Insomnia and Seven More Short Stories Read online

  Jep smiles, but mine fades away as I approach the conveyor.

  Pick up the duck.

  Put on the head.

  Put the duck down.

  Sleep.

  Pick up the duck.

  Put on the head.

  Put the duck down.

  Sleep.

  My eyes grow heavy, but I continue on, concentrating on the task at hand; put the duck head on for ten hours without Feene, without sleeping, and you’ll be fine, I tell myself.

  My hands become shaky, and hope seeps into my mind. My hands never get shaky until the shift is up. I glance at the clock. Only three hours have passed.

  The next time I look at the clock, only a half hour more has passed, then fifteen minutes, then five. Time is slowing down. And I’m missing ducks. I look to my right and see the four other guys working the duck heads moving fast, picking up the ducks I missed, which is most of them.

  “You okay, Henderson?” someone asks, but I can’t tell who.

  “Missed his Feene,” someone else says.

  I focus on the ducks, willing my hands to move faster.

  Pick up the duck.

  Put on the head.

  Put the duck down.

  Pick up the duck.

  Put on the head.

  Put the duck down.

  My fingers slip, and I drop the duck to the floor. I bend over to pick it up. I feel a wave of nausea pass through my body from head to toe. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

  Sleep.

  I jolt back up and come face to face with George, smiling wide. “Missed your Feene, Henderson? Everyone’s talking about it. I heard you helped Jep make it through the break. Looks like it’s your turn, eh?”

  George continues to talk, but I don’t hear him. I close my eyes for an instant and open them again. A voice inside my head shouts at me to close them again, to sleep. I attach another duck head, but I never put it back down.

  I blink.

  When my eyes open again, I’m looking at the ceiling. Then George, who is leaning over me, shouts something unintelligible. I realize then that I had fallen asleep—really fallen asleep! I urge my arms and legs to push me up, to stand, but nothing happens.

  I blink again.

  I think I hear something, shouting maybe, and then a pressure squeezes under both my arms. It’s...comfortable.

  A loud noise makes me open my eyes, and I realize I’m no longer in the factory. I’m lying on my back, on a cement slab. Two feet...two black, shiny shoes are in front of my face. I look up to see a grim man with a dark mustache peering down at me.

  “Where am I?”

  “Where you ought to be.”

  “I’m in jail?”

  “Penal colony.”

  “No...”

  “Should have thought of that before you went to sleep.”

  “It was an accident.”

  The man looks down at me, his lips turned down. “We found your bed.”

  I stare at the floor, unable to face the man again.

  “This is where you belong. All you sleepers are alike.”

  “Please, I—”

  “You want to sleep? You want to dream?”

  “Dreams...are good.”

  The man laughs. “You belong here. You want chaos? You got it. For you, Feene is a thing of the past.”

  The door slams behind the man as he leaves. I feel an incredible sadness, but I refuse to keep my eyes open any longer.

  I awake feeling better, almost like I’d just had a jump. But I know I haven’t. The pale cement walls remind me where I am—what I did. Light streams into the box of a room from a window above my head. It seems unusually bright...and it’s getting brighter.

  The sun is rising. I slept through the night.

  I’m suddenly struck, though not from a fist or anything else quite so physical. It’s a smell.

  The smell.

  I suck a deep breath into my lungs, allowing the sweet smell to tickle my nose. The fragrance floats thick in the air.

  Creak.

  The door opens.

  “Hello?”

  No one responds.

  Creak.

  The door opens some more and then sways back and forth. A cool breeze hits me, carrying more of the wonderful odor. The door is open. What kind of prison cell is this?

  I walk to the door and peer out into the brightness beyond.

  I must still be sleeping.

  This is my dream...my awake dream...it’s come into my sleeping dreams.

  I step out onto the ground, which sinks beneath my feet. I look down. Sand? I’d seen sand a few times as a child, but I never touched it, never experienced it. I bend down and take a handful of the sand, letting it run through my fingers. It’s cold and soft.

