Kelly McLennon

ODE TO A WATER BED

Probably the last one in existence, the holdout from an era long gone.

It was a thing of wonder.

Our aunt let us sleep on it when we were hers, those elementary spring breaks, relegating herself to the couch.

It was like sleeping on Jell-O. It was sleeping on a raincloud. It was sleeping on goddamn water.

It was waffles for breakfast and pizza for dinner, movies and the beach and the bowling alley. It was Pop-Tarts and stuffed toys and the coveted Gamecube.

It was the chicken-themed kitchen, the refrigerator full-body-tatted with magnets, the old pipes in the old house that smelled like cinnamon apple —air freshener, mind you. It was a week without nutrition.

It was a week, every year, of the water bed. Artificially heated, cradling our half-grown bodies. There is nothing like the privilege of a wiggle, the subsequent slosh of the very bed beneath you. Rebounding back and again off the wooden sides, and, when it dies down, doing it one more time.

It went like all balloons must— the decades wore it down to the treads,

until it sprung a leak, the opposite of a doomed lifeboat. No one can bale their way back into the vessel.

And thus it bled to its end, hospiced out— my aunt the death doula helping it go. The last one in existence, must be, gone before I knew its worth. It was too old, and I am too young. This is the way of these things.