Bed-Making
prose by Brian Stephen Ellis
My name is Russell. It’s the same as my dad’s name but we have different middle names so I’m not a gross Junior or anything. When I got a job at Plaid Pantry, they put Lee on my nametag and when I asked the manager Angie why, she said Russell was too long to fit on the tag, which I didn’t think was true, and also Lee isn’t short for Russell, it’s a completely different name.
Plaid Pantry starts you on the overnight shift when you get hired, and I kind of liked the overnights because it never got too busy and there was a funny sense of community to the neighborhood, the same night people came in every night, all of them characters, the lady with her dog in her purse who always bought red cough syrup and red wine, the old guy with bright white frizzy hair who never wore a shirt under his jacket and was always covered in sweat, even in the middle of winter.
There was also a rush each night between when the bars closed and when the beer cooler was locked, between 2 and 2:30am. There was a dive bar at the next corner and the regulars would come streaming outta there and come to the Plaid to buy enough drinks to get them to 7am, when we started selling again.
Kayla was one of those regulars. She had long messy curly blonde hair that she sometimes tied in a sloppy bun and wore these shapeless peasant dresses and had a nose ring. She kinda reminded me of my ex-wife. I thought that sometimes she might be flirting with me because when she’d bring her armful of malt liquor up to the counter, she’s set the 40’s down and lean her elbows on the plexiglass over the scratch tickets, her face moving across the invisible line of demarcation that was my side of the register.
I think that we maybe almost kissed once. It was in the dead of the overnight, between 3am and 4am, the cooler was stocked, and I had counted the cigarettes and was just kinda waiting for the deliveries to start showing up when she came in. Kayla was all alone, the door dinged, and she went to the malt liquor case in the corner, as was her habit. She must’ve remembered or realized that it was too late to buy, so she just kinda flitted around the gleaming fluorescent store, the floor was shiny because I had just mopped it. Kayla was swaying back and forth as she walked, looking at random things, I was watching her on the small blue and black fuzzy security TV built into the counter.
After doing a full circuit of the store, she came around to the register without picking up anything, and she said to me through her teeth, “so do you want to smoke a joint or what?”
So we both went out to the parking lot and I locked the front doors and we sat on the curb facing the street. She took this thin joint out of her small bag, I was never much of a weed smoker, but pinner is what we use to call these joints, and she put the pinner between her lips and tilted her head forward and all that tangled hair was in her face and flicked the lighter in her fist to light up. She took a drag and passed it to me and our fingers touched in the pass, my huge craggily hands against her tiny fingers, and we were sitting right next to one another our shoulders touching, Kayla had these gorgeous shoulders, you could always see her shoulders with the dresses she wore, I mean you could really spend a lot of time thinking about her shoulders if that’s the kind of thing you wanted to do. I breathed in the smoke and the street was empty on the other side of the vacant lot and the traffic light changed for no cars and the buzzy white streetlights glowed up even higher than that, and above the light the city sky was purple black and starless with a little bit of spring wind moving all around.
The pinner burned fast, we each took two hits in silence and then she turned and looked at my face full on, and that’s when I thought it was about to happen, the kissing-type situation, but it didn’t. She just looked in my eyes for a long time and then sighed and said, “alright” and I rubbed my neck and said, “alright” and she got up and left and I went back inside.
Angie promoted me to assistant manager, which meant I worked the swing-shift, 3pm to 11pm, which was a whole different crowd of customers, ones that I didn’t like nearly as much. They were fine I guess, but these people had so much more purpose, these were people who stopped to pick up something on their way home from work, running errands, these were people with jobs. I never saw Kayla on the swing shift, and I figured it was one of those weird things, how a person can suddenly become a fixture in your life and then just as suddenly be gone.
It was like nine months after that time we almost kissed that I saw Kayla again. I had just clocked out of my shift, there was a new overnight guy named Brian, and I went around the corner of the building, past the bins, and I saw Kayla there, on the ground, lying on the sidewalk.
“Kayla?” I said, in like a normal, conversational tone. Kinda stupid thing to do.
She was half-way on the sidewalk, half on that ratty grassy strip between the sidewalk and the curb. She was flat on her back, like when someone eats it slipping on ice, but there was no ice. It was winter but it was still in the 40s. She was wearing this fuzzy robe slash coat that was Muppet texture. I went and kneeled over her. She was breathing, but her eyes were closed, and she was kind of humming.
I slid my hand behind her head to lift it, and she got animated and fussy like my kid used to, there was no blood anywhere which was a relief, and then I said loud, like when you talk to an old person, “can you get up?”
Kayla moaned and twisted her lips but kept her eyes closed. I stood over her and took both her hands and lifted her shoulders off the ground, and then pulled her up onto her feet. She helped a little but not much. She was floppy in my arms. I put my shoulder under her armpit and pulled her arm across her back. I started walking with her up the sidewalk.
“Where do you live?” I asked, projecting my voice, “you live close right? You must live close.”
Kayla scrunched her face and dragged her feet. She let out a high-pitched whine and drooled a bit. She smelled like a recycling center. She started pointing, and eventually I found her house after passing it twice. I was surprised she lived in a house and not one of the multi-unit complexes on either side of it. She motioned to a side entrance at the end of the driveway, between the house and one of the larger buildings.
