Sleep

         A house sits on a hill with a long set of stairs leading to the front door. Other houses crowd around and there is no room for a front yard, but this house shoots up, looming over its neighbors.  The steps are concrete and unworn, starting straight up towards the house from the sidewalk.  About midway there is a platform, merely a square of concrete, and the steps now proceed to the right before another platform and switching to the right.  Before the door there is a brown door mat.  No words adorn it, but it is made of rough bristles.  Each bristle pokes out in a seemingly unique direction, and most are stiff and straight, though a few have been bent and therefore appear shorter than the others.  There are patches where groups of the bristles have been bent down and the mat as a whole seems shorter in these areas.

         To the left of this mat - as well as to the left of the door and the platform that is directly below it - is a small garden accessible via a door located on the platform below.  The door is small and old.  It has a curved top and a small iron handle that is sturdier than it looks, which is to say it isn’t actually falling off. The wood is a medium, but full brown and is knotted in many places.  While the wood the door is made of is smooth the door itself has many curves and is not flat.  A small gap exists between the bottom of the door and the concrete and from the crack, and over the top, rushes the scent of cinnamon.

         Behind that door lies the garden, though it is devoid of cinnamon.  Flowers are abundant and no bare ground can be seen.  Opposite the entrance is a bench, made from the same wood as the door.  Flat pieces of wood curl up at each end to form armrests and slats of wood serve as legs in the same places.  A cushion covers the bench.  Green, red, yellow, blue, and purple are all embroidered into the cushion, woven together to form a scene.  A man is sitting in the shade of a tree, book in hand, and yellow, bell shaped flowers of the tree droop down all around him.  And above the bench, bell-shaped flowers drop from a tree.

         Wind rustles through the leaves before sounding a wind chime which is hanging from the tree.  A string loops around a tree branch and is attached to a circular piece of wood.  From this pale wood dangle seven metal tubes, each ones longer than the next.  Each tube is cut at an angle on the bottom and a hole has been punctured into the hollow.  Metal brushes together and the sound carries and passes by a window on the second floor before dissipating into the vastness of the sky above. 

         Light streams in, filtered through the small cracks between the closed blinds.  Reflecting off the dark green of the blinds, the light becomes slightly muted.  One beam falls upon a digital clock, silver backed with red numbers.  All eights flash repetitively and no sound comes from the clock.  On the side table, a dark wood table with a circular top, a wallet, keys, a cell phone, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter all lie next to the clock.  The cigarette pack is smashed and at most only the bottom layer of cigarettes remains.  They are Marlboro’s and a green see-through lighter rests diagonally on top of them.  Resting underneath the cellphone the wallet is barely visible, but it is black with an orange trim.  It’s thin and no money is poking out the edges.  The phone has a message on the screen indicating that it has received a new text message. 

         Another beam of light falls across a forehead.  The forehead is ethnic, but not dark, and long, dark brown hair is draped over the top of it.  Anything below the forehead is hidden by a blue blanket with white stripes.  The body extends under the covers and the lump it creates is curled with its legs tucked up, arms clutching the sheets.  A shift.  He or she rolls over, where previously they were laying on their left shoulder facing the clock, they are now on their right and inclined such that their face is almost in the pillow.  Legs stretch out to the end of the bed and they emit some sort of guttural sound.  Warm woolen socks protrude from under the covers and stick off the end of the bed.  The socks are grey with white on the ends where the toes go and little fuzz-balls gather on the heels.  He or she shifts again this time spraying their arms out behind them and lying face down in their pillow.  The sheets have fallen back a bit revealing their neck and the bare skin on their back. 

         A slight breeze slips in through an open window, rustling the blinds gently.  A faint clink of metal on metal is barely audible, perhaps just enough to enter a dream.  The blinds settle back into place and the breeze continues on, barely grazing the bare skin of the sleeper.  It does however, just enough so that small goosebumps begin to pop up all over the bare skin.  Small bumps more apparent to touch than sight to which the sleeper pays no mind but to roll back onto their side and pulls the cover back up to eye-level. 

         A woman is sitting at a copper table, her eyes in the direction of a window, through which shines only the bright lights of the city.  Turquoise, leaning towards green, covers sections of the table with un-oxidized, but thoroughly dirty, copper covering the rest.  The table is rectangular in shape and lines up with a long window in the corner of the room.  Three wooden chairs, with the backs painted a green similar to the copper, are the only company the woman has.  The woman’s left elbow is resting on the table and propping up her face, chin in her palm.  Her arm is oily, recently lotioned, and her skin-tone is golden, part natural and part from tan.  No scars mar her arm, nor the face it leads into.  Small blonde hairs proceed from her elbow to her wrist, spaced far apart and so faint that they can hardly be seen.  There is a beauty mark on the side of her wrist right where the wrist bends so that her head can rest on her palm.  Basic clear nail-polish gives a glossy look to her nails which barely extend beyond the tips of her fingers.  She lifts her fingertips from her face, starting with her pinky and ending with her index finger, before she touches them back to her cheek in reverse order.  The faintest sound of skin hitting skin escapes from the taps.  Her eyes remain trained forward and out of the window, a slight watery glaze starting to form across them. 

