WAITING FOR SLEEP ANGELS   (1,830 words)

   In the daytime, Sybil’s upbeat. She’s strong, she’s brave, she’s an inspiration to everyone around her. ‘Wish I had her courage,’ people say after they’ve been to see her. Sybil projects a good image, but she needs the daylight hours to do this.

   Towards dusk, things start going the other way. The very word dusk is a word Sybil hates. It makes her think of waiting for long, tired afternoons to give way to evenings, lights clicking on in trailers. The scarred knotty pine panelling in her mother’s kitchen, the rustling of cockroaches beneath the skirting boards, behind the faded wallpaper.

   As a child, she’d stand at the backdoor just as evening began to filter through the last vestiges of daylight. She’d stare out at building rubble, the rusting husks of cars poking up through grass that never got mowed, the garbage blown up against aluminium siding. She’d stand there and listen to the sad, shrill eeeie-eeie whine of the crickets and just wait for night. Back then night was a friend. There was promise in it, mystery and romance. Night crept in and swallowed the ugliness right up.

   But night was no longer something she looked forward to. The sadness, the ugliness – she knows now that they’re more than what you can see rusting away in a backyard. Night won’t cover up the world’s ugliness if you’ve let it leak into you and fester.

   Now when all the lights are out and darkness floods the room like a great black lake – that’s when the sad thoughts come to her. That’s when all the what ifs? parade past her, when all the things she didn’t do but should have or did do and shouldn’t have, come along and wear away at her. Oh, they ought to see her then, those people who think she’s so brave, so strong!

   Ever since she was a little girl, she’s had trouble falling asleep. Her father used to tell her that everyone had their own sleep angel. Your sleep angel came along in his canoe, his oars plying the waters of the Lake of Sleep that spread out all around you when you started nodding off. He’d move in close and just wait there until you’d dropped off – until you fell right into his canoe. There was a place in that canoe all soft and dark and waiting for just you. Once you were inside, he’d row you out until you were in the middle of the Lake of Sleep. And there you’d stay until morning, when he’d row you back to the Shores of Daylight again.

   By the time Sybil was a teenager, she reckoned that her angel was a pretty careless, slipshod fellow who didn’t take his job seriously. He probably sat there in his canoe yakking away with his fellow sleep angels, never giving a thought to her waiting there. Even as a teenager, she’d lie awake night after night and sleep would only reach her after long, tedious hours.

    But now – well, sleep has become all but impossible. The only reason she even bothers to go to bed is because it’s expected here. Part of the routine.

   Darkness has leaked into every corner. Even the mirror over the wash basin is almost gone, the hospital furniture merely vague suggestions in the oily black shadows.

   Sybil lies quietly and takes the deep, controlled breaths she’s been told to take, willing sleep to come, but knowing it won’t. Her casted arm is giving her no pain, the cuts and bruises are healing. She’s walked from one end of the corridor to the other any number of times, strolled the hospital grounds, drunk her warm milk. But here she is again, wide awake.

   The images she wants – lofty mountains, rocky gorges with frothing white waterfalls tumbling down – she can conjure them up, but she can never manage to hold onto them. Gradually they are replaced by images she has seen in newspapers, on television, the backs of milk cartons: the lost children, the grief-stricken women, the frail grandfather crouching in the rubble that used to be his home.

   She wills them out of her mind only to have them creep back in again. This time with sound effects and actions: the lost children are crying, calling for their parents; the grieving women are tearing at their hair; the homeless grandfather sinks to his knees and covers his face with his hands.

   Sybil weeps with them, these people whose suffering is so huge that it humbles her. How do they cope? How do they go on? How does the woman who has lost her grandchildren struggle to her feet, wipe the dust from her clothes, go on living? How do the parents of the missing children bear up under the agony of uncertainty, the grief of permanent loss? How does the elderly man rebuild his home and get on with the remainder of his days? How do they all manage to find sleep at night knowing what they know, having seen what they have seen?

   Good memories – that is the way!  Sybil remembers a photo of herself on her daughter’s tenth birthday. She’s with her sister Marsha and they’re both laughing, their arms around each other. She’s got on one of those tent-like shifts they used to wear back then, a ghastly floral print. A white cake edged in piped pink frosting, a scattering of sugar roses peeping out from a clumsy tangle of birthday candles. Marsha, heavily pregnant, is fanning herself with a rolled-up magazine.

