Childhood Insomnia

She believed that sleeping meant appearing to be sleeping. She would lie stiff between her parents, muscles smothered under rippling skin, eyes banging against their lids. “So this,” she would think, “is sleeping. This is how sleeping feels. This, I guess, is it. This is all it is.”







Marion Cohen has two books of flash-fiction (that is, if that’s the same thing as parables): Parables for a Rainy Day, and Sizes Only Slightly Distinct. Her books total 27, including two memoirs about spousal chronic illness, a poetry book about the experience of math, and one about thrift-shopping.

You can see more of her work in 50/50 and 3.3