Nap, Not

Sometimes, when you are tired and get in bed to take a nap, you can't sleep. What's up with that? All you want to do is take a nap. A nice nap would do you good. Would help you out a bit. And so you lay down on a comfortable bed and pull the blankets up just so, and you turn this way and that until you are finally still, and then you wait. You close your eyes. You clear your throat. You move your toes. Just a little. And you wait for sleep to take you. And you wait. You open your eyes, just to feel the tiredness, just to make sure you are tired. You are. You are tired. So you close your eyes all over again. You think of something. The first thing that comes to mind. It's the sight of a burn. You think, No, I don't want to think about that. That's not something that will put me to sleep. If I fell asleep thinking about the burn, I would have a nightmare. You tell yourself, No, but because you've told yourself No, the thought persists. This time, with more detail. The burn is revealed. There was a man once. He was a friend of your father. And you open your eyes. But it's too late. You are thinking about the friend of your father. He'd burned himself. Spilled gasoline on his leg and dropped a cigarette on his pants. You saw none of this. You saw the burn later. You saw the burn at a picnic, when this friend of your father stopped by and drank whiskey. So much whiskey, the gauze covering his burn took on a strange color and smelled like whiskey. He took off the gauze, just because. He wanted to show everyone what a real burn looked like. You looked. You looked into the red eye of something beneath skin. You saw what soft skin looked like, white and swollen like wet macaroni on a sidewalk. Sometimes, when you are tired and want to take a nap. Sometimes, this happens. Sometimes, you can't shake the image. Just sometimes.