   Marsha’s got diabetes now, so bad that she might have to have her leg amputated. And her twins – the babies she was carrying back then – one of them’s already dead of an overdose.

   And another image is picking at the edge of Sybil’s mind: another heavily pregnant woman, an AIDS patient in a fly-ridden hospital in some dirt-poor African country. God knows how she will cope, what she will do, this woman! Tears fill Sybil’s eyes: her own troubles are as nothing compared to those of this woman, of so many people in the world. So much war, poverty and disease, so much cruelty and injustice and plain old bad luck – and oh Lord, why is she doing this again?

   Remember the good things:  thank God there have been plenty!  The day she first met Baylis, those highly polished shoes he was so proud of. How unintentionally cute he was in his earnestness to make a sale, how eagerly he went through his rehearsed pitch. And how amazed he was when she said yes, that she’d be happy to buy insurance from him. The way she’d caught him trying to peek down her blouse as she signed the forms and how mortified he’d been that she’d caught him. How they laughed about that later! Their newborn baby’s face, all clenched and tight like a peony bud. The joy she and Baylis had felt, stepping across the threshold of their very own house, the burst of pride and happiness…

   Ah, but the last time she and Baylis drove past that house – years after they’d sold it – how sad to see that the new owners had cut down the rowan tree they’d planted, filled in the fish pond, poured concrete all over the front garden, painted the trim bubble-gum pink. How sad to think that every beginning came with an ending attached. You couldn’t see it, but it was out there just the same. 

   Her Uncle Caleb used to say that the best thing you could hope for was to die in your sleep. As a child she’d always thought that was a pretty awful thing to say. But now she saw his point. Going to sleep one night and drifting off into who-knows-what – well, it sounded pretty good to her.

   Because everything in creation – every child, every tree, every day – was bound to come to an end. And there was no guarantee at all that when the end came it would be painless, dignified, meaningful. Once you’d figured that out – once you genuinely understood the truth of the matter  – just getting up every day and going through the motions became a pretty heroic feat.

   She’s so strong, she’s so brave – what do they know?  She’s just good at pretending, that’s all. Pretending she’s got to go on, that tomorrow’s the first day of the rest of her life and when the going gets rough, the tough get going. Here in the darkness, steeped in the darkness of her thoughts, it’s a different story.

   Do you think I can pass that van? she’d asked Baylis. And he’d said Yes.  They’d been moving along at a snail’s pace and they were supposed to be at her sister’s hours earlier. Baylis hadn’t seen the dip in the road; he’d been half dozing, half looking at the scenery. Ten seconds later and that minibus would have come up out of the hidden dip and sailed safely past them at 80 miles an hour. Ten seconds – a mere ten seconds, that would’ve been all it took.  She’s so strong, she has such a will to live. Jesus, what did any of them know?

   Sybil turns over onto her side and listens to the rattle of gurneys and the muffled chatter of nurses outside her room.  They’re just outside her door. One nurse is complaining about her husband who’s been on a fishing trip, what nonsense it is, grown men sitting out there all day long trying to catch something. All they bring home is a sunburn, a pile of dirty clothes, and the occasional catfish. All that trouble for a catfish or two, she says.

   ‘Why honey,’ her friend tells her, ‘don’t you know, it ain’t the fish, it’s the fishing. That’s what they’re out there for.’  Sybil can hear their laughter echoing down the corridor with the clicking and rattling of the gurneys.

   Not the fish, but the fishing.  Even now Sybil can remember those fishing trips she used to go on with her father and Uncle Caleb, the happiest memories of her childhood. They never caught anything – just sat there and watched the wind rippling the surface of the water, listened to the birds, talked and ate sandwiches. They’d consider themselves lucky to see a kingfisher.

   ‘Where’s your fish?’ her mother used to ask them when they got home. ‘Didn’t you even catch one?’ Sybil wracks her brain, but for the life of her she cannot remember a single fish. Surely they must have caught a fish or two at least once, but if they did, she cannot recall. Somehow this strikes her as funny and she finds herself smiling for the first time in ages.

   Not the fish, but the fishing. That's what we're here for. She closes her eyes and feels a certain peace settle over her. Perhaps the sleep angel will come and row her out to the Lake of Sleep after all.