Later
By Corinne JackerLaurie's father, Malachai, has recently died. She and her sister, Kate have returned to the family home to help their mother, Molly through this difficult time. Laurie is taking a bath in this scene and she starts telling the audience about her insomnia.
LAURIE
It wouldn't hurt. To lie back in the tub and let the water just cover me, curl up under it and go to sleep. Since he died, I don't get enough sleep. Lying in bed at night, there's always the possibility of something to listen to, sounds, people doing something I'd miss if I was asleep. But you can't just lie there listening to your husband snoring.
Last month, I woke up about two-thirty, and I tried turning Norm over - sometimes that stops him - but it wasn't any use. So. There wasn't anything left to do but think. First I tried saying The Star Spangled Banner backwards - brave the of home, free the of land. And then I tried counting how many letters there were in the first verse. And I worked out how to make a turkey mold with lemon and orange jell-o and slivers of cherries to make the dark parts of the feathers. And every once in a while, I listened, just to see if something was going on outside - it never is. Not at that time of night.
So, I thought about starting a reading group. Just five or six women. We'd get together and read important books. Like Tom Sawyer and Kant's Prolegomena to Pure Reason... Even that didn't put me to sleep, so then I tried a sex fantasy. But I've never been any good at that. So. I settled down to sleep. And at that moment, when I knew I was safe, he leaped out at me, out of the warm, unmoving brown shadows. My father, Malachai the Magnificent - I never should have looked at him, at the mortuary... you could see the stitches, where they sewed his lips together - a kid told me once when I was little that that's how they take their insides out, pulling them out of the mouth, yards and yards of intestines... He scared me, coming at me like that. Talking through his sewed-together lips like a ventriloquist. And he came over to the bed and looked at Norm, and he shook his head. "No doubt about it," my father said. "His equipment is definitely no more than half the size of mine."
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