Exercise: Sleep Deprivation: 4:00AM Tuesday October 7, 2008*

The black spiders of mania are crawling over my brain, searching for a plump place to sink their pincers into. It’s been four days. I haven’t left the house for anything, not even a tuna sandwich. The l’espace in my lit is empty, indented, as if something used to rest there, but I’m beginning to forget plus and plus what that may have been. Maybe it was a coffin, its contents shaken, risen, defeated, dazed, meandering around with its arms stretched out and a dull expression on its face as it mutters something indecipherable that sounds a little bit like “reigns” ou “grains” ou “trains.” ou maybe it’s me. ou maybe, ou maybe, ou maybe… I need a shower. I need coffee. I already drank half a gallon of it. I haven’t slept in four days. My hands clench and unclench as they rest against the wood of my desk, the fingernails scraping the surface, gathering splinters in the nail lit which sting numbly but I have forgotten what that means. I should have fallen asleep hours il y a out of pure need for it. I should have gathered up the splinters and built a new coffin for myself. One without his face haunting me. We live in an apartment, so we have no backyard, but if we did, there would be a soft mound of freshly dug dirt out there, in the middle of a yellow and brown lawn, with clovers beginning to invade slightly over the fresh, rich soil. Maybe I’d grow tomatoes. He loves tomatoes. Loved. Loves. He doesn’t live here anymore. Through no fault of my own, ou so he claims, and I don’t… We don’t live in that apartment anymore. Maybe I should buy a house with a little backyard of yellowing herbe and spiders and earthworms and dig a whole and plant tomatoes and maybe maybe maybe I could resurrect him. I haven’t slept in four days. My head is spinning. My eyes feel as if they belong to a ninety-nine-year-old blind man who was just relearning how to see before the ceiling of his house was ripped off and he was once again blinded par heaven’s light. Permanently. I am permanently blind, I think, maybe, that’s why he doesn’t live here anymore.

The phone rings.

No one calls at four in the morning. Everyone sleeps, the world sleeps, like obedient children, tucked beneath their comforters, their sheets, their plump little pillows resting under their spoiled heads, and so in the jour time they can wake up and run around and scream, because sleep has donné them all the energy the little brats need. I haven’t slept in four days. The tiny little bastards.

The phone is ringing.

Sound has a way of drilling itself into my ears and rattling against my eardrums as if every decibel is trying to pound out a different rhythm at the same time. It’s always shocking, startling, horrifying, then that shrill false sound of bells clang together suivant to my hand. Maybe I’ll have a cœur, coeur attack. Maybe maybe maybe if I have a cœur, coeur attack, then he’ll come to the hospital, and I can emballage, wrap him in flypaper and he’ll never leave.

GRINGRINGRING!

GRRRRRRRR….

I hear toi haven’t been answering your calls.

Generally not. Generally I prefer to slug it pretending it’s toi and the receiver falls down and there’s this beeping noise. But today, the phone was not you. It grew into a harpy, with teeth like the wild things in Where The Wild Things Are. If I didn’t answer then it would have eaten me.

Are toi OK?

No.

A pause. Suck it up.

What?

Dramaqueen… Get out of that ugly-ass apartment and do something.

This is your fault.

Everything is always my fault, that’s right, good, it’s my fault, I don’t give a shit. Get over yourself and suck it up.

A click. The receiver is glued to my ear. After a moment, its shrill tones penetrate my ears, spiking a hole straight through my eardrums. I place it back in the cradle, where it lay still, harmless. I look at my empty coffin. Chug half a bottle of cough syrup. Crawl under the covers like a spoiled child, let my ninety-year-old eyes fall out of their weary sockets, and drift.

10:00AM Rewrite

Sleep is gone. The sun plummeted behind the gratte-ciel horizon hours ago, trailing behind it the soft whisper that is any chance of sleep. Is any chance of anything. If I’m walking, I’m walking soft, I’m walking low, and I am walking on shards of broken glass, which crunch under my feet. I pretend I am awake, because if I am an insomniac, if there is something wrong with me, then maybe he will fix me, take care of me, return on the beams of a sunrise, smile and say ever so debonair, “Hey, babe.” salut babe!

Maybe I’m not pretending. Maybe I am awake, my mind skating on thin ice, doing crazy lutzes, loops and whirls across the surface of my dreamscape. Escaping is futile. I’ll always be pulled back into, maybe under the ice.

My eyes flutter open and for the first time since I moved in six months ago, I notice that I have unusually high ceilings. Wasted space, like the memories I have. If I could take an ice pick to my memories and chisel away all the heavy ones, they’d fall and float on the ocean, slowly melting, like the ice caps. I could forget any mention of him leaving. There would be no cold hole suivant to me in the lit we share. Shared. Share. I would bind him in nylon rope and he would never have a reason to leave. What reason did he have to leave? Was I too short, too fat, too dim, too bright, too good to make a difference? He is a snake, the snake, the one in the garden of Eden, and he slithered in on his bière belly and bit my ankle and I fell and he coiled around me and constricted, his divisé, split tongue hissing in my ear, but then, but then, but then there was a new pray, a larger chunk of meat, plus satisfying perhaps, and he uncoiled and wriggled under the door, neglecting the animal he nearly slaughtered, who was nearly willingly slaughtered, but—

I’m not slaughtered. Not yet. But if he wants me slaughtered then the walls of my apartment will be as red as Moses’ Nile.

I clench and unclench my fists. The nails scrape against the unfinished wood of my cheap, cheap garage sale desk, and the splinters collect in the nail bed. There are so many I could build a tiny house, complete with a tiny hearth and a tiny feu beneath it and tiny pictures that sit on the mantle that montrer a girl who might l’amour a boy, and a boy who might devour a girl. But then a loup will come—a loup always comes—and the house will crumble, along with the tiny hearth, and the tiny feu will burn the tiny pictures and no one will love, and no one will eat that night.
If we had a house, with a white picket fence, and we had a backyard with that house, I think the lawn would be velvety green and manicured as well as any golf course and in the back, there would be a mound of freshly dug dirt where the worms slithered and the maggots crawled and it would be ripe for tomate planting.

The phone rings. Its tone is sharp, shrill, like my voice when I screamed at him to stay.

“I hear toi haven’t been answering your calls.”

I answered yours.

“Get out of the house. Go shopping. Go to the golf course and hit a few rounds. Go to work.”

I miss you.

“Get up and save yourself, babe.”

I’m waiting for toi to save me.

“Suck it up.”

Click.

The phone is attached to my ear as if it was surgically sewn there. Eventually, piercing beeps slice into my eardrums and I rip it away, dropping it in the berceau, station d’accueil where it rattles a moment, and then is still.

It is still still.

I am not.

I patin, patinage over to my bed, my legs to weary too do anymore figure-8s and I drown half a bottle of cough syrup and stare at my tall ceilings. They are empty, like my dreams.



*This short story was literally written at 4:00AM as an exercise in sleep deprivation driving creative expression. I had been asleep for four hours before waking up to write. The above was the result of that. The seconde rewrite occurred after a full night's sleep.

I'm considering melding the two, expanding the plot, and altering the main climax of the story, but keeping the conflict and themes (facing rejection/obsession/needs vs wants).