Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

She said a good day ain't got no rain
She said a bad day is when I lie in the bed
And I think of things that might have been

I woke up one morning, [my girlfriend] asked me if I slept good. I said, "No, I made a few mistakes."

She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils.The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her.It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

"How long was I asleep?" she whispered. He didn't respond.
"How long was I asleep?" she asked again, and noticed a hint of red in his cheeks.
"You were asleep, too?"
"Until you began drooling on my shoulder."

I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn't know about it yet. It's so hard for women - even nice women - to realise that their bodies are not irresistible.

She lay upon her bosom, with her elbows in front of her, her legs wide apart and her cheek resting on her hand, pricking, with a long golden pin, small symmetrical holes in a pillow of green linen.Languid with too much sleep, she had remained alone upon the disordered bed ever since she had awakened, two hours after mid-day.The great waves of her hair, her only garment, covered one of her sides.This hair was resplendently opaque, soft as fur, longer than a bird’s wing, supple, uncountable, full of life and warmth. It covered half her back, flowed under her naked belly, glittered under her knees in thick, curling clusters. The young woman was enwrapped in this precious fleece. It glinted with a russet sheen, almost metallic, and had procured her the name of Chrysis, given her by the courtesans of Alexandria.It was not the sleek hair of the court-woman from Syria, or the dyed hair of the Asiatics, or the black and brown hair of the daughters of Egypt. It was the hair of an Aryan race, the Galilæans across the sands.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Pavlov's Daughter, woke up in the morning, hear the bell ring, and something deep inside of her, makes her want to salivate, so she lays there drooling on her pillow...

She rose and looked at me with delirious black eyes, black and wanton and in a dream, her neck stretched and defining the bulging cords at her throat. she had nothing to say with her lips, but the ghastly cast of her face, the teeth too white and too big now, the frightened smile, these spoke too loudly of the horror shrouding her days and nights...As I walked toward the bed, she pulled up her knees, slipping into a crouched frightened position, as though she expected me to strike her.

Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals - the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I'd been gnawing in my sleep.

I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!