Sleep Talkin' Man by Karen Slavick-Lennard Read Free Book Online Page B

late-night mumblings. This has been known to drop him in a bit of hot water. For instance, one night after he had shamelessly teased the receptionist at work about the prolific :) and :( faces studding her e-mails, STM came out with:
    “If she sends me one more fucking smiley
face emoticon, I’m gonna shove that
keyboard so far up her ass, she’s gonna
have to tweak her nipples to force quit.”
    That one caused some trouble. To be specific, when he walked into work the next morning, it caused a stapler to be hurled at his head.
    Real life references didn’t always pepper Adam’s sleep talking as they do now. In fact, for a long time, everything Adam said seemed utterly random and unrelated to reality. It was a full ten months into STM’s existence before he said anything that we were able to recognize from our waking life. But there was no missing it that first time:
    “My snorkel! My snorkel! Judge won’t like
it if I don’t have my snorkel!
You PLANT it … Don’t want baby snorkels.”
    Now, I can’t tell you where the snorkels fit in. I can tell you, though, that this was the night before he was going into family court concerning visitation with his kids. Perhaps his anxiety was so intense that it broke right through more literally than anything else had up to that point. Although, as you can see, he didn’t quite manage a complete departure from the surreal.
    We had another month of nothing but randomness from STM, and then, just after one of our best friends revealed that she was pregnant for the first time, we got our next little glimpse of Adam’s life in STM’s exposition:
    “Babies don’t bounce. They don’t bounce!
Shame.
It’d be much more fun if they bounced.”
    This regretful warning was most informative for our pregnant friend, I’m sure.
    Another month went by with no midnight mentions of Adam’s waking life. And then we went on our honeymoon, and Adam’s twoworlds collided! He babbled nearly every night about the day’s happenings. Our honeymoon was a bit unusual, you see—we spent two weeks volunteering at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand—and thus, I believe, it provided plenty of fodder for STM’s interest in the abnormal. It started with this one:
    “Oh, such wrinkly skin. And oh so hairy.
Yeah, like grandmothers with trunks.”
    No real mystery what he’s talking about there, although it does beg the question of how hairy Adam’s grandmother was. Another night, we had this:
    “Stop bouncing the floor. Stop it, seriously, I need to pee. I need to pee and I can’t pee in the toilet when you’re bouncing the floor … Fuck you shit-for-brains, that’s it, I’m gonna piss up and down your body every time you bounce … There we go.”
    This one was definitely inspired by real life: at the sanctuary, we lived in a raised structure made of mostly bamboo. When anyone from any of the huts walked around, the entire place shook with their footfall. This next one is pretty self-explanatory, given the fact that we were in Thailand:
    “What goes in one hole hot comes out
the other hole hot. Burning fucking curry.
Awesome stuff.”
    And finally, for anyone who has ever shoveled elephant poop, this one needs no explanation:
    “Totally green snowballs. Giant ones! They
look wrong. They sound wrong when they
hit you. And boy do they smell wrong.”
    I can only hypothesize that our daily experiences started appearing in Adam’s sleep talking because in an elephant sanctuary, a situation asunlike our typical life as you could ask, our day-to-day was suddenly just as interesting as his imagination. Our stint at the sanctuary seemed to throw wide open the portal between Adam’s waking and sleeping lives. Even after we’d returned home to “regular” life, reality cropped up more and more often among the usual bizarre, fanciful musings of STM. STM was inspired by people Adam met, as in this utterance after an evening out entertaining a client with an especially noteworthy