Graveyard Shift

by M.L. Rio

Tellingly, the most arresting odes to slumber are spoken by those who can’t have it. Consider Macbeth, doomed to sleep no more: slumber is the “balm of hurt minds,” “sore labor’s bath,” a doting seamstress who “knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care.” Insomnia unravels a person without mercy.

“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.

“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.”

Head suddenly spinning—a glittering, gruesome whirl of disembodied arms and legs, hands and feet. “I think I might be sick.”

One year, one divorce, and exactly one tenure-track interview later, she’d given up on doing anything more exciting with her library science degree than menial data entry and occasionally reorganizing her rickety bookshelves according to a different classification system. She’d already grown bored with Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress and was considering a foray into the Universal Decimal system just for something to do.

She had a bizarre natural aptitude for deciphering cryptic bibliographic data. But the real secret to finding what you wanted fast was starting with the right kind of query. Learn to manipulate a few advanced search operators, and you could save yourself a lot of hours looking for a needle in a haystack.

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.’”

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’m one of your lab rats, Tom. I’m the ghost of lab rats past.” He went still, stopped struggling. Hannah blew a kiss in his ear. “Honey, do you remember me now?” What a charming name they gave it. Project Honeydew. That must have been Heather’s idea. She had the same cold, sticky sweetness. She insisted everyone call her Heather, not Dr. Lockley. Even slippery little rats like Hannah.

“I don’t care what you thought,” Hannah told him. “I care how long I have before I’m just another Hostile Incident.”