- The voice
- Warm, faintly comic, one eye barely open
- Home
- The Big ShushThe shore. You cannot tell where the water ends and the sky starts
- Part of
- Sleep namesA character per sleep word, so the word is learnt without being taught.
The story of Peli Can Sleep
His name is Peli. The sentence is Peli can sleep. And that sentence is doing something none of the other names manage. Grove to Sleep says go to sleep, which is an order. At ease is an order too, only a kinder one. Peli can sleep is not an order at all — it is a thing said about somebody else, in front of you, and underneath it, without ever being aimed at anybody, it says and so can you. That difference matters more than it looks. A child who cannot sleep is usually trying. Telling somebody to go to sleep adds pressure to a person already failing at it. Saying you can takes the pressure off. It is a release rather than a demand, and it is very possibly the most useful thing a bedtime brand can say, and Dan found it in a bird. He sits low on one weathered clay post at the very edge of the water, the huge bill laid back along his own neck and breast, which is how pelicans genuinely rest. Chalky warm grey-white clay. The bill is pale pink-peach with a small warm yellow patch where it meets his face — not yellow all over, which was the easy mistake — soft-edged and rounded at the tip, no hook and no point. There is a soft shaggy crest on his crown, and it is the thing that stops him reading as a bath toy. His eyes are closed, or one of them is very slightly open. He is the only one who lives at the Big Shush, and he is the one character in the whole world allowed to be a bit funny, because that enormous bill is a joke shape and everyone knows it. At the very end of a long journey, a kind and slightly absurd bird is a comfort rather than an event. The one thing he ever does is slide the bill a little further back along his breast, and settle. A wave arrives underneath him and he takes no notice, which is the whole point of him.
In the archive
Peli Can Sleep leads 2 pieces in the archive and appears in 0 more. They arrive here as they are approved and published.