Sometimes, I plunge deep beneath their feet. As they breathe in and out, I sneak underneath. I can do that; I am sneaky. Beneath their toes, I feel fully every bit of what covers them.

Their chests rise and fall, sometimes together but most of the time, in their own time. She moves one knee up so her feet can’t touch: it won’t last long. Soon enough, she’ll find her soles together. They’ll cuddle like they want to do, make that swish-swish-swish sound like they always do, which is the rhythm of her sleep and the way she dives down to dreaming. He’ll move in the night like Gulliver unpinned. More lurching and loud, but he’ll sigh sometimes like a kitten, like a lamb, all breath and no boom.

I will hover there, beneath their toes. I will lay there, untouched and unknown.

There isn’t much difference between my sneaking in to them and the rest of where I am. Everything I am is like this: just sweet sounds and fleshy warmth. Sometimes when I dive down, I wish I could tap tap tap a secret code on their feet to tell them what I know.
I don’t miss their breathing, but I like it; I don’t miss them, but I like them.

I don’t have hands to touch them. I don’t have words to speak. I just listen, which I can do, and so I listen when they sleep. I go deep under to where they go and I go with them. I lie beneath their feet in the middle of their nights and wait until the next day comes. Because it comes for them.

They will wake. They won’t want to, but they will. He will roll out like a log in shorts and she will pull the blanket to her nose and tuck one foot into the other: swish-swish-swish.

Soon, I will start to disappear like I do; I will crumble gently, fall into pieces and little bits, and I will go away.

It’s okay: they needed to let me go.

Before now, when I heard them breathing, it became the in and out of my own breathing. When she moved her knee up, I knew it as if it were my own knee. When he lumbered over, I felt it. Sometimes I think I miss that, but mostly, I don’t.

I don’t. I don’t miss it.

Comments

[Susan (Trout Towers)]

I love this new round of Polite Fictions. It's giving everyone a chance to work their own kind of magic.

Nicely done, Picket. Nicely done.

[Jett]

Oh God, Picket, this broke me in two, right where I'm at, just as I'm needing a clean break in place of a jagged slow one that has been happening.

And this piece? It put me in mind of another, I don't know why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrsc5FeQDs

[mongoliangirl]

This made me want to rest my mind more than I do.

[Zip n Tizzy]

put it into words.
this is how I imagine it, just never quite articulated it.
very nice.

[Palinode]

There is something kind of mind-bending in the phrase "I lie beneath their feet in the middle of the nights," because I envision the people as sleeping and horizontal, with the soles of their feet parallel to the ground. It cracks my spacial thinking open. This is lovely and gentle stuff.

[Palinode]

I love the notion of a ghost existing in dreams, or only as a dream. This reminds me a bit of Roetke's "The Waking": 'I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow/I learn by going where I have to go.'

[TwoBusy]

Man. This is just graceful and gorgeous and aching for all the things it doesn't say. How lovely.

[foradifferentkindofgirl (fadkog)]

This makes my mind swirl. I keep coming back and resting on the line 'It's okay: they needed to let me go' and I can't decide if I want it to be an ache or a celebration.

You all, seriously, awe me.

[Carolyn Online]

Sniffle. I still love it Ms. P.