The Sanctuary of Slumber
By Ashley Redden
Copyright 2013 Ashley Redden
Image courtesy of foto 76 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The Sanctuary of Slumber
Irony? A comedy of errors? Some stupid satirical play? All or none? This is my life now in vivid color.
The world has ended, no longer a worry, but now an absolute fact. Done. Finished. That proverbial fat lady has been belting out a tune for quite a while now. The credits have rolled.
No. Our downfall is no longer a concern, for that I don’t even have a wisp of a care. My worry is much more personal. My need. My requirement
What do I think about? Sleep. Just sleep. Only sleep. Blissful, uninterrupted, pristine sleep.
When did I sleep last? Good question. Maybe someone out there knows.
Irony? A comedy of errors? Whatever. Just give me some stinking shut eye. I will take what I can get at this point.
I hear someone laughing, not just giggling, but laughing hysterically. I look around bewildered and realize that the person laughing is me. Is this good? Maybe not.
I take my last bottle of water and pour some into my hand, not too much, not too little, but just enough. Into the eyes the water goes. I blink furiously and give my head a shake, just to clear out the cobwebs. I can’t be sure, but I could have sworn that I actually heard something rattling around up there. Probably best not to do that again.
Absently, I lightly scratch behind my ear, frown and notice that the back of my head doesn’t feel quite right. I mean I’m fully aware that hygiene has left the building for awhile now, but I should still have a pretty good head of hair. Matted up and maybe pretty nasty, that hair on the back of my head, but there right? Not really. My fingers are suddenly groping for any remnants of hair upon the back of my head, but they find none. Those fingers rake through air and over skin. No hair, just dry itchy scalp.
I pull my hand away and peer at the fingers. I wouldn’t say that a handful of hair resides there in the midst of my grubby paw, but there are some wiry sprigs, a few lonely sprigs. I stand looking at the hair, too tired to be shocked. This probably isn’t good.
I wiggle my fingers and the sparse bits seem to float and flutter as they take flight leaving my hand. I study my fingers as they work them back and forth. As I stare at what must be my very own hand, I can’t help but wonder whose fingers are these? Mine? Certainly not. My fingers have never been so horrible!
The nail beds are like tiny black circles at the end of those wiggling digits. Where the nails used to be shiny and flat, now each brown and yellow nail is warped like a bad roof and attempting to break loose and flutter away. Just like the hair. No, this definitely cannot be good.
I drop my hand and stagger on. Destination? Who knows? Who Cares?
Sometimes the going is difficult, my legs and mind don’t work so well anymore.
The city streets don’t help. They are littered with all the necessities of life. Everywhere, there are rotten clothes, rotten wood, broken televisions and assortments of other things that used to make a home a home. Most everything that the third world has ever produced lay in these streets. I used to live in a world of wonders. Now, I live in a world of crap. The whole city is just one big cesspool of garbage.
But none of that matters. Walking doesn’t matter, eating surely doesn’t matter, which seems more like a myth than a memory at this point.
No, oh no, the first and last thing that matters now is sleep, just a little rest. When did I last rest? Days? Months? Years? Decade’s maybe? Who can remember?
I hear someone laughing again, a wretched high and unbalanced sound. I don’t bother to stop and look this time. It’s probably just me again. That’s probably not good either.
I turn the corner and stop for just a second resting on the side of a building that is doing its level best to bring everything outside in, one festering piece of rot at a time. I shake my head half expecting to hear a rattling sound from my fuzzy brain and gaze into an alley. I dozed off, I think. Just for a minute, though, probably not long enough to attract attention.
Sitting in the alley, on the far side against another dilapidated building, three sets of wide deeply blood-shot eyes greet me. Three boys, thugs of the most wretched sort most likely. Two gaze into my eyes the bags beneath theirs probably mirroring my own; the third gapes at my leg. Obviously unsure of whether to attack and beat me or run for their lives, the three slowly rise from their haunches.
I wave them back and say, “Don’t worry, I’m just moving on. I won’t stop.”
“You just stay back bug bait. We don’t want no trouble,” one of the thugs says. The other two nod in agreement.
If I wasn’t so stinking, unbelievably, completely and utterly exhausted, I would laugh aloud. These three murderers have probably ended the lives of more people in this past year and a half than their combined birthdays.
Instead I croak out, “I won’t. I’ll just be going.”
I stagger by, not even bothering to look at the young killers. They, however, eye me as if I were about to sprout fangs and strike.
Irony, that’s what this is. Complete and total irony. My life in a bucket.
For the past year and a half I’ve spent almost every filthy scrounging second crawling about in and through the deepest darkest crannies I could find. Living like something out of prehistory, filthy, disheveled and feral always running from thugs just like these three. Then I went to sleep one night, or was it daytime, those of us that dwelt in those dark wretched places below the city streets had stopped keeping track of such things, and woke up bitten. It wasn’t so bad at first, just small blotches, like bruises that didn’t hurt. But dear God they looked awful.
These bites were easy to hide in the beginning so that at least I had friends. We were a pitiful bunch and running constantly for our lives, but together nonetheless. As a group we surely were misery personified, but together with everyone in the same boat, it made the days seem a bit better. A shared burden is maybe a little bit less than one carried alone.
After I realized what had happened, I tried my best to stay awake and did so for several days, or weeks or whatever. But people aren’t built to go without sleep forever, it just doesn’t work. So it happened at last. I sat down, going to rest for just a minute or so and accidentally fell asleep. When I awoke, the bugs had had their way with me.
People saw. My friends threw me out like so much refuse, which is kinda funny when you think about it because that’s what we were living in. Before society fell, we would have been considered garbage ourselves.
I hear that laughing again and look around this time. The three thugs are inching away, all eyes on the calf of my right leg now. I reach down before I realize what I am about to do and run my hand down the back of my right leg. The skin is stretched perfectly over the bone, no muscle, no sinew, nothing but tight skin over bone. Perfect in an abject horror sort of way.
When I look back my three would be murders are gone, presumably off to harass and exterminate others that the bugs haven’t gotten around to eating yet.
A couple of weeks ago, I would have been killed within days roaming the streets not affiliated to any of the gangs whose rule holds sway here. But after the bugs bit me, made me bug bait as we leftover remnants of humanity now say. Well now, after that happened, I found myself free to go wherever I wanted. Molested by none, shunned by all. I have to wonder if the lepers back in biblical times also had it this good.
There have always been people saying that the world would end. They were laughed at, these prophets of doom, ridiculed and despised as nut cases which most invariably were. But even they, with their hysteria and paranoia running on overdrive,
surely never envisioned or imagined the end of the world occurring the world ending like this. Yet again, it would seem that truth is far stranger than fiction.
Like the old saying goes, "Who could make up something like this?" In the end the so called nut cases got it right. The world is surely in its death throws, for people anyway. The bugs are seeing to that.
No one knew where the bugs came from or where they went or how people were chosen. What, exactly, are they anyway? I used to wonder if maybe they were some great intergalactic spiders spinning webs between here and there, wherever there is. Once we humans went to sleep, we slipped into their gossamer unseen webs, captured in that strange other place conveyed by our dreams.
The spiders pounced, or just took their time, who knows which and gnawed upon us unlucky chosen few. They injected their strange otherworldly venom and it did its work making our soft parts softer. Then, when we unlucky dreamers fell
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