It’s just a bed, a sterile and thin model similar to those you see in hospitals. It’s not quite as imposing. It’s like a tiny version of a bully. “Don’t take me too seriously, pal,” it seems to be saying.

Still, it takes up the room, if not in size then in magnitude. It looks cold.

It was delivered yesterday. I’m glad I wasn’t here when it was.

When I was growing up in this house, the room the bed has claimed was a parlor. I never understood the purpose of the parlor. It was a forest in miniature of never-sat-on furniture, dusted-weekly tables and statues, art hanging from walls that were never looked upon except in passing.

The rest of the house was lived in, even smelled different, alive. The parlor was a universe unto itself, reveling in it’s stagnation.

Now the furniture is gone, to where I don’t know. I don’t ask. On some level this is still, always will be, the parlor. For now though, it is something else.

I place a chair by the bed, taken upstairs from my father’s old bedroom, the one he has slept in since before I could vote. There will be lots of sitting in this room, and a chair must be had.

I adjust it. I stand back, as if a painter.

It will do.

My eyes settle back on the bed.

How many beds has my father had in his life? I’m sure there was a crib in the beginning. Then probably a small bed. Did they have toy beds back then? Somehow I cannot fathom my father sleeping in a bed shaped like a race car. Still, he was once a child, just as I was.

It doesn’t matter.

A thought tickles some morbid aspect of my soul. I picture my gray, exhausted father, laying in a Speed Racer twin, pushing out his last bit of air before the great beyond.

‘Annnnnndddddd….they’re off!’

‘Go Speed! Go!’

Yeah, it’s a race all right. One that’s just about over. A few more laps…

“Speed! Speed! Look out, Speed!”

I have ceased to be entertained by my irreverent distraction. The smile that had barely begun to exist recedes again into the void of nothingness.

I look at the bed.

It looks back at me.

‘Be good to him. Give him sleep. He has earned it more than most. And when your task is done, leave of your own accord.’

The bed answers me only with silence. An eternity of silence.

I hate the bed. I want to take a bat to it, break it’s metal legs, smash it’s faux wooden head. Finish off it’s belly with a knife till I’m bathed in it’s white, synthetic cotton guts.

The Bed Slayer. The town will have a parade for me, and I will pose before newspaper camera men as they show me smiling, the bed hanging in the air from a hook besides me. I will have become a black and white immortal. I will be humble, of course.

“I just got lucky,” I ‘ll say with disarming sincerity as I pat the trophy besides me, “right place, right time, all that jazz. It just wandered up to me and…..BAM!”

I’ll shout the last word, the reporters will be taken aback and then laugh. I will be blinded by the cameras as they take shot after shot of me and my prize.

The picture taking will never cease.

With each new starburst my smile will widen till it has grown beyond my face, overtaking the town, eclipsing the world, eating the sun.

I will smile forever.