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Perchance to Sleep

By G. W. Thomas

The Rainbow Man could not sleep. He had not slept for seven days. The worries and pressures of being the world's foremost expert on magic had stolen away his ability to slumber, to lie down and enjoy the little death.

But he tried. Every night he lay on the softest quilts of goose's down, the sweetest lutes playing to ease his tortured soul. But for seven nights, nothing.

It was on the eighth night that his mind wandered over the many experiences of his life, to adventures and dangers survived, to old friends, some living, some dead, some undead. But always he chased a deep, important truth--the very meaning of existance. By the end of the first watch, the wizard hand narrowed his examination to the essense of life--by the second watch--the fabric of the universe--and by the third he stood boldly at the door of all understanding. Now to write the elusive germ down. He went to his writing desk.

The cook, a productive woman who arrived early as a rule, came in by the side gate. In the small alcove where the wizard worked on his great lizard-hidebound books, she found the Rainbow Man snoring pleasantly away, his pen poised stiffly before an empty sheet of paper.


© 1999 G. W. Thomas. All Rights Reserved.

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