The Untimely Eviction of Mr. Brown, Page 1

Have you ever been kept awake by the sound of your own heart? Like a stubborn salesman scratching at the door?

As though every beat ripples through you as a penny in a puddle, resounding like waves circling out and expanding like the ever-blacker universe itself?

And isn’t it peculiar how the rest of the body seems to involve itself? As if to support the growing tumbleweed of sound, thunderous thumps in your chest. It generally begins with the ears, as they project the mumblings and thuds of your assiduous heart through to your pillow like an ill-smothered megaphone. It is a sound that simply cannot be repressed. It may as well be a deaf high school marching band beneath the box springs. As soon as that song takes off, your eyes will follow suit, and crank themselves open like Venetian blinds at noon. In the Sahara. Hot. You will see in the dark as you never have. Each knock and bump of your chest will open a larger hole that will form in your ceiling. It will eat your potentially radioactive glow in the dark stars from 1985, sucking them up into naked space. It will be entirely impractical to close them again, what with the band and celestial activity overhead. But this phenomenon is by no means limited to your head. Inevitably your fingers are tapping your pale thighs, and you have flopped to your back to avoid the megaphones pressing any harder into the traitorous pillows. The fingers are picking up pace, filling the missing notes between syncopated beats, until they seem to sprout minds of their own and generate heat from the speed of their drumming. Each finger becomes an oversized matchstick and ignites, sending you into a flaming frenzy and kicking around sheets like a devil child. You extinguish the flames, but not before loosening every cover of your mattress sheets, so that you must stomp to your feet and reconstruct the bed entirely before you might make a second attempt at sleeping. It is then that the flood lamp of a harvest moon behind the bars at your window begins to build its own case. As you walk to your window you drop the burnt sheets and forget the smell of charred arm hair entirely. All sound evaporates from the room and your eyes would once more be free to close, had they not just been witness to the only thing on earth that might have silenced the largest, most ambitious muscle in your chest.