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29 Sleep Comes to Mary todd Lincoln Mary Todd, Mary Todd, one more letter than the name of God, attack, attack, the taunt she heard behind her back from the very same people who now stand and applaud, who dutifully nod to her and her husband when they enter the theater box. Now God Himself will not let her sleep. He talks and talks. When she slips away she is not of this age. She dreams some future dream, some flickering screen, a movie, not a play, some simpering comedy, some little man, not Booth, Sic semper tyrannis!, the black hole of his mouth not synchronized fully with the image on the scrim, not him, but a woman in Dallas crawling out on the back of a moving carriage, to gather something. Flowers? Her marriage? The bits of her husband’s brain? She sleeps just like a funeral train, fits and starts, coming in and out of the rain. She diffuses, becomes each raindrop on the windowpane, each a tear, a little planet, a new nation of housewives all alone, crying in their sleep, Mary Todd, Mary Todd, all Mary Todds now, and Lincoln is gone, and their husbands are blown up by roadside bombs. They are led by little men who speak knowingly of God, held hostage by theatrical, collateral harangue. They live sleepless like collapsed stars, in their astral madhouses, their own little booths. They wait for the next big bang. ...

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