narcolepsy can be a gift if you remember not to care

by Ben Starr

Peter Herrmann

I met a man with the power of sleep. He could fall asleep in the space between breaths. Nod off at the drop of his soft felt hat. He told me he had practiced sleeping until the brink of hibernation. Until he could fall asleep while he was already sleeping, burying sleep deep inside pockets fast asleep, tucked away like the hand-painted nesting dolls my grandmother brought with her when she swam the Atlantic. The plump wooden figures she hid high on a shelf and never let me touch. When I was thirteen, I watched my grandmother sleep until she died. Fit snug in that coffin, her lips were blue. Blue like the husk of a milkweed beetle. Skin cold and hard as old books. I asked the man, the man with the power of sleep, if he knew how to sleep like my grandmother. If he knew how to manufacture the kind of sleep where time drapes itself on your chest like a newborn, nestles inside your bones, dares you to move just one rib.

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Ben Starr studied as part of the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and is a reader for Dishsoap Quarterly. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, HAD, Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, Scaffold and other journals. Find more of his work on X @benjaminstarr and at benstarrwrites.com