space ship – foto by Smith

I go in to tuck Lady into bed, crawl up from the foot of the bed until I can lie on my stomach and kiss her forehead softly and repeatedly with little dream kisses to prevent her nightmares.

“My poor baby,” she says.

“Why poor baby?” I ask.

“Because of all your body pain.”

“I don’t feel too bad in this position.”

“You should sleep on your stomach.”

“I can’t, I can’t breathe right on my stomach through the night.”

“You need an anti-gravity envelope for sleep.”

“I could sleep easily in space, just floating, no stress or weight or pain anywhere. Put up little cargo nets so I didn’t float away. And it’d be great for us to make love in weightlessness — pause — or at least it used to be back before all the space crumbs, before the astronauts started eating potato chips and the little leftover chomped crumbles floated around everywhere coating man and machine. It got worse when the Russians brought up hard pretzels; they’d chew with their mouths open and bits of pretzel shards went everywhere getting into eyes, ears, nose, armpits, vagina and ass cracks, between ball sack and thigh — it’s really creepy having a bit of unknowable crust float out of one astronaut’s mouth and over into yours; you catch all kinds of colds and social diseases and stuff. That’s why they started to quarantine the space dudes and dudesses when they returned to Earth so they could vacuum the crackers and chips and bread and pretzel crumbs out of all the bodily crevices. And it’s not just food — there’s stray body mold floating around up there, nose snot droplets, loose saliva, dandruff, smegma, toe jam, head cheese, sweat drips, liquid farts, body lice — and each word spoken to you up there comes with its own moist envelope of bodily fluids clinging to each syllable. . . it’s like endlessly making love to unbathed strangers in all their wrong body bits.”

“I’m going to sleep now. You should write that down.”

“Okay, love. Sweet dreams.”

weightlessness – foto by Smith