The Bedtime Emptying of Our World by Joel Hans

At bedtime, our daughter asks for two handfuls of Crayons and a ream of computer paper. She asks for the tiny blanket we crocheted for her when she was six months old. For the doll with fidget-knotted plastic hair. For the plushy puppy she named after the dog who died years ago. For the toy muffin torpored in a plastic egg. For Lambie, who we had already packed away in a cardboard box destined for Goodwill. For her last acrylic painting, her strokes already peeling away from the cheap printer paper. Her easel. Her trampoline. Her sandbox, bricks and sand and black widows all.

She asks if she can cuddle with her pedal bike, the one with streamers and training wheels she hasn’t been brave enough to shed, which reminds her of when she was still small enough to be held in the sanctuary of our arms. With the bleached bird’s bone from the yard, which reminds her how the desert sun bakes us clean. With the branch of mesquite we keep on the kitchen counter, which reminds her of the monsoonal afternoons where we watched lightning dazzle the sky and she learned to count the gap between flash and thunder.

She needs her little sister, who she wars with and steers in equal measure. She needs her friends from preschool, who have taught her everything she knows about the world outside our home. The swing from the backyard, which we deliver with the olive tree still attached. The saguaro cactus from our front yard, which we collect with an adze and a sequence of pulleys, so she can curl up inside the caves carved by woodpeckers. The great horned owl that perches in the palm tree, which we coax down with a garage mouse and a blanket and our waiting arms, to keep watch over her dreams.

We fly to every library and check out every book, because she feels like she hasn’t yet learned enough. We fly to Wisconsin to collect her grandparents, because she already knows how time thins with time. To the center of the earth to find the magmatic core where heartbreak crystalizes, because it’s better she learns early, when she can still heel toward forgetting. To the moon to retrieve the shroud it unfurls when eclipsing the sun, because she needs to know life loves to cast uneven lines.

We love you, we shout as we close her door, which we can barely close. Our voices echo across the canyon that’s grown between us and her, trees and clouds and stacks of books she, tantalizingly, hasn’t yet read. And like with lightning during the monsoons, we count the seconds until we hear her voice in return, the brief but enduring tremor she imparts on the bedtime emptying of our world.

All that’s left is a single blue Crayon tucked against the baseboard. One last thing we forgot to bring her, but she’s probably asleep by now. One of us stands, heels down and spine straight against our daughter’s bedroom door, while the other traces the length of our legs, the bluffs of our jaws, as we look into each other’s so familiar eyes. Our hands overlap as we outline each of our fingers, barely enough now, between us, to count the years we’ve spent together. We switch places, then break the Crayon in two, our laughter orbiting the tiny darkness we now share.

We fill ourselves in with color.

When morning comes, when she finds her dreams too wide, the first thing she’ll see is two Bluetiful eclipses heartstruck and knocking, asking if we can do this all again tomorrow, across the door to what is now her sewn and sleeping world.

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JOEL HANS — Joel’s work appears in Story, West Branch, No Tokens, The Journal, Booth, and others. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona, and now edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe. Find him in Tucson, Arizona, where he lives with his family, or online at joelhans.com.

Art by SUSAN SOLOMON — Susan is a freelance paintress living in the beautiful Twin Cities area of Minneapolis/Saint Paul.