Portrait, Sleep

After she gave birth, she could hardly sleep because she was either leaking milk or blood, or both at the same time or because she heard every sound the baby made—the widening of his thin lips while dreaming of a past life to his little fingers opening from a fist releasing his fate, or blinking his eyes, adjusting to the light.

She couldn’t fall asleep, so she fed the baby multiple times even when he was full, cross-eyed watching her face, scratching her chest with his uneven nails, or pushing her gorged nipple away with his big toe. Whether it was eyepatches, chamomile tea before bedtime or whether it was feet soaked in Epsom salt or massaging her soles with mustard oil or warm milk with turmeric or ASMR videos on YouTube, whether it was watching her baby in and out of dreams, inhaling his milk breath, his fingers wrapped around her pinky pulling her to another universe—nothing worked.

Past midnight, the sleep in her eyes was replaced by the blinking microwave clock to be set correctly someday. Sleep escaped like the stale smell of oil when she opened the packaged chana masala or spinach paneer or mushroom peas her husband brought during her pregnancy, sleep sizzled like bountiful butter in a hot pan to thaw two frozen naans curled at the edges, slowly flattening in heat, sleep became the couch where she stretched her swollen legs before it disappeared in her stubborn, dead-white stretchmarks. Sleep flashed like ads on the television screen during the rerun of Friends with the baby in her arms, baby on a wide cushion on the floor—giggling, drooling, hiccupping, wailing as if remembering something terrible—baby in the blanket with her in the guestroom, baby in the darkened bedroom after her husband had left for work, baby in the living room with all the windows open—cicadas throbbing, a breeze butting the bougainvillea up against the windowpane and tickling hollows in her feet as she stared at the wall color, then the ceiling fan and the pattern on the curtains making sure she was in her home and not someone else’s. Sleep snuggled like the warm washcloth from the dryer in between her fingers, sleep weighed on her eyelids like dishes in the sink and another overstuffed trash bag waiting to be picked up, on her spine jolting into a bright pain like the shock from sting rays from sitting against the hard headboard, from walking and standing so perfectly still—holding a bottle of milk or a wipe when her husband returned from work, he was spooked when he spotted her. She tried to be polite, asking him about his day, her fingertips seeking out his white-collar weariness, her face smothered with an expression Help me.

You, ok? He asked when she looked at him, shook with exhaustion. I want a bath, was all she could manage. Of course, he said and picked up the baby from the bassinet. By the time she was done because the water was no longer balmy and the bubbles had shrunk to the bottom of the tub, he had passed out with the baby asleep in his arms, and she lay on downy-light-scented-white-lavender-sheet but the awareness of if she fed the baby before he slept or did her husband changed his diaper, if she should use the restroom once more, plummeted its roots throughout her with a thousand feelers and watching both of them—Oh so peaceful, she sobbed.

To avoid making any sound, she tiptoed outside the room, outside the house, and sat on the front steps listening to the clatter of cars without mufflers rising and dying on the nearby state highway, night songs of frogs waiting for rain, a gentle whirring of birds in the branches of the oak licked by the flickering warp of orange streetlamps, their shadows shaking loose in her eyes. A dog yapped from time to time inside a house down the street—a long corridor of closed doors she wished she knocked on one and someone invited her in, opened her fist and released the baby’s pacifier on the carpet she didn’t realize she carried with her, and quietly led her to a bed skirted in viscous black air away from the mottled white of the moon and blushing bang of the dawn. She lay flat as if by a road roller, her hamstrings loose, her chest collapsing and rising into long waves of her breathing and she slept and slept, floating through a wormhole of dreams, wanting to wake up and pick the pacifier.