The Mattress Conspiracy
None of us saw it coming. It was slow and subtle. First, a lot of small stores went out of business. We wouldn’t miss them. They were tiny – nail salons, currency exchanges, party stores, boutiques, all of them located in strip malls. Then the stores were vacant for a while. Soon after that other stores popped up with names resembling each other – American Mattress, Mattress Firm, Sleepy’s, the Bedding Experts. One by one, they populated our neighborhoods. Then we noticed they were run by people we had never seen before. They looked foreign, with narrow faces and eyes that converged on their noses like a pair of tight ends. We couldn’t tell what country they came from, maybe somewhere in Southern Europe or Central Asia, where their countries’ names were hard to pronounce. And we noticed that all the owners seemed to know each other. We suspected they were looking for more real estate.
But we were wrong.
They had all the real estate they wanted. It wasn’t about mattresses at all.
It was all about box springs.
The prices of box springs soared. The mattresses were loss leaders. Soon, mattresses were going for around a penny each, but these intruders had cornered the box spring market. Box springs were being sold for thousands of dollars. This is the way conspiracies start, with something simple that transmogrifies into another thing of complexity and popetus.
Who were these people? Some said they were the computer hackers from China and Russia, a cabal of revolutionaries from one of those Asian countries people had forgotten, the heirs of the Romanov dynasty, friends of Archduke Ferdinand, the caliphate, hedge fund managers from offshore banks. They started to gobble up everything. And they did not stop at box springs, either. Pretty soon they owned all the boxes and all the springs. You couldn’t package anything unless you wanted to pay hundreds of dollars for a box. Springs? Forget it. They owned all the springs that got made, including mainsprings on clocks and watches. Now they controlled time itself, because nobody could tell time without a timepiece with a mainspring.
That is what finally did them in. Without timepieces, nobody knew what time it was. We all walked around dazed, wondering if we should go to bed and sleep. We fell asleep everywhere, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, outside in parks, on the sidewalk. We saw the folly of owning mattresses and box springs because it became comfortable and fashionable to sleep anywhere we felt like sleeping. The conspiracy got crushed under its own weight. The foreigners evaporated. Nail salons came back. Mattress prices stabilized. So did the price for box springs. The government, eager to show us it had control of the situation, established price controls on the mattresses and springs. And anyone selling them had to be licensed by the Bureau of Sleep. Along with price controls, the Bureau of Sleep mandated strict sleep hours, so that we now all get eight hours of sleep every night or we can be fined.
The government tried locating the conspirators, sending agents overseas to search the Caucasus, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and the Far East. No one was ever found.
Since no one was found, the government told us the Mattress Conspiracy never really existed. We didn’t believe it at first, but we grew to accept it, and finally it became law.
Then we went to sleep.
Paul Smith lives near Chicago with his wife Flavia, belongs to the Rockford Writers Guild and writes fiction & poetry. He likes the bus and drinks Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one.