"Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep" by Doris von Tettenborn — Our September 2025 Silver Medal Winner
“Heartwarming... believable and inevitable.”
“Very mature writing. Strong characterization.”
Meet Doris
Doris lives in the shadow of the Alberta Rocky Mountains and is grateful for her mountain panorama sunset views. She savours being retired with time to garden, write and play with her granddaughters. Doris’s essays have been published by Globe and Mail, Off Topic Publishing, Blank Spaces and Inspired Lifestyle magazine.
Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep
the unedited story by Doris von Tettenborn
Dark, so much.
The old woman peered into the black night, the forest barely visible, lit only by moonlight reflecting dimly off the snow.
Cold. We so cold. She clutched her sweater tighter around her throat.
Warm, light inside. She tilted her head, glancing back. Where inside go?
She stumbled in the freshly fallen snow, her floppy slippers far too loose on her thin little feet.
Behind her, the wind erased her footsteps. She glimpsed a flicker of blue. Something over there.
Where is his door? She touched her cheek, confused. We lost in fridge.
Each step felt harder than the last. Her feet shuffled slower as she saw the train: a rusty blue car, snow swirling up around its wheels. That must have been what she’d glimpsed in the splashes of moonlight through the bare tree. As if in a trance, she walked toward it.
Light, warm. She shivered, her teeth chattering, threatening to fall out.
The door stuck when she yanked it. Her hands felt cold and weak. She pulled and kicked. One slipper fell to the concrete block below. She stepped inside, shivering.
The train seemed familiar. Was it the one behind Daddy’s house? Flashes of memory, the train whistle every night at midnight. No more whistle. She and her brothers playing in a rusty blue train. Behind Daddy’s house. Maybe she had dreamed a train. She shook her head.
She sat down hard on the nearest bench, grateful for the tiny comfort. She glanced around. An old abandoned passenger car, cracked red seats, paper things on the floor, cloths, pokey things. What was that peeking out from under a pile of papers —a porcelain hand.
“Oh, there you are!” she cried out in joy. “My beautiful baby... baby...”
She gently picked up the baby doll and instinctively cradled it in her arms against her chest, automatically rocking. The old woman felt joy swell in her chest, love and warmth flood her cheeks.
And then, soft and sure, she whispered:
“Hush, little baby...”
Outside, the wind picked up, snow swirled higher as the train car creaked. Darkness deepened as the old woman sang her baby to sleep.
Early the next morning they called a Code Silver. Elderly female. Ninety-two. Advanced dementia. She had wandered from the care home sometime after supper, last seen wearing a pink flowered dress, white sweater and house slippers. Her absence wasn’t noticed until morning.
By then the snow was already past the laces on their boots. The wind was picking up rendering visibility patchy. The cold hung in the air, breath visible like wispy ghosts, the unlikelihood of overnight survival unspoken.
The daughter brought Toby. He wasn’t part of the official search team, but no one argued. The dog had known her mother’s scent for years.
“Find Grandma.”
Toby inhaled deeply into the sweater. He was off, quickly at first, then slower, meandering in
circles, tangents. The daughter sighed patiently, recognizing her mother’s likely path. Toby’s nose skimmed the drifts, then lifted toward the trees. The forest behind the care home was scrubby with thin birch, frozen cattails, and a narrow creek under ice. Her mother had walked it a thousand times, back when she could still remember the way.
The daughter had walked it too. Hand in hand, with her mother, so many years ago.
It didn’t take long. Toby found a faint trail, a disturbance in the snow, not quite tracks. There was a shape in the distance, half-lost in fog. An old rusted blue train car. She hadn’t remembered it being there.
Toby sat at the door, tail slightly bouncing, waiting.
The daughter stepped up slowly, chest tight. Her heart flipped with a sliver of hope as she spied a slipper in the snow just outside the open door. She bent and picked it up, the fabric stiff with cold. The door groaned slightly as she stepped inside.
It was colder in the train than she had expected—colder than outside, somehow. Like the air had been holding its breath all night. The light was dim. Snow had crept in through the cracks. Books and toys lay dusty, broken and abandoned on the seats and the floor in scattered piles.
She saw her mother sitting on a bench at the far end of the car, facing forward. She looked small. Her arms were wrapped around something—a bundle of white.
The daughter approached in silence. No calling out. No sob. Just each step landing softer than the last. Then she saw it. The object in her mother’s arms was a baby doll with porcelain hands and painted lips, wearing a long white gown. It was nestled against her mother’s chest like a cherished baby. Her mother’s eyes were closed, her mouth slightly parted, her expression peaceful, the peace of someone who had remembered love.
The daughter knelt. She reached out and touched her mother’s cheek. Cold.
She sat on the bench across from her. Toby lay at her feet, nose resting on his paws. Snow tapped gently on the roof.
For a long time she just looked at her mother, still cradling the doll. She tried to imagine what her mother had seen. A baby she had lost? A memory of her own mother? Or just the last warmth in a cold, dissolving world?
The daughter softened, let herself remember being hugged and held close. Her mother humming something under her breath, the same way she did while folding laundry, brushing tangles from her hair, or rocking her own grandchild years later.
Hush little baby...
She had sung it, too. To her own daughter, many years later. Many years ago.
Her breath caught. A warmth spread from her throat to her chest. She closed her eyes and let the tears flow.
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