The House Is Sleeping

ln the house, the windows are sleeping, the furniture is sleeping, the refrigerator is sleeping, a plug dangling from its shoulder. The doors are sleeping: beautiful, solid, heavy doors. Krustev is sleeping, hung on the wall, his wife is sleeping on one side of him, his daughter on the other, they are sleeping with open eyes, smiling amid the garden outside. The empty bottles jammed into the black bag in the hallway are sleeping. The air conditioner. The Lawnmower. The dirty dishes piled in the dishwasher. The slippers, collapsed from exhaustion, are sleeping in indecent poses. Sssssleep . . . The only ones standing guard are the tiny lights of the alarm system and a few inexperienced spiders, who have stretched their webs in various corners of various rooms, stalking their puny prey without an inkling of one another's existence.
As if to make up for this, the whole garden is awake: the birch trees are whispering, the willow is murmuring incomprehensibly, in the furrows the multifarious plants with Latin names are trying out their new flowers and buzzing excitedly in exotic languages, the rock garden is juggling miniature stones and there, next to it, on the lawn, is the place where their family picture was taken five years ago, the places where the three of them have set foot can be clearly seen, where they carved the moment in gently and unrelentingly, there the grass is flattened and will not straighten up again.