  I glance to my right and see fifty square cells, just like my own, spaced out along the beach. But the others are decorated with leaves, potted plants...flowers! The smell must be flowers! My heart pounds in my chest, surging blood through my veins faster than any Feene-jump I’ve ever had.

  Then I see the people. Some lounge in hammocks. Some are fishing. And some splash around in the water...in the ocean. And they’re laughing. Really laughing. I walk to the side of my cell and gaze out at the ocean. The water’s so blue it stings my eyes. The sky dances with glowing clouds. I can hear the trees rustling in the wind and a cool air massages my skin. And still the smell lingers.

  Then, waddling by the shore is a duck. A real duck. Its green head shines like an emerald and its little knobby orange legs kick out one at a time, carrying it forward. Its feathers are an assortment of browns, grays and whites. It lets out a little quack and waddles into the water.

  I fall to my knees, in awe. I rub my eyes to make sure my vision is clear.

  When I open my eyes again I see a pair of bare feet standing in front of me. I look up to see a beautiful woman with flowing white hair. She’s wearing what appears to be a hand-made bikini top and a pair of short, tattered shorts that does little to hide her bronzed legs. She smiles at me with gleaming teeth. “See where dreams get you?” she says.

  I laugh the truest laugh of my life and begin to weep as the bright sunflower-sun rises over my new world, where ducks aren’t all yellow.

  AFTERWORD

  Sometimes authors use fiction to sort through, emote and otherwise deal with issues in their own lives. Insomnia is one such issue. I have gone three days with only three hours of sleep between them. I routinely lay in bed at night for hours, before falling asleep—often until after the sun has risen. My average amount of sleep per night is five hours.

  The result is a craving for something that is forbidden to me, not by the constraints of a workaholic future society, but by my own frenetic mind and overactive imagination, which dreams up many of the horrible scenarios I write about while I should be sleeping. In addition to that, I have a sensory processing disorder (which I gave to the character, Sara Fogg, in my novel, INSTINCT).

  So what does this disorder do that keeps me awake? Primarily, I FEEL sounds. It is especially troublesome at night when there is very little background noise. The ping and pop of heat coming on feels like a punch in the stomach. A baby’s cry (I have three) twists my gut. Absolutely everything I hear at night opens my eyes and sets my heart racing.

  Another effect of SPD is that my imagination, which is hard to reign in while laying in the dark, can actually create a spike in adrenaline, which makes it impossible to sleep, sometimes even while on something as potent as Ambien!

  Henderson’s plight, of craving sleep, of longing to close his eyes and dream, matches my own. I would love to be able to simply lie down, close my eyes and sleep. If only my Feene pill wasn’t hard wired into my mind!

  On the plus side, most of the stories in the collection were written late at night while the rest of my household slept. So maybe something good has come of it.

  THE EATER

  On a particularly hot summer day in New Hampshire, a small pool of water sa
t alone in a sandy, tree-surrounded clearing. Torrential rains had flooded a nearby stream, which overflowed into a neighboring bog. The flooding expanded, pushing water and transplanting fish, amphibians and various other swamp dwellers into the normally parched clearing. For the first few days, the area became a temporary oasis, but the sun had been burning bright for five days now and all that remained of the flood was a single, one-foot deep, inky black pool that churned continuously like a boiling brew.

  Surrounded by tall pine trees, the clearing remained unknown to many, save for a few junk dumpers and an adventurous child or two. In this case—three.

  Matthew, the oldest of the three brothers wore thick glasses that acted like a magnifying glass when held just right in the sun’s beams. The siblings had learned the trick last summer and it brought them to the clearing again this summer. The clearing was chock full of ants fit for roasting. Joshua, the youngest, was still only six years old, but he had the lungs of an opera singer, shouting about anything that crossed his path. The middle of the trio, Jerry, was, for today at least, the ring leader.

  “This sucks,” Matthew said as he swung a pine branch around his head, shooing away the mosquitoes. “I can’t even see the ants squirming.”

  “You can see them when they’re dead,” Jerry said as he led his brothers through the last of the pine trees and into the clearing.

