Sleep

The pawnbroker’s wife grew more and more exasperated with her husband’s laziness, but the more he slept, the more he was tired. He dreamed of building, fetching and carrying stones and mixing mortar. His hands grew rough and his fingers thicker, until soon he fumbled with coins and struggled to separate notes, his fine long fingers coarse and clumsy as though wrapped in newspaper. He became careless in his work, selling his own watch by mistake and giving a gold wedding ring back to a poor man for nothing. His wife found him sleeping soundly. She noticed how thin his naked wrist was, which could hardly have supported a handful of pebbles.

Now she would not let him sleep, harrying and stabbing him with her pointed fingers, until his swollen eyes wept with the thought of his work unfinished, bricks unlaid.
“It is nearly done,” he pleaded.
“What is nearly done? What is this silliness? Count money. Build towers of gold coins, not bricks. This is your work.”
In his dreams he smiled at the sensation of stone adhering to stone.

She rang a bell every hour to awaken him. Finally he no longer slept. His nights were a strange swollen fruit that made his eyes and mouth sticky. Flies visited him. He no longer thought of bricks and his building receded from memory, unfinished. Soon he had squandered all the money they had except for a single gold coin, and he knew that his wife no longer loved him. She told him, “Now you can sleep, since you have ruined all the waking world.”

She took the coin and left one night, knowing he was awake but saying nothing. Months later, he died suddenly, his eyes open. A death not connected to sleep, but abrupt as a full stop.