There’s so much you can do on a bed. There’s the obvious—have a picnic with beer, cheese cubes, and sardines. The less obvious: Write a story. Design a new city. Draw in miniature. Sure, you can reach orgasm on a bed—even two people can. And if you’re lucky (or unlucky), you can make an actual baby. But the strangest thing you can do on a bed is sleep. To sleep on a bed is to depart the body you protect with your life. And what you leave it for! To dream in miniature of cities, babies, and sardines. The start of which can so easily turn to nightmares. The very best thing you can do on a bed, I think we can all agree, is to get up off of it. Walk with courage into the daylight—into all of those things you’ve never even seen.
Lynn Mundell’s work has been published in Booth, Eclectica, Counterexample Poetics, Oblong, Number Eleven, and other fine journals, with more forthcoming in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, Permafrost, and Litro. Lynn is co-founder of 100 Word Story and its anthology ‘Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story’ (Outpost19, April 2018). She lives with her family in Northern California.
–Art by Marina Ćorić
