Aurora Bonner: BEDS • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Aurora Bonner
BEDS

The cabin is cold after the fire dies mid-night. I watch the rise and fall of my father’s steady breath, just beyond his red whiskers and long black hair. My brother is nestled with my mother somewhere far away from my touch. On the floor of the loft, icicles on the windowsill seem to dangle precariously close to my forehead.
I am afraid to sleep in the farmhouse. Getting my own room does not feel like something to celebrate, but something to mourn. I make a bed on the floor of my brothers’ room, a blanket and pillow in between their twin beds. The wooden floorboards are cold but our whispering keeps me warm as the stars replace the sky outside our window panes.
The ranch house feels cavernous and cold despite the electric heater and new carpet that covers the floors. My parents have become ghosts, retreating to their room, muffled fighting seeping from under the crack of their bedroom door. I make my old bed on the floor in between my brothers’ and we talk of nonsense until they fall asleep, R snoring and M pretending to, afraid I’ll start talking about our parents.
My brothers are gone, with Dad in his new house, and my room in the ranch feels foreign. My mother kissed my head before she left “for just a few days” which turned into a few months, turned into perpetual aloneness. I go to bed alone, locking the windows and doors, covering my body and head with blankets and pillows.
E’s house is loud, full of dogs and screaming Italians, so much like my own before my parents deserted it. Here, I’m never asked questions and am always offered extra food. We sleep in her bed side by side and she allows me to take up space even though she has sisters that borrow her clothes and steal her jewelry. I feel warm and loved, but then we get boyfriends and share our beds with them.
I am on high alert in A’s bed at his mother’s small house, the trailer they move to when she can no longer pay the mortgage. His touch makes me want to leave my body. I imagine myself floating to the ceiling, searching for a way to escape, perhaps through the crack that spreads from the ceiling fan to the corner window. I don’t know yet that this is not how boyfriends should make you feel.
Alone, in my apartment, I collapse onto my bed, still in my clothes from waitressing at Red Lobster where I make enough money to pay for this room that hemorrhages heat and has knife marks on the back door. When I awake mid-night, I crawl under the blankets, not caring that I’m soiling my sheets with the dead lobster smell that clings to my pants. I pull the quilt up to my chin, cover my stomach with a pillow, and my head with another so that my nostrils and mouth are exposed enough to breathe, an old habit I never stopped.
J and I meet in the middle of our apartments in the middle of the night. Sometimes we just walk and talk until sunrise and sometimes I sleep on the couch at his apartment after we’ve watched Predator or Aliens and I am too afraid to walk home alone. When he finally stays at mine, he stays in my bed and we don’t emerge for four days, even when that means we fail Color Theory class for too many absences.
Our children crawl into our bed, sandwiching me with clammy little hands and infrared heaters for backs. I pat their unruly hair, listen to their steady breath, and watch the day fade to night. Sometimes J and I hold hands from opposite ends of the bed and sometimes not. I don’t peel the children off me or take them to bed or try to fall asleep, instead I stay awake as long as I can, devouring their warmth and drowning in the feeling of together.

Aurora Bonner is a place-based writer and teacher. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, HerStry, Impost: A Journal of Creative & Critical Work, and elsewhere. Her essays are included in two anthologies: DINE, from Hippocampus Magazine & Books, and Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania from Catamount Press. Aurora Bonner received her MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University.