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The Mattress Conspiracy<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n None of us saw it coming.\u00a0 It was slow and subtle.\u00a0 First, a lot of small stores went out of business.\u00a0 We wouldn\u2019t miss them.\u00a0 They were tiny \u2013 nail salons, currency exchanges, party stores, boutiques, all of them located in strip malls.\u00a0 Then the stores were vacant for a while.\u00a0 Soon after that other stores popped up with names resembling each other \u2013 American Mattress, Mattress Firm, Sleepy\u2019s, the Bedding Experts.\u00a0 One by one, they populated our neighborhoods.\u00a0 Then we noticed they were run by people we had never seen before.\u00a0 They looked foreign, with narrow faces and eyes that converged on their noses like a pair of tight ends.\u00a0 We couldn\u2019t tell what country they came from, maybe somewhere in Southern Europe or Central Asia, where their countries\u2019 names were hard to pronounce.\u00a0 And we noticed that all the owners seemed to know each other.\u00a0 We suspected they were looking for more real estate.<\/p>\n But we were wrong.<\/p>\n They had all the real estate they wanted.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t about mattresses at all.<\/p>\n It was all about box springs.<\/p>\n The prices of box springs soared.\u00a0 The mattresses were loss leaders.\u00a0 Soon, mattresses were going for around a penny each, but these intruders had cornered the box spring market.\u00a0 Box springs were being sold for thousands of dollars.\u00a0 This is the way conspiracies start, with something simple that transmogrifies into another thing of complexity and popetus.<\/p>\n Who were these people?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They started to gobble up everything.\u00a0 And they did not stop at box springs, either.\u00a0 Pretty soon they owned all the boxes and all the springs.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t package anything unless you wanted to pay hundreds of dollars for a box.\u00a0 Springs?\u00a0 Forget it.\u00a0 They owned all the springs that got made, including mainsprings on clocks and watches.\u00a0 Now they controlled time itself, because nobody could tell time without a timepiece with a mainspring.<\/p>\n That is what finally did them in.\u00a0 Without timepieces, nobody knew what time it was.\u00a0 We all walked around dazed, wondering if we should go to bed and sleep.\u00a0 We fell asleep everywhere, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, outside in parks, on the sidewalk.\u00a0 We saw the folly of owning mattresses and box springs because it became comfortable and fashionable to sleep anywhere we felt like sleeping.\u00a0 The conspiracy got crushed under its own weight.\u00a0 The foreigners evaporated.\u00a0 Nail salons came back.\u00a0 Mattress prices stabilized.\u00a0 So did the price for box springs.\u00a0 The government, eager to show us it had control of the situation, established price controls on the mattresses and springs.\u00a0 And anyone selling them had to be licensed by the Bureau of Sleep. \u00a0\u00a0Along 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.<\/p>\n The government tried locating the conspirators, sending agents overseas to search the Caucasus, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and the Far East.\u00a0 No one was ever found.<\/p>\n Since no one was found, the government told us the Mattress Conspiracy never really existed.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t believe it at first, but we grew to accept it, and finally it became law.<\/p>\n Then we went to sleep.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Paul Smith<\/strong> lives near Chicago with his wife Flavia, belongs to the Rockford Writers Guild and writes fiction & poetry.\u00a0 He likes the bus and drinks Newcastle Brown Ale.\u00a0 If you see him, buy him one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Mattress Conspiracy None of us saw it coming.\u00a0 It was slow and subtle.\u00a0 First, a lot of small stores went out of business.\u00a0 We wouldn\u2019t miss them.\u00a0 They were tiny \u2013 nail salons, currency exchanges, party stores, boutiques, all of them located in strip malls.\u00a0 Then the stores were vacant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[135,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-poetry-picks","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10122"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10124,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122\/revisions\/10124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}