winkle on time

I’m lying on a blanket in my backyard. I have a book opened to the last page I left on, but the sun is too bright for me to read and my eyes grow sleepy. I feel the sun on my cheeks, the sweet, sticky burn of UV rays on the tip of my nose. A breeze tickles my the hair on my arms as I occasionally notice that I am drifting. I feel an ant crawling along the ridges of my bare left foot; I twitch my toes in an attempt to shake it off but soon give in to ambivalence and let the ant continue its exploration.

I soon disappear from my backyard. I see my housemate Lauren look out of the kitchen window and into the yard — she sees the vacant blanket where I reclined just moments ago. The neighborhood cat, Timothy, stretches her mittened paws and kneads the black and white patterned blanket where my own body stretched and kneaded just moments ago. I watch as my friend Kaylie, owner of said blanket, comes outside and shakes the woven blanket out, shoving it in her backpack. I remain unmoved, watching the slow, sleepy movements of life continuing around me as I lie weightless and invisible.

I dream of being honey and of swimming through sun-baked plant veins. I dream of melting cement and blown glass beads. I feel my hair and teeth fall out of my skull and my fingernails slip off my hands. I feel my eyelashes dance away with dandelions gone to seed. My eyeballs, like snails moving out, slide down my cheeks onto the soft thin grass. My collarbone becomes hollow like the shell of a cantaloupe.

I sleep, invisible in existence, for twenty years. My housemates all graduate and move out. They aren’t worried about me — they know I’m sleeping soundly.