spring locked

I had high hopes of this bed. By a casual reckoning, this might be the thirteenth bed I’ve lain my head in since November. Many of these barely deserving the title bed, cama, lit, etc. This one is a sofa bed. Upon occasion, (drunkenness or denial), it seems like too much of a fuss to make it, in which case I throw some cushions on the floor and hope for the best. But by and large, I prise the beast out of its cage, ratchet it up, ignite the cylinders, and crawl in. The sofa bed has not done too bad a job. Until recently. When it’s begun to cavil. An unorthodox mattress, it now aspires to concavity. There is a way of lying on it and maintaining a flat surface, but the springs growl and whine, and it feels for all the world like you’re sleeping on three planks placed over a ravine. Better to let the springs have their way, sinking about twenty five degrees in the middle, creating a Grand Old Duke of York of a mattress. Who knows, this might be a model of orthopaedic soundness. It might be the future of sleep.

Then again, it may be an aberration in the face of nature. One day I expect it to snap its jaws shut on me like something out of a Chaplin film. My legs and arms waving at the ceiling as the mattress placidly digests my corporeal being.