JH: Bed frames, headboards, footboards: overrated?

MM: What the Husband Would Tell His Single Self about the Importance of Headboard

The bachelor notches his conquests on the headboard, and believes the husband, not unlike the prisoner, wants a headboard only to carve out the dragging days.  The bachelor plays his wild nights to the headboard’s metronome as it meets the wall again and again, and is convinced the husband hears in that same struck rhythm the memory of a woman knocking after last call on an apartment door left slightly ajar. But here is a truth the husband knows: the bachelor, filled with himself, tears the headboard loose with his writhing, hacks it into bonfire wood, paints his body with all the time in the world and spits Wild Turkey onto the flames.  While the husband stands just beyond the firelight’s cast edge, watching the past burn down into ash before he steps to that place where singed ground meets green earth, where he joins with the wife, where they kneel together, digging beneath what is spent to make their future’s joy from the warmed clay.