Graveyard Shift

by M.L. Rio

Some nights she wished for catastrophe to strike just so she’d have a big story to break, which only made her feel worse in the morning, because she still had no story, but she did have a fresh black bruise on her conscience.

C. burranicum is an endemic species—it doesn’t grow anywhere else,’ according to sophomore biology major Wes Tucker, who was forced to leave his room on the fourth floor of Coblin Hall. ‘Killing it would be like, mycological genocide.’”

By the time she was thirty, she had given up trying, tired of being tired, tired of telling people she was tired, tired of being bombarded with imbecilic advice about how to be less tired. Have you tried a warm bath? Warm milk? Herbal tea? Reading before bed always works for me! No, shit-for-brains, she wanted to say—and sometimes did, I’ve only been trying to sleep since the day I was born, and googling home remedies never occurred to me.

She learned to live in the permanent twilight of sleep-deprivation psychosis. Life, if you could call it that, was a never-ending out-of-body experience.

Most people never traversed the numinous no-man’s-land between sleep and waking, where the laws of the physical universe went to pieces.

“Because your only people skills are seduction and sadism.” She licked her lips. “What’s the difference?”