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Sleep, by V. L. Draven

6/11/2020

 
I lay in the dark.  I try to sleep, but the welcome blackness fails to reach for me.  I know she is nearby.  But she is outside my grasp.  I wish I had not met her, that she had not become my lover.  It would have been better for both of us.  I look around the dim room.  She is hiding in the shadows.  She watches.  She hesitates.  She has nothing to fear from me.  I would never hurt her.  The pricking in my eyes signals the desire to slip into her embrace.  Yet we both know that is no longer possible.
I learned the truth years ago; she revealed it to me.  Sleep is not something we fall into.  She is a being that hunts us.  She lays in wait in every shadow, waiting upon our readiness for her.  Once we have been prepared by our desire for rest.  Once our eyes are closed and her presence cannot be detected, then she approaches.  She touches us, strokes our mind with her invisible fingers.  When we are helpless, she starts to feed. 
I was nearly dead, when I first saw her.  Laying in a drug induced stupor, foam dribbled from my mouth.  The needle was still in my arm.  Sleep was all I desired.  When I looked around the room, everything swam and swooned.  Yet, there she was.  She watched shyly, unsure, curious.  She approached me, ran her fingers down my face.  Unable to move, I looked up at her, tried to talk.  Her black eyes, her long dark hair.  I wanted her, to feel the warmth of her body against mine.  Somehow, I knew her seduction would end in my demise.  Yet I could not resist. 
Before the drugs wore off, Sleep had already left.  The desire for her had faded from my eyes, removed by her feeding on the buildup of tiredness that the drugs had induced.  I walked in the daylight, unsure of what I had experienced.  Yet that night, as I prepared for bed, she returned.  Unafraid, she sat on my blankets.  She stroked my forehead.  She kissed my lips.  And as I fell into her embrace again,  she filled my dreams with her fantasies.    
We became lovers.  She visited me each night; I slipped into unconsciousness in her arms, but when the morning came, I always woke alone.  
Months passed, but my dreams turned sour.  I woke in the night screaming.  She gazed upon me. Her form had turned pallid and pale; she was ill, sick from our association.  She could not remain.  She left, looking back as tears flowed down her face.  Her kind were never supposed to fraternize with the awakened. 
Now she haunts me.  Watches me from across the room.  I still want her, yet we both know that we cannot be together.  Never again will I feel the warmth of her embrace, only the pricking of eyes so heavy with the need for her, that I can barely keep them open.
Sue Clayton
7/11/2020 05:18:42 am

To sleep perchance to dream of drug fuelled fantasies. Despair in every word.


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    Friday Flash Fiction is primarily a site for stories of 100 words or fewer, and our authors are expected to take on that challenge if they possibly can. Most stories of under 150 words can be trimmed and we do not accept submissions of 101-150 words.


    However, in response to demand, the FFF team constructed this forum for significantly longer stories of 151-500 words. Please send submissions for these using the Submissions Page.

    Stories to the 500 word thread will be posted as soon as we can mange.


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    Please feel free to comment (nicely!) on any stories – writers appreciate it.
    Just at the moment, though, we're moderating some of them so there might be a slight delat before they appear
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    One little further note. Posting and publishing 500-word stories takes a little time if they need to be formatted, too.
    ​Please note that we tend to post longer flash fiction exactly as we find it – wrong spacing, everything.

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