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Sleep

Fiction

Sandwoman

My insomnia began just when my baby girl started sleeping through the night. Anytime my head hit the pillow, my heart pounded like a million galloping horses, and I would tremble and sweat and eventually get up and stand on our back porch to beg the gods for peace.

By Maria Kuznetsova July 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Coach’s Kid

Coach Walls started calling me “Tank.” Coach O’Brien said, “J.P. is out to kill.” Dad said nothing, but every time I looked at him — shin-high socks, gray shorts, V-neck tee with chest hair spilling out, whistle dangling around his neck — he was unable to hide his grin.

By John Paul Scotto July 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Perfectly Built Spaces

To help me fall asleep at night, I try to think about soothing subjects. This is why, since I turned fifty several years ago, I have found myself renovating houses in my head. . . . I am particularly interested in renovating the houses of my childhood.

By Kelly DeLong October 2022
Poetry

Selected Poems

from “Sleep Skills” | These days I wake up tired / after hours skimming sleep’s / surface like a hungry bird, waiting. / They say it’s a fact of growing older, / to lose the skill for sleep infants / and teenagers effortlessly have.

By Andrea Potos May 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Sleep Study

I wake at 2:34 AM and lie in bed staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours, beating myself up for having awakened way before it’s time to get up.

By Evan Lavender-Smith October 2019
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Learning To Sleep

You’re not really exhausted until the hallucinations start: Droplets of mercury floated in my peripheral vision. A lemon levitated out of the fruit bowl. A streetlight at the corner of State and Garfield laid its long body down on the sidewalk. The cat looked up at me from the corner of my desk, twitched his muzzle, and said, “Libby, Libby, Libby.”

By Allyson Goldin Loomis February 2014
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Afternoons

The rooms were filled with the smells of food. The only sounds were those of the house slowly settling around us, and the birds outside in the walnut trees, and an occasional car going by on the blacktop road.

By Carolyn Miller August 2012
Fiction

His Mrs. K

She sits in the kitchen with coffee and a view of the soft rain. This is her early-morning time alone and always the best part of the day, before he awakens and she must adjust to his moods, his needs. This, her hour of resolve — not to do anything in particular, but only to bear on through the morning.

By Dwight Yates July 2011
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Four Beds

I turn off the lamp and ease myself into the hand’s-breadth space between Rob and the wall. In the dark he places my fingers on the supple frets of his ribs, showing me simple chord changes. He murmurs throaty Gaelic into my ear, and I rub his stomach as if he were a sleepy child. We fold against each other like the pages of a letter.

By Rochelle Smith October 2010
Sy Safransky's Notebook

November 2008

No matter who’s elected president, writers will write. Painters will paint. Three in the morning will still be three in the morning. The door in our psyche we don’t want to walk through will still be just down the hall. No matter who’s elected president, life will hand us the invisible thread that connects us all; love will hand us the needle.

By Sy Safransky November 2008