Sleepaway Camp

Imitation of Bruno Schulz and Hiromi Kawakami by Emmy Etlin

My summers at sleepaway camp always had a way of drawing my body out of slumber and into fits of sleepwalking. My mother insisted that I wear tin bells on my ankles and wrists at night to wake others up if I stumbled out of bed and into the unrelenting wilderness of the night.

While falling asleep, I would fill my thoughts with the weight of a million feathers, determined that this would finally be the night I would wake up in the same place I’d fallen asleep. I spent my days exhausting myself under the suffocating sun in the hopes that I would sink into the depths of my mattress at bedtime. Sleepwalking became my shameful secret, and although no one had discovered my nighttime wanderings yet, I wanted to experience camp like the others. No matter what I did during the day to exhaust myself — swimming in the pool for so long that the chlorine turned my skin a chemical green, eating so much that my stomach puffed out like a pregnant lady’s, sitting so close to the campfire at night that my eyes burned from the smoke — I could not control my sleepwalking. I began to wonder when someone would finally notice that my bed was unoccupied at night, that there were gills growing along my ribs, that tiny wings were sprouting from my back.

When I sleep walked, I liked to sit in the underground hut by the Tuolumne River, start a fire, and schvitz. When the brown bears walked past me, they didn’t stare at my sweaty body, but instead, they curled next to me, snoring like puppies. The first few nights, my vision was dizzying, as if I was looking through a kaleidoscope. To calm myself, I liked to match my breathing to the bears’ rhythm. Each inhale was a red brick stacked on the previous one; soon, hours had gone by and we’d built a red brick house right there on the banks of the Tuolumne River, just for me and the bears. As I became more comfortable and my vision stabilized, I no longer felt embarrassed by my sleepwalking secret. After we built the house, I stopped going home each morning to the wooden cabin I shared with the other twelve girls.

I asked the bears to watch our little house under the blanket of night so that I could rest my eyes and explore the campgrounds. Exhilarated by the discovery of the gills on my neck, I often took nighttime swims in the Tuolumne River after my schvitz, a personal mikvah under a thousand glowing stars. One night, I ventured past the archery field, up a steep hill of dead orange weeds. I found a ferris wheel, a carousel, a house of mirrors, a dance floor — a carnival just for me! I found myself on the dance floor, my feet lifting inches off the ground as I twirled. As I watched silent fireworks ooze above me, I finally felt freed from the nauseating feeling that had gagged me when I was with the others during the day. And when I danced, I was no longer a horse on the carousel condemned to move up and down in circles forever, I was as free as a bird.

One night, the other campers came down to a Tuolumne River for a late night swim, and they happened across my red brick home. They found me curled up next to one of the bears. It was agreed that I would be chained to my bed at night, under the watchful eyes of the counselors. That night, I dreamt about finding the carnival again. Constrained by the metal chains, my dream struggled to morph into the night’s sleepwalking adventure.

Yet, I felt no pain as the wings lengthened out of my back and the shackles silently released my wrists and ankles as they shrunk into tiny claws. I felt my body compress and soften as I flashed through the cabin door and circled the campgrounds from above. Even as the air thinned, there was more oxygen than I knew how to breath. I was wide awake as the wind rushed past my smooth chickadee’s body. I could see the flashes of neon lights radiating off of the carnival, twists of smoke emitting from the chimney of my red brick house on the banks of the Tuolumne River, and the quiet stillness of my wooden cabin.

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Emmy Etlin '21