The Bed

I was home last week for Spring Break, and as usual I was housed in the spare bedroom upstairs. My mom kind of uses that room as an all-purpose space for spare furniture, grandkids' toys, sleeping babies, and things like that, so every time I come it's a little different. This time it had something quite new: my grandparents bed. My grandfather passed away last month (he and his wife had lived with us most of the last decade or so), and they had turned his room into an office. Most of his things have gone to various relatives, but the bed had merely migrated upstairs. So that's where I slept all week—I don't know if that's weird or what, but I was cool with it.

Here's my story. The bed's headboard has two tall skinny posts that jut up along the wall, and anytime you move a bit or roll over, the vibration travels up the posts and makes them tap the wall softly. It's a bit annoying, actually, and the word on the street is that the Old Man used to take the posts off when they bugged him. Well one night I went up there and plopped down on the bed and was reading a book, and after a minute I noticed the posts were making a regular tapping on the wall: tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. I wasn't moving at all, so I wasn't sure what it was at first. But then it dawned on me, it was the sound of my heartbeat, traveling from my chest to the mattress to the headboard to the posts to the wall, beating out a quiet tattoo. It was only happening because I had just run up the stairs to get my heart pumping a bit and I had lain down belly-first.

Creepy, yeah? It made me think of ripples of oars on a lake, the music of the spheres, and dinosaur footprints.