  “That’s dumb. If I want to see dead ants I can just squish them with my finger when I’m wearing my glasses.”

  “C’mon,” Jerry said, “humor your dying brother.”

  Matthew gave Jerry an angry look. “That’s not funny. You’re not going to die.”

  Jerry kicked the dirt. “Kids with leukemia die, Matt.”

  Matthew opened his mouth to continue the argument, but he was cut short. “Guys! Guys!” It was Joshua. “Look at this pine cone. It’s huge!”

  Matthew and Jerry cringed as Joshua’s high voice tore across the forest like a lighthouse cuts through fog.

  “Shut up!” Matthew said as he pushed past the last of the pine branches and stepped into the clearing. “If you don’t shut up, we’re not bringing you with us next time.”

  “But this pine cone is huge!” Joshua said. With his eyes glued to the pine cone in his hands, Joshua failed to notice his brothers had frozen at the outer perimeter of the clearing. “Oh! Eww...There’s yellow stuff on it! Really, you guys should—oof!” Joshua tripped over Jerry’s sneakered foot and crashed to the ground, sending a cloud of dusty soil into the air.

  Joshua sat up and brushed himself off. “I’m telling Mom! You two...” Joshua looked up at Matthew and Jerry, who normally would have teased him about his unfortunate fall by now, and saw that they hadn’t even noticed him on the ground. That wouldn’t do. “Hey! Hello! I’m telling Mom you pushed me!”

  Nothing.

  Joshua’s forehead furrowed in confusion. It was then that Jerry turned to Matthew. “Should we get Dad?”

  “Dad’s not going to help you when I tell mom you pushed me,” Joshua said, looking up from his place on the ground.

  Jerry looked down at Joshua. His eyes were wide. “Josh...what?”

  “I’m telling Mom you pushed me...” Joshua said.

  Jerry just looked confused.

  Joshua’s forehead grew wrinkled. “What?”

  “Josh...look.” Jerry said, returning his gaze to the clearing.

  Joshua turned and looked out at the clearing. He leapt to his feet and let out a shrill scream. “Oh! That’s gross, that’s gross, that’s gross!”

  “Shut up!” Matthew said, taking a step forward. “I think we should get out of here.”

  Jerry strode past Matthew, bent down and inspected one of the hundreds of miniature corpses littering the clearing. “It’s a salamander,” Jerry said.

  Matthew and Joshua seemed to be put at ease that the dead creatures could be identified. They moved forward.

  “Gross and gross,” Josh said as he looked at a dead frog.

  Matthew bent down to a large rainbow trout and poked it with the end of his pine branch. “Man, I could’ve caught this guy.”

  “No way,” Josh said. “I would have caught him first.”

  Matthew snickered. “You couldn’t catch your tail if you had one. Idiot.”

  “I’m telling Mom!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Guys, look,” Jerry said as he walked deeper into the clearing, hopping past small, crispy corpses as he moved. “There’s some water.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Matthew said.

  Jerry quickened his pace. “Chicken?”

  “Yeah!” Josh said, heading into the corpse field. “You’re a chicken!”

  Matthew sighed and followed his brothers toward the center of the clearing, where he could see a pool of water.

  Jerry was leaning over the water when Matthew and Joshua arrived. “What do you think they are?” Jerry said.

  Joshua stuck his tongue out. “They’re gross.”

  “If you say the word ‘gross’ one more time, I’m gonna throw you in there,” Matthew said.

  Joshua pursed his lips.

  Matthew looked at the water. It was full of squirming, slippery, wet creatures that made the water as dark as oil. “Tadpoles? We found tadpoles in a puddle a few years ago.”

  “I don’t think they’re tadpoles,” Jerry said.

  “Okay, genius, what are they?”

  Jerry leaned closer. “I don’t know...I’ll catch one.”

  “I don’t think you should,” Matthew said. “What if they’re poisonous?”

  Jerry poised his hand over the water. “There’s nothing poisonous in New Hampshire.”

  “Rattlesnakes,” Joshua said. “Dad says there were rattlesnakes on Rattlesnake Mountain, until all the people went up there and killed them.”

