Myth Happens

Because derspatchel and I both received a healthy exposure to James Thurber while growing up, we have determined that last night shall henceforth be known as the night the bed fell on our kittens.

Because the kittens are fine. They were not even in the same room, having been assiduously lured out with feather toy and judicious profanity. The bed, however, is pretty broke.

The thing to understand about our former bed is that it is a hand-me-down from my parents; my grandparents had it before them. I don't even know the name for it: it's a kind of storage bed with slats that basically consists of a queen-sized open rectangle of wood, a central partition running head to foot, and slats arranged in a kind of rope ladder, so that they rest on the partition and a niche on either inside of the frame. Mattress goes on top. If you want access to the storage space, you lift off the mattress and roll the slats back. We weren't using the storage space, but the kittens had discovered they could slip in under the tiny headboard and roam around in the partitioned space, mewing plaintively when they couldn't remember how to get out. (Consonant with the laws of humor, it turned out that a kitten could get out just fine once we weren't trying to help them, but the laws of humor do not apply when the kitten panics and begins scrabbling frantically at the inside of the bed, necessitating intervention from the people who were trying to sleep on top of it.) The kittens were being especially inconvenient last night. First one and then the other slipped inside the bed and refused to leave, despite repeated clawing at the slats. I tried to read, assuming they'd extricate themselves. They didn't, not both the same time. Finally Rob took up the cat magnet—a jingly toy trailing now grievously battered peacock feathers, proud artifacts of our young predators' growing skills—and whisked them both out of the room, closing the door behind him.

He sat down on the bed. Something gave under me. We leapt off the bed and discovered the slats had slipped partly off the left-hand inside niche, tilting the mattress slightly. Distressing, because we hadn't known it could do that, but not a disaster: we slid them back into place, making sure they were braced correctly on both sides. I got back into bed. I was very tired. I've slept between one and five hours a night for over a month now, recently tending toward two or three; it's the worst trouble I've had sleeping since 2006 or 2007. Earlier in the day we'd bought an air conditioner; I was looking forward to installing it in the bedroom window so that the heat collecting under the eaves would no longer be a factor in the insomnia. I was reading a tiny critical study of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill (1965) which I was quite enjoying. Rob collected his book and got into bed.

The bed collapsed. Galvanically, like a sort of weltering whale. I can write that in hindsight because no one was hurt and the sudden subsidence of mattress and bedclothes underneath a pair of startled people must have looked hilarious from the outside, like something that could happen to Buster Keaton at the end of a long day. It was three-thirty in the morning, we were both stressed and exhausted; it felt horribly emblematic of everything that has been difficult about this spring. It was the one last thing we didn't have the strength to deal with.

So we dealt with it, because the alternative was not an option. Parts of the frame had splintered. The partition had snapped completely. There were wrenched nails sticking out of the slats. We dragged the mattress off the frame, shoved the frame off into a corner, this was also the point at which we discovered that one of the kittens had conscientiously peed while under the bed, so we cleaned that up, dropped the mattress back onto the floor from which we had so recently rescued it, and it was four-something in the morning by then. I'm not even sure what time it was by the time I finally fell asleep. There was bright hot light outside the curtains and at least I had a bigger fan on the dresser than the tiny little desktop thing that whirred through my nights on Dartmouth Street last summer. It's not that hot this afternoon. It might even be breezy by now. The kittens—undamaged, importunate, adorable—keep trying to climb on my lap and interfere with my typing. I had nightmares I can't remember. We need a new bed.

And that was the night the bed fell on our kittens.