Erin Murphy

Insomnia Chronicles V
 
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. Our friend is more hunched since we saw him, pre-COVID, at his 90th birthday party. His kids and grandkids and kids-in-law flew in from all corners of the country where they teach kindergarten and brew beer and play violin. Or was it viola? The cake was all candles, all flame. Now it looks like he’s always reaching for something he dropped on the floor. Where does the expression have a hunch come from, that feeling of being nudged by an invisible force? My phone says origin unknown. So no one has a hunch about the derivation of hunch. Huh. Notre Dame just reopened after the fire. The cathedral, not the school. A woman I know was living in Paris when it burned. Earlier that year, she hired a photographer to capture her walking her large dog against backdrops of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, the Musee d’Orsay’s window clock, block after block of wrought iron and stone façades. In one shot, taken at street level, the spires look tiny behind her and her Newfoundland. She’s wearing a red wool coat. The sky is blue. She and the dog stare wistfully beyond the frame. It could be an image from an in-flight magazine or a celebrity profile for Harper’s Bazaar. I’m fascinated by her urge to preserve how she wants to be seen, architect of her own star. My father went to Notre Dame. The school, not the cathedral. For years he lived inside a fortress of anger and illness no one could scale. He died alone. Never even saw 70. A real pisser, he might have said if he’d lived to witness it himself. A real pissoir. On the way home from visiting our friend, wind on the Susquehanna River bridge picked up our car and dropped it in another lane, like we were a toy in some giant’s clumsy hands. Which, I suppose, we are.
 
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Insomnia Chronicles VII
 
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. We can’t find our car in an airport parking garage. This sounds like a recurring nightmare or a Seinfeld episode, but it was my husband and I yesterday in Baltimore. I sounds so cloth-napkin-in-lap formal here. Even at 2 AM, I can’t make a subject/object error. We were subjects searching for our object, a black SUV that looks like every other black SUV—part Uber, part hearse. An Uber Hearse. My parents’ best friends from college had a ’62 hearse. They drove from Connecticut to Florida one spring break, Barbara and Jeff up front, Mom and Dad rattling around in the back where the casket belonged. None of them were what they’d become. After my folks split, my father took my brother and me to visit Barbara and Jeff unannounced on one of his every-other weekends. We sat on the white sofas in their front living room, and they smiled like there was sand between their teeth. Even though I was just a kid, I could tell my father was realizing he’d lost them in the divorce. We lost our car in the garage. We’d parked in 5E but when we returned, we rolled our luggage up and down the labyrinth of level five, spilling into D on one side, F on the other. No sign of our car. Maybe it was stolen? A comedian once joked that we were obviously not an advanced species because we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. My aunt visited me in London with her $29.99 rolling bag from a big box store. By the time we got to my flat, her round wheels were well, flat. Jeff died suddenly last month. For days I felt a pang I couldn’t explain. There should be a word for the death of someone who isn’t recognized in the public sphere of grief. He was my mother’s best friend from college. The co-host of our annual Friendsgiving meal. One half of my only role model for a long, functional marriage: 58 years. 6,732. That’s how many steps we logged before we found our car in Baltimore. But not before we called a helpline number posted in the stairwell. Turns out there were four towers with four different 5E sections, like an architect’s practical joke. The name BWI—Baltimore Washington International—is logical. But some airport abbreviations seem random, like EWR for Newark or ORD for Chicago. I have dozens sloshing around in my brain: DCA, MCO, PHF, FAI, LHR. I kind of like that they don’t quite make sense. I like when letters and words are liberated from the jobs we think they should do. An engineer friend of mine invented a device for injecting medication during heart surgery. She has a patent and a startup company. Some retailer invented the .99 price tag, a decrease that increases sales. Google tracks it back to Chicago, 1875. According to the comedy rule of three, I need a third example here, another tick on the existential spreadsheet of what we value above all else. What does it mean to want to make something in a country that tells you to make something of yourself?
 
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Insomnia Chronicles XIII
 
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. People slept in two shifts in medieval times, a colleague mentioned at a work party last night. First sleep and second sleep. In the wee hours between, they’d stumble to taverns and drink mead and play—what? the hurdy-gurdy?—then return to straw-stuffed mattresses for second sleep. It’s 3:22 AM. I could knock on my neighbors’ doors and invite them over for a beer. The retired couple next door has an early pickleball practice. On the other side is the physical therapist who says middle-aged pickleball players keep her in business. The man in the green house would probably shoot me in the face. During the last election, his lawn sign said Four more years of liberal tears.The only taker might be the divorced guy on the corner. Every weekend, he and his buddies close the local bars and continue their shenanigans in his back porch hot tub. Summer nights when our windows are open, Led Zeppelin drifts into our dreams. Mellow is the man who knows what he’s been missing. I rarely see the other neighbors. One converted a school bus into a mobile gymnastics studio. Another carries her toy poodles on walks. They say Americans live isolated lives, so I was surprised on a trip to New Zealand to see that they fence in their front yards. I’m not talking little decorative white picket fences. I’m talking barricades topped with shrubbery so thick you can’t see the houses. Not exactly neighborly. A medievalist researcher learned about second sleep from court records. After a woman disappeared one night, her daughter testified that she’d run off with two men after first sleep, telling her daughter to lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning. I wonder what future humans will use to learn about our ways. Text messages, selfies, grocery lists? Once when I typed Tilex bathroom cleaner on my shopping list, AutoCorrect changed it to Rolex. Yes, I needed eggs, toilet paper, and a $10,000 watch. What would that list say about me? What would we learn about each other if we caroused between sleeps? At the work party, a stiff administrator who’s typically zipped up in a suit did an alarmingly realistic imitation of a peacock mating dance. Who knows what he’d do at 2 AM. What else are we missing? What’s the cost of the cost of living?

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Insomnia Chronicles XV
 
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. Those suffering a loss should write in their grief journal before bed. Tony Hoagland said We’ll end up at a funeral parlor run by somebody’s brother. I ask AI to write my bio. It is just vanilla wrong, not 180 degrees wrong. Has me born in Illinois instead of Connecticut. Says I went to grad school in Washington state instead of Massachusetts. Gives me an NEA, which would be nice. This week I learned a woman I worked with in the 90s died in a car accident thirteen years ago. She added an i to the end of her last name to make it sound Italian and maxed out five credit cards to put a down payment on a house. No one knows the difference between wary and weary. A man in Pittsburgh is trying to find the descendants of whoever owned a circa 1920 suitcase. Does it matter where I was born or went to school? The captain of the boys’ soccer team rescued from the Thai cave died at 17. When I worked at a newspaper, the editor used to say everyone dies of heart failure. It was at the peak of the AIDS epidemic and families feared discrimination. Peter Orner says You can’t pre-break your heart. Yesterday on continuous loop: the latest video of another mother’s son beaten to death by police. We say latest, not last.
 
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​Erin Murphy’s work has appeared in such journals as Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfictions 2024, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, and Bedford/St. Martin's. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Fluent in Blue (2024) andHuman Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review.