Graveyard Shift

by M.L. Rio

It’s frighteningly easy to get lost in your own subconscious; any place you think you know is different after dark.

the most arresting odes to slumber are spoken by those who can’t have it.

Nobody wanted to huddle in a moldering churchyard after midnight because there was nowhere else to smoke. But huddle they did. Misery loved company and made strange bedfellows.

“Occam’s razor,” Edie repeated. “The simplest explanation is the best explanation.” It was a motto she’d tried to instill in her staff at the Times—along with the official motto, Salva veritate. With truth intact. But the truth was never simple, seldom whole.

He should have been dumber. Anybody that good-looking deserved to be dumb.

Valid

“Saint Anthony’s Fire. It was a sort of medieval epidemic. Caused gangrene and hallucinations and made people feel like they were being burned alive.”

It was difficult to make out much but Rorschach blots in the shape of a person.

Friends and lovers came and went, but the Toyota was forever.

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.

Felt

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.

“I care how long I have before I’m just another Hostile Incident.”

FACTS! She sighed, slugged the Coke anyway. FACT: Diet Coke had more caffeine than regular, but still much less than coffee. FACT: That did not make it any better for you. FACT: Edie did not care.

Milky autumn sunlight dappled the floorboards through the colored glass.

Fav