The People My Sleep Invents
Gabrielle Schafer The People My Sleep Invents Every night the brain runs a pawnshop, trading in old glances, bent smiles, the dented profiles of men who once handed my father a receipt through a slot of glass. They come back misfiled. A woman with the eyes of a checkout clerk and the mouth of a saint in a painting stands in for my mother. A boy who once dropped a coin in a fountain returns as my brother, taller, burning. The mind, they say, cannot sculpt a new face. It must steal them, like buttons from coats, like bones from graves, like extras wandering off the edge of old films. So the night fills with citizens of nowhere: the man who pumped gas in 1983, still smelling faintly of unleaded and boredom, now cast as my executioner, my savior, my friend. I never learned his name. In sleep, he learns my secrets. They arrive wearing masks made of memory — the bus driver’s jaw, the neighbor’s eyebrow, the woman who once said “next” like a verdict. They audition endlessly for meaning. Somet...
