It's Sheet Like This...

Dale heard about other people doing the polar bear challenge to ring in the New Year and decided to come up with his own activity: the black bear challenge. Which meant, he would start off the year with seven months of hibernation. He set up a series of auto-replies to job-related emails, essentially delegating all his work to other members of the team, and built a slot into his bedroom window, so pizza could be delivered directly to his bed when he needed sustenance. As for going to the bathroom, well, you’d probably prefer not to know, honestly. Anyway, when all his arrangements were made, he gets under the covers and enters a sleep-like state of being for more than half the year.

__

A year ago, Jim didn’t know the first thing about baking. Then, a lot of his graphic design work started to dry up, and he decided he never liked doing it anyway, so maybe it was time to think about a new profession. The only place he could find to work was the bakery down the street, as desperate to deal with their staffing shortage as he was to find work. Now, he corrects people’s pronunciations of the of the word ‘croissant,’ shakes his head at poor lamination, and brings things like cream puffs dipped in chocolate ganache to parties. When he shows up, at least. That’s the downside to working at a bakery: the odd hours he has to keep, going to bed early, and getting up well before the sun rises.

__

Cynthia lays in bed at night a lot these days, awake, staring at the ceiling, remembering the camping trip. Maybe it was because she had so few other memories that the moment with the knife sticks out so sharply (no pun intended) in her mind. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the key to unlocking her past, the component that might help her remember who she’d been before she’d arrived here, in this idyllic town ten years ago with no memories, no name, nothing but the clothes on her back and the strange tattoo of the sword on her wrist. For a while, she thought there might some reasonable explanation for the feeling, but now she simply cannot deny it: when her friend handed her the knife so she might try some whittling in front of the campfire, she’d felt something course through her, and she knew definitively in that moment that she’d spent a lot of time in her past with a blade in her hand. But she’s not so sure she was using it to carve wood…

What do these three people have in common?

Well, they all have complicated relationships with sleep. So they should probably get some good new sheets!