a sleepy fancy

Friday comes and I hit the wall. Or rather, the wall hits me.

Last night I was so tired that I fell asleep reading in bed with the light on. I didn’t wake up until two a.m. to switch it off, drag the extra pillow from under my head, and roll blearily back under the covers. I don’t remember the last time that happened – when I was fourteen, maybe. And then this morning my body found it impossible to get up. I kept pushing Simon away from where he insistently stood shoving his nose into my eye; awkwardly guarding my face with my arm, I mumbled pitifully, "G’way..."

But the day came rolling onward with a royal carpet’s grand inevitability – maybe a careworn tattered grandeur; King Friday is a little old and leaky, stooped over the towns and fields with a muggy benevolence that really does nothing to liven one up. I stood on the sidewalk after Deb got the mail, smoking a cigarette and breathing the asphalt soup of the half-rainy air and wishing my eyes would open all the way.

If today were a statue, it would be of an old, old man, with a kind, deeply lined face and short scruffy beard, vague eyes staring off into the distance. He’d be wearing motheaten old heavy robes, a battered crown overgrown with ivy that waves over one ear and drapes itself down his back, and holding a green, eroded scepter in one hand. Bare feet. There’d be moss and bird droppings scattered all over him, and he’d be sitting in some weed-grown corner of a neglected park, his cement figure darkened in the folds with rain, the occasional pigeon lighting on his shoulders and arms with simple ceremony. Some vagrant with a sense of humor will have left a Styrofoam cup tucked between the fingers and thumb of his free hand, resting on the arm of his bedraggled throne. You wouldn’t be able to read the brass dedication plate anymore under the patient fingernails of time and the blazes of graffiti, but he doesn’t seem to mind or notice. He’s just sitting in his corner, soaking in the acid rain and the quiet of the park, a faint smile worn onto his face, and only the occasional drug trafficker or bum or immortal college kid breaking free from an afternoon of summer boredom knows he’s there.