a quickie before bed

Callie lay in bed, disappointed to find herself at the end of another day with nothing accomplished. Today offered no progress, nothing new, and here she was, laying in the dark again. Her eyes briefly stung with incipient tears, but she was not able to sustain a mood of petulance. Callie smiled at her easily conjured self-pity and turned on her side, enjoying the sensation of moving under heavy sheets.

Callie's bed was a small, private palace of creature comforts. In a way probably typical of women who remain single for a long time, the bedroom had come to represent the possibility of a sensual encounter that, in actuality, had no place in her life. Once liberated from the possibility that a man might actually see the most symbolically private of her rooms, Callie freely indulged fantasies of harem-like comfort. Reasoning that one-third of one's life is (or at least ought to be) spent in bed, she felt justified spending one-third of her paycheck on furnishing her private domain.

The rest of the house betrayed no sign of the opulence that lay within the bedroom. The kitchen contained typical bachelor and bachelorette trappings: a single bottle of wine on the counter. A fridge bereft of food, but overflowing with condiments, a wire basket hanging from the ceiling containing one orange and one onion. The living area was so barren that one could consider it an oblique hint of its own: the very lack of hospitality of the living and dining rooms might lead one to assume that whatever room remained behind the closed door must of necessity contain some warmth, assuming any humans lived here at all.

Indeed, behind that closed door, Callie felt very much at ease, and was beyond considering the possibility of leaving her cocoon for the remainder of the day. The ultimate symbol of girly princesshood, the bed was shielded from the vulgar world, with a full canopy. At the end of the day, Callie loved to brush aside the curtains of her bed, wrap herself in Oprah's favorite throw pillow, and gaze out at the rest of the world through the gauzy distortion of the bed curtains. She chose rich colors for her bedding. A regal, blue-grey comforter puffed in all directions, for some reason giving her the feeling of floating in a friendly sea. Callie enjoyed just laying in her bed, turning her body over, lazily kicking her legs like a swimmer, spreading her fingers out like starfish.

Tonight, however, offered no such comforts. Callie lay like an obedient child sent to bed in the summertime while it is still light out, arms rested folded on her chest. She did not think of parents or any other family. She did not remember cherished moments with past and present friends. Although she contemplated her demise, she was not filled with nostalgia, longing, or panic. With her eyes trained on the ceiling, on a fixed place corresponding to a fixed point in the sky, she waited.