She
[WP] A drug is developed that mimics the effect of 8 hours of sleep, giving people another 8 hours of potential production. Soon, society adjusts to a constant state of production. However, a horrible consequence begins to unfold.
*****
She was:
a shadow on the edge of consciousness, perhaps less, though always more;
a voice in the night, most often when you needed it;
a companion in the daylight hours, those little slips that feel like death, and then rebirth on waking;
a thought you never knew you had;
a dream you wanted to go back to.
The girl slips through twilight, dawn threatening behind her. It’s a world turning gray in a place where the only colors should be stars, or the desires people bring to her; which could be many and could be confusing, but which never had any other place to go. She sees a doorway up ahead, slips through it. All she does is slip these days.
It’s a man. He’s sitting at the dinner table having breakfast, which doesn’t make much sense to her. All that pomp and circumstance replaced by paperwork, seats for seven others taken up by laptops, notebooks, and more phones than one man needs. He’s working in that half-world between awareness and the subconscious where the mind tries to retreat to now there’s nowhere else to go. He’s almost creative. He shapes a phrase that he thinks is quite clever, poetic, he used to be a poet in his teenage years. He crosses it out. The boss doesn’t like poets. Not in an earnings call. There’s no poetry to ones and zeros, it’s all stark prose where the subtext is stripped out and the punctuation is a bunch of exclamations. One after every line. Every life. He’s drifting.
The man reaches to his right and pulls out a pill, drinks the pill down with his cup of tea. Not coffee anymore. He doesn’t need coffee and he never liked the taste.
And the girl steps back. She has her foot in the door by the time rush hits, and then it’s rushing past him, towards her, the eight hours that should have been her life flashing before his eyes, a tidal wave of sleep, perchance to never dream again.
The door slams shut behind her. She can hear the man humming. A lullaby. He’d had a baby once, or had that been a dream too?
The girl slips south. Doors crack open and slam shut. Open, shut. Open, shut. She peers through another, sees an awkward child playing. That coltish age where they could be a girl, could be a boy, could be something else—they’re still trying to find themselves in every way they can.
The setting is a porch towards daybreak. A chill spring morning that will lead to a glorious spring day, which will lead to something else, something colder, because these days the girl feels like everything slips back to winter. The child is staring down at a blank sheet of paper, eyes drooping, head lolling sideways. The girl steps closer.
She can help, wants to help. She reaches out, and it’s like a little piece of the child reaches back, half-formed or less, all soft curves and frayed edges, hardly a suggestion of the person that they’ll become one day.
But there is something. The girl can see it if she focuses. She’s good at pulling threads together, and what are people but threads, really? An interest here, a thought there. Little scraps from friends and family along the way that snarl-up in the darkness where they should. Where people aren’t even thinking about them. Where they’re thinking about work or school or love or lust or the vague impressions of all those things that they’ve gotten from books and movies. The way that a life should have been.
A dream can slip between those cracks.
The girl steps forward. She’s taking on a shape, something she used to do all the time. She’ll know why soon, but for now, it feels right. Needed. She slips into it and through it and towards the exhausted child.
A breeze kicks up, cold off the mountains in the distance. The child’s head snaps up. Shakes. They reach into their pocket, pull out a little red pill. Stare at it for a while. Swallow.
The breeze howls, a door slams. Her twilight gets a little grayer.
South becomes imperative. North is wrong, east is cursed, and she doesn’t dare think of west. South pulls her. There’s desperation south, exhaustion. A need to sleep, to think freely, to let a soul spill into darkness and let the work bleed off, the school, the love, the lust, the little desires and the big. All the thoughts that used to crowd in at the break of day are now just thoughts. Everywhere. All the time. The horizon turning into data, as far the eye can see.
A door is thrown open.
The girl stumbles towards it. Slips.
Sees a young woman.
She sits on a cushion in front of a tall bronze rimmed mirror, the edges worked like spreading vines. She’s brushing her hair. Long hair. Beautiful hair. A true black river spilling over one shoulder. The brush catches and the woman sighs. Such a tiny sigh, so solemn. There are bags under her eyes like someone pressed hard into her skin and smudged. They look like they hurt. There’s a bottle sitting on the floor beside her, almost lost in the tumult of makeup.
And the woman keeps brushing her hair. It’s a battle, a war she’s losing. It won’t be the way she wants it. She looks at the bed sometimes, a mess that she’s trying and failing not to think about. There’s a guitar in one corner, a book of piano sheet music on a stool. Three pairs of shoes, two pairs of stockings, one well-worn dress that might have been well-loved once, trailing back in a self-consciously random line towards the closet. Her bookshelves—well stocked—are the only things in order.
She sets the hairbrush down. She’s shaking like she wants to throw it through the window, which is open now but the girl watching her gets the sense that doesn’t matter much.
The young woman looks at the guitar. The piano music. Says “I used to…” and then a curious thought flits across her face. Like she can’t complete the sentence. Might even have forgotten how. She laughs, a little nervously, more than a little afraid. She reaches for the hairbrush, drags it through her hair, the door opens and a man comes in and he sighs too. Deep and exasperated as he trudges through the mess and finds the bottle, uncaps it, holds out two little red pills.
The girl sees him from the chest down, towering above the young woman. He’s a rumbling voice, rising up and crashing down and pushing her back towards the doorway, the twilight, the encroaching dawn, which is a bad thing for dreams. Sometimes they shouldn’t end. Like poetry from ones and zeroes and those self-discovering years, they should go on and on. The girl thinks so, at any rate. She lets out a little sob when the young woman reaches for the pills. The man’s hand comes down, cups her so cheek softly, his thumb resting in the hollow beneath her eye.
Twilight. The gray before the dawn.
The girl sits on a ridge and looks out across it all, this world where she’s always lived. Home, with room to spare.
She was:
a shadow on the edge of consciousness, perhaps less, though always more;
a voice in the night, most often when you needed it;
a companion in the daylight hours, those little slips that feel like death, and then rebirth on waking;
a thought you never knew you had;
a dream you wanted to go back to.
She is:
ripples on a pond;
a frontier that men have conquered;
an afterthought in a brave new world.
She could have been:
*****
THE END.
