the traveling mattress
by ainsley wilson
there was once a girl. born screaming into the world amidst the silent eyes of her older brothers. she grew fast. by the time she was two years old, her hands creeped out the edges of her crib, grabbing at furniture and air until one day she knocked over a floor lamp. wrapping her grubby hand around the metal and yanking, yanking until it toppled over, glass shattering as the shade bounced two feet into the air. her parents promptly transferred her to a bed all of her own. being the only girl, she didn’t have to share like her brothers, who had been paired off into the dwindling bedrooms of the house.
the girl liked her bed. it was massive, reaching twice her height in both directions. it was blue with swirling patterns of purple that creeped uniformly through each stitched square. much prettier to look at than the stupid pale yellow birds that perched uniformly across her four walls. the tag on the mattress said full. she felt full. her dressers were green.
the girl slept in that mattress for a long time and her limbs kept growing, always trying to overpass their confinement and by the time her parents sent her to far away school, her feet poked out the end, toes pressing downwards into the side of the mattress in the same way that she sometimes pressed her toes into her youngest brother’s side to elicit a screeching kind of laugh. a pained kind of laugh like when she heard her mother and father fighting downstairs as she slid her legs in between the banister spokes. a kind of signal cue. her mother laughed like this just before she came up the stairs and on those nights, her father always slept in the downstairs guest bedroom, sheets tousled but not slept under, like the indent of a ghost. the girl would pull her legs back and lunge in carefully placed steps—as to avoid the floorboards that moaned under weight—back into her room and flop backwards on her bed. if she wasn’t careful, her door would nudge back open and she would feign sleep from the peering eyes of the hallway.
at far away school, her bed was longer but skinnier, the perfect size for her measurements and as much as she reached, she could never get her toes to slide over the edge. at night, she would dream of her mattress, longing for summer and winter when she could return to her own bed. in those dreams, her limbs would flail outwards, outwards and often she woke up on the floor.
when all of her brothers left the house for good, her mom told her that they were downsizing and getting rid of all the furniture. the girl understood that it was her time to leave so she packed up all her belongings into a small duffel bag and begged her mom not to get rid of her mattress until she came back. the green dressers and yellow birds she left with one last lingering examination for her memory.
the girl left for a long time, unused to the ways of the world and drinking in freedom that she had never known. she spent lots of nights in other people’s bed, hopping from one continent to the other. but no mattress compared to the one from her childhood. after many years, she saved enough money to buy a small one bedroom house in the city she was born. all of her brothers had married and bought houses in the same neighborhood they had grown up and she got to meet their young children who ran around her legs calling her aunty.
her parents had moved into a simple one level ranch when she finally returned. she kissed her mother on the cheek and poured her father a glass of orange juice. she sat for a long while in her great grandmother’s old rocking chair staring out the window at a robin hopping on a dead branch until her mother touched the small crook of her arm. she followed her mother to an unfinished attic space that was empty save for a lumpy object in the corner. it looked bare as it laid there on its side, leaning against the pink insulated wooden beams. the girl dragged the mattress down the ladder, out the door, and through the streets
“aunty, aunty what are you doing” the children called but she paid them no mind. the girl dragged the mattress all the way to her new home. the only furniture that adorned the place.
she fell softly onto the faded blue mattress, the equally faded purple swirls shooting out of her ears and fingertips and striking sideways into the walls. she pulled the strings tightly into her body, wounding up and up
and slept backwards.
Click to see Ainsley’s work in the Fall ‘22, Spring ‘22, and Spring ‘21 issues