Nemimi

Nemimi in Japanese is a word for what is heard by the one who is asleep, to be distinguished from what is heard by the one who is awake. She had found it in a list of unique concepts in different languages, alongside the Portuguese toadeira, a harpooned whale that continues to howl, and the Turkish mihrap, a beautiful woman who is no longer young.

She used to turn towards his nemimi.

When he had wrapped himself tighter in the duvet in his sleep and she woke with her feet left uncovered, she would sometimes take the opportunity to speak. When awake, he only wanted to be together, only to cuddle, only to have someone to ruminate with. His waking ears were given to someone else, his day friends, but his sleeping hearing was hers.

With it she could talk about her childhood, so softly that the voice was almost only audible within herself. About how, at the age of six, she went alone to the sett to lure out the badger. With a greasy chicken wing between her fingers, the plan was to entice the animal all the way home to the cabin and lock it in the cellar. The badger had probably already gone into hibernation, and dusk transformed the forest, she could not find her way back, volunteers formed a search party and she ended up in the newspaper, but she never told the truth.

Until now.

Another time she had been offered painkillers by a friend at a party, but the pills turned out to be fentanyl. A joke that ended with her spending a week in hospital. Then she complained of gastritis and a splitting headache and perhaps depression even, but the doctors found nothing unhealthy and eventually she was discharged. She told his nemimi about this too, when she was truly certain that the ears were asleep.

The months passed and she found herself on several occasions waking with bare feet. She grew ever bolder in her confessions, describing how she sent a report of concern to social services about a colleague, or how she used to steal Nespresso capsules from the community hall, as a protest against the board. Not even when she set out her detailed murder plan against her enemy from upper secondary school did he show the slightest sign of life. He simply slept sweetly and stupidly through the nights.

In the mornings she nonetheless felt consistently better, as if cleansed by her nocturnal confessing, and could more easily play the happy wife and brew coffee and toast bread, and listen to his detailed accounts of his dreams. One time he had found a goldfish in the closed ecosystem, another time he had copied the telephone directory for a client. Good heavens, how exhausting, my dear, she had said to his waking ears, and even then he had not heard what she said, for by then he was already deeply absorbed in the morning paper.