by Mags Kingston
I Can’t Fall Asleep in the Bed I Grew Up In
I step over the threshold into my childhood home, and I become an insomniac all over. I am grown now, but here, again, everything is the same: the same nighttime routine, the same shampoo, the same lilac walls, the same picture of a white Jesus at the head of the same bed in the same room in the same house.
Still, I cannot sleep, and I wonder if it’s the mattress.
It’s older than me by several decades and should’ve been thrown out before it found its way to my bed frame, but my mother insists. She won’t say it out loud, but I think she sees it as some sort of busted family heirloom because every time I point out that I cannot sleep, she frowns, tells me it’s worth more than I know. She points to one of the many tears as proof. Instead of cotton, the mattress is filled with black wool.
–
Dream logged August 17th, 2015, at 4:48 AM, the exact time of my birth thirteen years later.
I am born with a head of black hair that is thick and long and coarse. It is a sin to have this hair, and they teach me how to shear it before I can even grip the scissors. Do this, they say, and a man will pick you when you are fresh, when you are fertile, when you are ripe like the sodden earth.
For years, I cut.
The shears are a shiny gold, and the sharp end feels so sweet against the seam of my skull. I don’t mean for that glittering edge to get so close. Or maybe I do because even though the gash it makes is shallow, my skin unwinds and twists into the night sky like noodles in tuna casserole, like twirling at a youth dance, like a rattlesnake crushed under a wagon wheel, like DNA sequences.
The ground dissolves beneath my bare feet—my hooves—and I am a lamb skinned alive, bleating for a mother already lost in the slaughter. Under the butcher’s microscope, there is brown bath water, missed periods, pinching pennies, calloused hands, and feet that walk six hundred miles. There is cooking dinner before Dad gets home, and prayers to a God that only speaks to your husband, and babies: so many babies. There is Fredrick, and Dean, and a man with no name that beats his wife. There is Mary Ann, April, Betsy. There is a behavior that says obey and an instinct that says run.
There is a mattress filled with black wool.
–
Referring to an outsider or outcast in a community, the term “black sheep” first appears in records starting in the nineteenth century. Science was on the rise, but there were no public schools to teach simple understandings of Punnett squares and recessive genes. Thus, the black sheep born from two white-wooled parents was considered something rooted in witchcraft and demonology and were promptly slaughtered at birth.
–
The mattress was initially purchased by my great grandfather in the 1940s, but it weighs heavier than that. When I follow the stitching and test the springs, it puffs the dust gathered in the hitch of my great, great, great grandmother’s handcart. A member of one of the first Mormon pioneer companies to follow the colonizer’s trail across the United States, that triple great grandmother was putting an ocean and continent between herself and her abusive husband. She is nameless, yes, but in the only picture that survives of her, she stares into the lens with the strength of a woman unwilling to be killed. Inside her handcart and curled in the shell of a mattress not yet fat with wool is her infant daughter.
When she arrives in Utah, she rejoices. It is not three weeks later when, jobless and hungry, she marries a man that takes her to a barren town in Wyoming. There, she will have eight more babies, and die, mostly forgotten, save for a mattress that has more padding than it did before.
–
Dream logged October 20th, 2016, at 1:44 AM. There are bruises on my stomach the next morning.
I am pregnant. I am only fourteen. My stomach bulges with a grotesque thing that I do not want, will never want even though my mother and my father and the high school teacher I met at a church event tell me I am too young to know yet. I think I am sure.
I think I am a lot of things I am not.
The thing inside me claws against my womb with splintered fingernails like real nails, like rusted ones sticking up from old floorboards, ripped free by something innocent and now waiting for the sole of an unmarred foot to get too comfortable, to not look where it’s going. They will call this thing a baby, but it sure feels like a parasite as it continues to thrash and rave against my skin until it is stretched paper thin. Translucent, it lays its outline upon me, rolling until its face presses up and I recognize those features: those brown eyes and dimples and gapped front teeth.
This parasite inside me is me.
Every other night, I have dreams filled with gore and screams and cosmic monsters, but this one is the one that shakes me to my core, the one that has me jolting from my bed, dripping with a cold sweat. I decide it is best not to go back to sleep for the night.
–
My great, great, great grandmother has a son her husband names Frederick. Like his mother, he is a devout Mormon. So devout, in fact, he goes to a youth dance two towns over when he is twenty-seven because God tells him it must be so. Across this room of only a few stones and wooden planks, he watches Mary Anne dance the afternoon away with her friends. Giggling and laughing, this thirteen-year-old child is too full of life to be aware of the sunbaked farmer that thinks he talks to God tracking her every move until, once the sun is set, he offers to walk her home. At her doorstep, he tells her God has decided they are fated for one another.
For five years, Frederick attends every youth dance two towns over.
On Mary Anne’s eighteenth birthday, they marry.
God calls it love.
–
Archaic animal hides used as clothing and shelter have revealed that sheep were one of the first wild animals domesticated by humans. Somewhere between 11,000 and 8,000 BCE—a time length treated like only a few weeks in ancient history—in civilizations spanning from Mesopotamia to Mehrgarh to Pakistan, everyone all at once decided that these beasts had value in their meat in skin. By the time the Bronze Age rolled around, sheep were entirely reliant on humans for their survival.
