The Rockin' SkyHorse Blues by Bruce Taylor

Author:Bruce Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, kafka
Publisher: ReAnimus Press

The Bed

Now this is the story of Miss McNed and her (almost new!) but second-hand bed. Now, she was a lady whose sleep she took oh, so seriously and when her old bed began to get rather lumpy here and there, she just knew that it was time to do something else. Now, she didn’t really need anything too fancy, she being forty-five, and with hair turning now decidedly grey, and with a few lines around her eyes—well, she found it rather difficult to recall the last time someone occupied her bed with her at all, except her pale yellow cat, Tinrinnyroo, which was an animal of few sounds except the proverbial “mew”, and that was about it. So one day after work in the Senior Citizens’ Home, Miss McNed was driving home and she happened to pass a used furniture store and she thought, Ah, this might do. And stopped her little red station wagon outside and just walked in through the door of that wide store, filled with furniture from anywhere that you please, and she saw a green mattress with blue stripes running lengthwise and she knew instantly, yes, this was for her.

“How much?” she asked the salesman, who came sauntering over as if he saw this scene as something out of a waterfront movie way back in the ‘fifties, and he said, looking at her, then at the mattress, and, lighting a cigarette that leaned out of his mouth at an angle that could most accurately be described by the word “cool”, he said, “Just got it in today, and if we can get it out fast, yeah, great. How does eighty-two sound?”

“Very well,” said Miss McNed. And she paid and he helped get that mattress in the back of her station wagon and, once it was home, she was delighted and surprised how light this mattress really was, and—fortunate again—it fit her bed frame as if it had been designed exactly for her. Yes. Exactly for her. No doubt about it at all, and she put on the sheets and the nice, thick chocolate-brown cover and she laid down, and ah, yes, sunk way down and it was perfect as perfect could be, the best mattress she ever had and she took the old one and put it out by the side of the house with the idea in mind to take it away as soon as she could, and then she proceeded to fix dinner: a small, dainty affair, nothing fancy here: stewed tomatoes, a small steak, and some potatoes, with lime Jello for dessert, and she was a simple sort of soul living a simple, spare life, yet with, she thought, happiness and friends. There was Aunt Clara, a sweet but crusty sort of a soul some twenty years older than Miss McNed, and frequently they talked for hours on end and this night Miss McNed called and said, “Clara? Clara, how are you doing?”

“Oh, rather well,” Clara replied, “at sixty-five, I guess I should be glad that I’m still alive, oh dear me, time goes by fast.

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