The Rub

Time for bed: bed time. One ticket to the Mattress Ball.

Thad's satiety has been achieved, his hunger sated, and his day's goings-on were now gone-on and, it seemed, stood complete. As the human animal, Thad lay in state, at peace, hypnogoguic in pleasant reverie, and would fall into the somnolence arising within him.

Thus, the wear-and-tear of his day was repaired, and his body-mind was revived in preparation to welcome — with fresh vim and vigor — the coming day.

Or not. Was it to be or not to be?

It was a daily exercise in dismissal of exercise, and putting behind him the thousand natural shocks his flesh had sustained, he pondered in his reverie the similarities between sleep and death, each a consummation.

To die, to sleep — To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!

Thad closed his eyes and so ended the day's heartaches. Dismantling his mind served him fulfilment. Actuation deactivated. He had finished the bottle and lay in wait for what dreams may come.

He sneered at doom, chuckled at catastrophe, and laughed in the face of death from which no traveler returns. As such, he shuffled off his mortal coil.

And slept with the fishes.