  “They’re not snakes,” Jerry said, shaking his head.

  Matthew chuckled. “Idiot...And don’t say you’re telling!”

  Joshua huffed and crossed his arms.

  Jerry lowered his arm over the pool, took a deep breath and then plunged his hand into the water. Moving quickly, he attempted several times to grab hold of something. “I can’t catch them! They’re squirming out of my hand.”

  Joshua crinkled his nose and stepped back. Matthew gritted his teeth as he watched and adjusted his glasses to make sure he saw everything clearly.

  “Got one!” Jerry said. He pulled his arm up and then suddenly stopped. The black water wriggled up over Jerry’s hand and wrapped around his wrist. He tried to pull his arm out of the pool, but the water’s grip was strong.

  Jerry looked back at Matthew with wide eyes.

  “Help.” It was only a whisper.

  Before Matthew could take action, Jerry was yanked into the pool. He splashed down into the water, kicking his legs and flailing his arms, screaming the entire time.

  Matthew turned to Joshua, who was also screaming at the top of his lungs. “Get Dad!”

  Matthew shouted, on the verge of panic. “Get Dad, now!”

  Joshua turned and ran as fast as he could, yelling, “Dad! Dad!”

  Matthew turned back to the pool and found Jerry was no longer thrashing. On his back, Jerry lay partially submerged, staring at the sky.

  “Jerry?”

  Nothing.

  Matthew bent down to him. His skin grew bluer by the second and then his eyes glanced at Matt’s and he moved his mouth. “Wa...ter.”

  Matthew grabbed Jerry’s shirt and pulled him from the pool. “Wa...ter!” Jerry said.

  Looking at the water, Matthew sensed that something had gone terribly wrong. He gazed at Jerry’s blue skin, wondering if the leukemia somehow attacked his brother’s body. But then he noticed something else. Jerry’s abdomen had swelled, and it moved, churning, just like the water back at the clearing did. Matthew looked back at the pool.

  The water was crystal clear.

  Matthew’s face contorted into absolute fear as he looked
back at Jerry, realizing that whatever lived in the pool, now squirmed inside his brother’s body, choking the life out of him, maybe even eating him alive.

  “Water,” Jerry said again. “Hurry.”

  Matthew sucked in a quick breath as the message became clear in his mind. He reached down, picked Jerry up by his armpits and began dragging him toward the woods. “The stream is just through the woods,” he said. “We’ll make it.”

  But Jerry slumped down, limp in Matthew’s hands.

  For five minutes, Matthew grunted and groaned as he dragged Jerry through the woods. Jerry’s skin was cold and turning purple. Matthew’s eyes watered as he feared the worst. His brother was dead.

  Without warning, the soil beneath Matthew’s feet gave way and he fell backward, letting go of Jerry as he careened downward. He struck water a moment later—the stream. Coughing and spitting, Matthew came to the surface gasping for air and missing his glasses. He looked up and saw the blurry figure of Jerry hanging over the edge of the embankment.

  Though positive it was too late, Matthew knew he had to try. He reached up and took Jerry by the hand. Gravity was on Matthew’s side now, and he pulled Jerry into the water with one fast tug. Jerry splashed into the water and lay face up above the surface. He wasn’t moving.

  Matthew punched the water with his fists. “Jerry! Wake up!”

  Then Jerry moved, but only a subtle movement. He opened his mouth. Matthew barely saw it through his blurred vision.

  Matthew’s terror rose as a terrible thought entered his mind. To save his brother, he’d have to drown him.

  Tears flowing freely from Matthew’s face, he took Jerry by the shoulders and thrust him beneath the water. Jerry began kicking and thrashing just as he had in the pool of water. Through clouded vision, Matthew witnessed the water around them turn black. The dark water spread out wide and then dissipated. Jerry’s body stopped writhing.

  A hand launched out of the water and gripped Matthew’s arm. He shouted and pulled Jerry from the water. Coughing wildly, Jerry clambered to the muddy embankment and continued to hack and wheeze for a full minute.