BUt It Never Works

K.C. Mead-Brewer

The new mattress was going to change things, she was sure. Hip pain and back pain, that sort of thing. The woman, Meg, her name on the form was Meg, touched her hips as she told him about it. She didn’t look old enough for hip pain and Dale thought about saying so, but instead he just put his hands on her old mattress to cart it away. He didn’t like her apartment. The white walls had goose pimples; her cell phone kept going off. Her stark eyes dressed in purple, as if they’d been crying. 

“Do you ever find anything inside the old mattresses?” She touched her worn mattress as if it might yet contain some secret that even she didn’t know. Dale kept his hands where they were, gripping the mattress’s end, and yes, it was easy to imagine fucking her on it. Meg had a plump face that he could picture cupping in his hands, like a goblet.

“I’ve never looked,” he said, though the idea had occurred to him. His grandmother used to hide money inside her mattress.

“Never.” Meg wrinkled her nose. “Has a bad taste, doesn’t it? Never, never, never.” And she was right. He already had the boxcutter in hand. 

Dale was careful not to stab too deep, just in case something was alive in there. Another version of Meg, maybe; the part of her life who sleeps. Splitting the fabric, the hard sound of ripped paper, they both reached in to feel the yellowed foam. The smell, like old sunburn peels. They cut deeper, they felt around. They slipped inside. Dale knew this was how his grandmother’s money must’ve felt. Secret and safe and waiting for a woman to press her body down atop them.

“What about this?” Meg whispered. She stroked the foam; she held up a condom. “Is this another never?” 

The mattress surrounded her surrounding him and it wasn’t comfortable, it really wasn’t. The foam squeezed around them as if it were young again, firm again, desperate for her, and the smell got worse the more she moved, and she moved a lot. Meg gripped his shoulders and he held her hips, wondering if they were in any pain, wondering who she was imagining him to be, and when it was over he got out from inside the mattress quicker than was polite. He couldn’t be alone in there; that’s all he knew.

Dale took Meg’s hand, helping her up, and he felt for a moment as if something special had happened. As if she were a queen stepping out from some other world. Snow White from her coffin.

All the rest of the day he drove extra carefully, pretending Meg was curled up asleep on the slashed mattress in back, not wanting to disturb her rest.

That’s how he avoided T-boning the pissy orange car that blew through a red light. The squirrel who misjudged their chances. His wife used to press kisses to her fingers whenever they passed roadkill, then press those kissed fingers to her car door, as if sending the dead thing a prayer or a wish. Wake up, those kisses said. Please, wake up.

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Ithaca, NY. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tin House's 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.