The back door to her place was open. Not just unlocked, the old wooden door was ajar. I pulled Kayla up the two steps, through the open door and onto a closed-in porch. It was dark and full of junk, just enough space to pass by. The door into the house, into the kitchen was closed but unlocked, and I balanced her on my shoulder while I turned the door handle.
It was one of those small one-and-a-half floor Portland houses. Kayla didn’t seem like a house owner, or even a house renter, so I figured there must be roommates or someone else around but there was no sign of anyone else. There was a dim yellow light on in the dirty kitchen, rotting food, empty cans and booze bottles, swarm of fruit flies over the sink, and I carried Kayla right through to a dark living room where I deposited her on a dusty couch.
I was going to go then, get out of that house, when I saw Kayla’s bedroom. It was right between the living room and the kitchen, and the light was on, and the bed was unmade.
I stepped inside her bedroom. It was a small room with a large bed in it. It was one of those large square beds, a California I think it’s called, and there was just enough space around the bed to stand, the room was a margin around the bed. The walls of the bedroom were painted this textured green color, a sage green with accents of shadow like marble painted into this color. On the flat wall opposite the bed was a huge oil painting. The painting was grey and blue and on it was depicted a person, sort of person, it wasn’t abstract but it was exaggerated, if you looked quickly you might not see the person and think it was just shapes, but if you looked for one second it was clearly a naked man on his knees praying, his clasped hands and arms and elbows took up most of the space, this guy was in trouble. He needed help.
I pulled apart the comforter and sheet where they were twisted up on the exposed mattress and began to make the bed. After a few seconds of half-assing it I decided if I was going to make the bed, I was going to make the bed, and dumped everything but the fitted sheet onto the floor. The sheets were dark green, a shade that almost matched the color the room was painted.
My fitted sheet technique is to start in one of the bottom corners, then pull the elastic edge over the opposite corner, at the head of the bed, then walk all the way around the bed to do the other corner by the head of the bed. This makes the final corner one of the ones at the foot of the bed, where you’ll have some space to muscle it. To me that’s the problem I see with fitted sheets, you will always have to muscle the final corner no matter what, but if it’s against the wall you’re hitting your head or your knuckles, standing at a funny angle. At the foot of the bed, you can put your back into it. I felt pretty smart when I figured that out. Kayla’s fitted sheet fit good, it wasn’t too tight or too loose, they were nice sheets even though they were old. I ran my palm over the fabric before I went to get the top sheet.
It was just me and my mom after my dad went to lock up, we bounced around a lot but usually stayed on the Oregon coast, those places are kind of a blur to me, but my mom always got these jobs in little no-chain motels, and she’d take me with her to do the housekeeping. I loved to sit in the corner and watch her make the beds. Part of it was just knowing that my mom had work that made me feel safe. Work meant money and money meant safety, but also there’s something hypnotic and beautiful about someone making a bed, walking back and forth, back and forth around the bed, the long consideration of sides and edges, smoothing out the wrinkles.
I held the ends of Kayla’s top sheet and flicked my wrists and the fabric flapped and fell over the mattress. I walked around the large square bed, back and forth, back and forth, evening the top sheet out. Pouring my consideration into the square of space.
A lot people make a big deal about hospital corners, and its true they look real good, but not everyone likes to sleep with them, some people find that they pull on your toes and ankles when you get in, and in my experience over emphasis on hospital corners is an under emphasis on the act of service, which is what bed-making is. I go for a slightly sloppier, but more comfortable corner.
Lifting the edge of the mattress to tuck the top sheet in I was standing at a funny angle, not quite bent, not quite standing, I felt a spit of fire at the small of my back, a reminder that time and age is real.
I gathered the bundle of the brown comforter that I had set in the corner and flopped it onto the bed. I found the bottom corners and flapped the whole thing out; it wasn’t as responsive as the bedsheet, but I could get it halfway flat. I walked back and forth around the bed again, adjusting. My whole life I’ve wanted to work. Not just like a job, I’ve had lots of jobs, I had a job now, but really work. Do something useful.
The biggest compliment you can give a person is to say that they are useful. I wish I was more like my mom. My own kid seems to wish that I was a stranger.
Once the bed was made, I went out to the living room and pulled Kayla up off the couch by her armpits, walking backwards to carry her to her room. With wide careful steps I backed up all the way to the edge of the bed, and then pivoted her until I could drop her down on top of it. I left the room, stepped through the open doorway, and I was one step beyond when Kayla woke up with a gasp.
She sat bolt upright, blinking hard and running her tongue around her mouth, under her lips. Her eyes were open and on her face was a sudden awareness, like everything from the sidewalk until now had been a dream. She looked up at me, her tangled hair falling in her face.
“Lee?” She asked, “what are you doing in my house?”
“That’s not my name,” I said.
Brian Stephen Ellis is the author of five collections of poetry and one collection of short fiction. Their most recent collection of poems, Against Common Sense (Limit Zero) was a finalist for the 2025 Oregon Book Award. They are poetry editor for Pool Party Magazine.