–
Mary Anne has twelve children, the youngest of which is April. She is wild from a young age, known in the Wyoming pastures for her dirty mouth and rebellious nature. She will keep this spirit, and it’s that spitfire that draws the attention of Jackson, a returned missionary hot off the slopes of Switzerland. Like a dowry, he buys the mattress—now brimming with black wool—and marries April on a winter day in 1940.
Three kids in three years and an aimless husband who moves them from Colorado to Nevada and finally to Utah deprives the oxygen from April’s spitfire, and by the time Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, she has nothing to say when Jackson joins the military before he can be drafted. He has bad lungs, so he fights Hitler from an air force base in Maryland. April doesn’t even tell him she’s pregnant with their fourth child just as he doesn’t tell her that he is having a fifth with a woman he will leave when the war is over.
–
Dream logged November 3rd, 2020. I have this dream frequently.
In the way that all dreams do, there’s little sense to be found in the way my father raises a knife and slaughters my siblings. He’s a busy man, a distant man, a sometimes mean man, but he is not a violent man. There is a long line of abuse in his well-worn hands, but he has cut it loose, hiding that different-kind-of-painful past behind a demeanor that only breaks at funerals.
Right now, though, he’s slicing up my siblings into thin lines of meat. I suppose I should run, but I just watch, wondering how I couldn’t put such obvious pieces together. Little things that mean nothing in reality create a jigsaw puzzle of reason, all signs pointing to how my father is a killer.
When he finally looks up, his face is splattered with neon blood that smells of oranges. With the seconds it takes to shift the knife in my direction, his face morphs as his hair grows longer and, in an instant, he is bearing the features of my cousin, fifteen, standing over me. The next moment he is a bald man teaching history, my boss at my first job, the man behind me in line at the grocery store that can’t help but ask me if I need a new personal trainer. He is a combination of every man I have ever met, flashing in strobes against the mirror of a blade wiped clean.
I wake just before it punctures my skin.
–
Before selective breeding got involved, sheep didn’t have to be sheared. Like dogs, these hoofed beasts would grow their wool coats thick for the winter only for them to shed naturally when the weather grew hot. In the spring season, farmers would follow behind the herds, gathering the wool left behind to make clothes, blankets, shelter. It was a labor of love and devotion, one that felt tedious by the third century of doing so. Now, if a sheep gets lost from its flock, its body will endlessly reproduce pounds of matted, dirty wool until it dies of heat exhaustion in the middle of winter.
–
Betsy, my grandmother and April’s second oldest child, moves to Salt Lake City to try her hand at something no one in her family, man or woman, has tried their hand at before: education. She enrolls in math classes at the University of Utah. Engineering is a high ambition, but she’s got the brains for it, the drive, just not the chromosomes. Her first class is PreCalc, and even then, she’s the only one wearing a skirt in the whole lecture hall.
There’s name calling and harassment, falling grades and depression. The only one who seems to care for her is Dean, an older man with a smooth smile and a soft voice. He offers to tutor her. The first night, he puts his hand on her knee. On the second, there’s little studying to be done.
It’s a torrid, not-at-all serious affair, and as all such affairs that started and ended in the fall of 1960 did, there are several missed periods, a positive pregnancy test, and a courthouse wedding. Betsy does not make it to her second semester of college.
–
Dream logged April 7, 2021, at 2:37 AM. When I wake, I create constellations out of my pocked, white ceiling.
I am standing in an empty church. It has been months since I’ve entered these unholy halls, but I recognize the prickles of the imported carpet digging into the heels of my feet and the smell of muted chlorine permeating from the cinder block walls painted white. Normally filled with men in suits and women in ankle-length skirts, it is empty now. I wander in loops around the building. I pass the baptismal font, the waiting area couches, the room where my neighbor Paul pretended to know everything about God and told a lot of lies in the process.
Just when I am about to give up, a whisper rises from the center of this church, and I know exactly where it leads.
The chapel, always at the core of these kinds of buildings, is void of all light, but the hushed speech only grows louder until I am facing the pulpit. There, the whisper is something closer to a scream that curls around my ears and slithers about my brain, and all at once, I am taken.
The bodiless voice grips me and shows me a series of horrid things: rotting corpses half-buried in frozen earth; men, women, and children fertilizing a mountain meadow with their blood; a tall, eyeless man twirling in the distance, always coming for me; the sins of a past I did not always live and never seem to remember.
–
Eighteen years and five kids later, Dean can’t support a family on conjugal tutoring sessions and takes up a job delivering bread across Utah. It keeps him out of the house for most of the day, but with a family and a mortgage and Dean’s customary pack of ciggies a day, it’s not cutting it anymore. However, Dean won’t let Betsy get a job. He won’t say why but just asking makes him a little more aggressive, a little more drunk. Betsy gets hired at the local dairy farm anyway and tells the children not to say anything which they won’t because now they’ve got milk that isn’t expired.