         The sleeve of a sweatshirt comes halfway up both of her palms.  Matted red lettering with white outline spells out “Brown” across the middle of the grey with brown tint sweatshirt.  The hood hangs out behind her, bowl shaped, and holds most of her streaming brown hair.  No skin peeks through where the sweatshirt meets her grey sweatpants which are faded, but dark at the same time due to how dirty they are.  The waist sits right on her hips with the drawstring completely relaxed and hanging loosely between her legs.  The sweatpant legs are stuffed into thick woolen socks covered in fuzz.  She shifts her weight ever so slightly on the wooden seat and a small gap appears between the sweatshirt and sweatpants.  A small breeze blows in from the slightly ajar door next to the window.  The incoming cold air is not strong enough to rustle anything, not even the piece of paper sitting on the table in front of the woman, but it sneaks into the small exposed strip of skin and raises the slightest of goosebumps. 

         The piece of paper is clean and white with two creases dividing it into three roughly equal sections. Half of the page is filled with a disjointed version of cursive in black ink, followed by a large and awkward signature.  The bottom half is white and empty.  A drop of water falls on the letter near the bottom of text, but before the signature.  Underneath the water, the paper quickly becomes soggy and the ink starts to run.  Black seeps out from the droplets connecting words and letters in its immediate vicinity before it comes to a halt.  Lying across the top corner of the letter is a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, partially smashed and empty.  Following the water a piece of ash falls off the end of the cigarette that is in the woman’s right hand.  As it falls the clump of ash stays for the most part intact, only a little blows off into the room.  Black burn marks are clumped on one end of the ash and this is the end that hits the water and the paper first.  Upon contact the ash crumbles, loosing its shape and becoming victim to the will of the water.

         The woman does not look down, but pulls her right arm from its resting spot on the table towards her face.  The cigarette finds her slightly parsed lips and the slight moisture that lines her lips rewets the end of the cigarette.  She tightens her lips around the cigarette, making the seal between it and her lips as air tight as possible before she inhales.  The fire that had died to embers, barely visible even with the ash having fallen off, is renewed and it moves slowly towards her, leaving ash in its wake.  Smoke rushes down her throat and into her lungs where it stays until she pulls the cigarette ever so slightly from her mouth.  The exhale is long and slow, releasing the smoke into the open air where it immediately starts to disperse.

         As the smoke disappears the woman lowers her arm and the cigarette in her hand back to the table.  She drops her left hand as well and subsequently rests her forehead on the back of her palm.  Her eyelids flutter and don’t fully close before she turns her head and rests the side of it on the table and closes her eyes.  The time in between her breathing becomes more and more spaced out, while it becomes more and more regular.  Inhale through the mouth, exhale through the nose.  Her dark brown hair falls haphazardly across her face and her lips have the smallest of gaps between them. 

          That smoke which didn’t diffuse into the room heads towards the open door on a draft.  The smoke slips through the crack between the door and wall and into the night air where it dissipates completely.  Night blankets everything in black, with only the bright lights from the city down below piercing the dark.  No sounds break the silence of night and the only scent is faint and of recent rain.  After a time a car passes by with its windshield wipers on the slowest setting.  The water droplets glisten on the black paint of the car, reflecting the yellow to white lights of the city.  Tires against wet, slippery pavement, are the only sound to breech the silence and it too, soon fades giving way completely to the quiet yet again. 

         Gradually the lights in the city become dimmer and the night sky becomes brighter.  Pink creeps out into the black, overpowering it and driving it away.  Dull lighting begins to illuminate the world again, though everything has an off tint.  Orange is the first to join pink in pushing back the black night.  Dew covers most of the garden and the colorful morning light is refracted through the thousands of dew drops hanging from the various plants.  One green leaf is weighed down by its abundance of dew and the water looses its grip dropping onto the leaf below it with a silent splash.  The receiving leaf is beginning to gather a pool of water on its top causing it to glisten and reflect more obviously than the other leaves. 

         The same light that is reflected amongst the thousands of dew droplets streams through a window above the garden.  Beams of light sneak in between closed blinds and fall across a bed.  The sheets are not made, but instead tossed to the side uniformly.  No one is sleeping in the bed, covered or uncovered, and the light illuminates an empty bed.