude. Webster was becoming a generator. Kept in the apartment, his substance was reacting with itself; shut away from experience, he was making up his own patterns and organizations, subtle as smoke.
    Even lying still, waiting for the slight movement of air through the window to cool him,