My mother is eight years old and is told to make dinner every night before Dean gets home. With her clumsy hands and uncoordinated body, she makes casserole with tuna from a dented can and not-yet-moldy cheese on Wednesday nights, cream of mushroom soup on Thursdays, and boiled hotdogs on Fridays.
At the dining table, my mother smells of fish. Betsy smells of cow shit. Dean smells of fermented bread and cigarette smoke to cover up the lilting notes of a perfume Betsy cannot afford. Once the plates have been cleared, she will run a bath that each of the family members will take turns using. Always the last to call dibs, my mother will sink into a tub filled with water that is cold and brown and potent.
–
Sheep, like most domesticated animals, are social creatures, and they travel in flocks to prevent feelings of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Unlike other domesticated animals, these flocks are almost always segregated by sex. Female sheep group with new lambs while the males gather in their own subset known to prevent the female flocks from entering areas with higher quality food and shelter. The only time they meet is during mating season.
In the few breeds of sheep that remain wild, flocking is rare.
–
The mattress becomes hers when she is thirteen. The ground over April’s grave is not settled and the tears for a woman she didn’t really know are not dry on her cheeks. All the same, when she goes to dream for the night, the bunk bed she has shared with her older brother for years is gone, has been replaced with box springs and a mattress. It’s obese now, so full that it bursts and bleeds with black wool. Still, it insists it has hollowed out a space in its belly for her to call home.
That night, she twists and turns on that hungry thing until she falls into a restless sleep filled with dreams of skinned and bleating sheep.
This mattress means she is old enough to soothe herself after nightmares, for bleeding in between her legs, for getting over it. On her best days, she’s a spitfire, a brain; she’s so full of life that she burns with a passion bright enough to scar the outsides from within. Time wanes, though, and her best days are fewer, seem shorter, are always interrupted by an inability to go to sleep. On the nights she can, she dreams of pregnancy, of haunted churches, of men.
She moves out and thinks she is free, but the thing is, this mattress, it has legs. It’s a shapeshifter that claws along the highway from home to dorm room to apartment and it basks along whatever bending bed frame she is calling hers. Even when she puts in the work, identifies it, and calls it out, it’s still there when she returns for the summer, when she visits on the weekends, when she comes home every other holiday.
She writes this story over and over, knowing exactly the piece it’s missing. To lay herself dissected and bare like a lamb splayed on the table in a freshman’s biology class, like she has done with her mothers for all of history. From father to bishop, from first boyfriend to middle-aged coaches, there are a million different stories she could tell. There is playing stupid to get the boy to dance with her. There is motherhood before high school, sacrificing all that a twelve-year-old can to her sister’s infant son. There are “no’s” and “not tonight’s” and “please do not’s” that are treated like expired milk in the hot sun.
Worst of all, there isn’t anyone to tell it for her.
So, she waits, and she dreams and every time she visits home, she has trouble sleeping.
–
Dream logged January 1, 2024, at 5:46 AM. No notes.
It is one of those dreams you can’t wake from, the kind where all your efforts are weightless no matter how hard you tell yourself to run faster, push harder, scream louder.
And loud it is here in this blank, black emptiness. It’s so loud I’m sure my eardrums will burst and bleed from the inside out. It’s a cacophony of dissonant harmonies that dance around each other into one brute symphony I must sit through until the end. After all, I am floating in this orchestra hall, and I cannot move.
My mother is there along with my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother. The line continues on, reaching to that void in an endless stretch of obscurity. Though I cannot make out the faces of even those five or six paces behind my mother, I know they are all watching me. Their stares are simultaneously vacant and so full of grief it makes my own eyes water in sympathy.
They grieve for their insides hollowed out and dropped down this abyss, never to be seen again. In that empty space, something beastly, misshapen, and heavy fills every part of them. It makes their movements sluggish and tired and thoughtless, but their paralysis is not like mine. Mine will vanish when the morning sun cracks through the opaque; theirs is forever.
“Join us,” they call to me.
I know they do not mean to say it, just as they did not mean to pass on their brown eyes, big feet, and predisposition for cancerous cells. Caught in the genetic makeup of my chromosomes is a museum of private despair that tells the stories of these women on the mapping of my brain so clearly, I was born knowing to never meet a man’s gaze, to count my calories, to always sit with my legs crossed.
“Join us,” they say again and this time they offer me a handful of black wool.
For years, I have accepted. So much of them I already am, and so much of me I have stuffed into the confines of a hand-me-down mattress, losing sleep to make sure they are not lonely. But this mattress, it’s old and dirty and in need of retiring.
“I love you,” I say to this line of women that are a broken mosaic of my best and worst parts. Again, and again after that, too, “I love you.”
When I wake, my I love you’s echo on further and further, infinite and forever for the infinities and forevers my mothers have lost.
–
The next time I visit my childhood home, I spend the night on the couch.
At last, I can sleep.
Author Mags Kingston is a writer based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, ouch! collective, and Next Gen. She currently works as an editor on environmental conservation projects across the United States. She can be found on Instagram and Substack @magskingston.
Artist Kale Hensley is a West Virginian by birth and a poet by faith. You can keep up with them at kalehens.com.
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