‘SOMNOLENCE REVERIE’

Landon Ashcraft is an essayist, poet, music producer, and photographer from Pensacola, Florida who now lives in Florence, Kentucky with his family. Ashcraft has been interested in the arts since elementary school but began to take it seriously only two years ago. He has been included in numerous photography exhibitions around Cincinnati.

SOMNOLENCE REVERIE

His silhouette stands straight on the hill as he stares into the sky, face upturned and yearning, hopeful. The stars are bright-glimmering-speckles in a deep-black expanse he wishes to get lost in. Hyper-focused, he waits on this cold late-Autumn night. But nothing comes, no glowing ball of light, no luminous orb descending, and his heart sinks. A feeling like blood draining downward in his arms and a heaviness in his chest. He hadn’t slept through the night since it happened. He had become anxious, developed a persistent worry about sleep itself. Would he sleep tonight? If he drifted over into sleep at 3am, 4am, how many hours might he manage? How was this affecting his nervous system, his brain? Vicious cycle of worrying about sleeping, lying awake in the darkness, awake in the dawning half-light, walking around like a zombie early-morning anxious about sleeping but trying to push though the day. 

He had tried everything, lavender baths, hot milk, cooling his bedroom with a fan, listening to white noise, listening to wave sounds, listening to podcasts, avoiding his laptop and phone, limiting caffeine, alcohol, to no avail. He’d tried over-the-counter tablets, prescription medication, melatonin, zolpidem, eszopiclone, even eating kiwis an hour before bedtime. He knew he was doing things while asleep but, worryingly, could not remember doing them, could not remember falling asleep, just the next day’s evidence of mud on his boots and wet coat and no recall of going outside. He would come down to find food prepared in little batches on plates in the kitchen when he thought he’d been upstairs for hours. 

He would think of his life back when it was normal, when he had a job and a regular sleep pattern, regular mealtimes, regular gym-times. And with his mind busy, lying awake for long periods night after night, his thoughts would always loop around to her. Sometimes he debated with himself whether it was the memory of her keeping him awake or if it was the recollection of her that was getting him through, that the intentness with which he thought of her could comfort him in his exhausted state of mental agitation. His eyelids felt so heavy. He closed his eyes and thought back to the first time it happened. He had walked up this hill to the top on a cold winter’s night, feeling pins and needles in his ungloved hands. Standing at the top, looking at the glittering stars, he caught a fleeting glimpse of something moving to his left. Turning his head slowly, he saw a tall, thin, hairless, gangly form with smooth grey skin which—absurdly—appeared to be naked apart from what for all the world looked like a black polo-neck jumper. The figure caught his eye and for a moment there was direct eye contact with gigantic black, almond-shaped eyes. Then the figure seemed to become thinner, and thinner still, and dissipate into a greyish hue as it touched the trees and disappeared. While still looking to see if it would reappear, he noticed darting movement by a rock diagonal to where he stood. He walked slowly toward the rock, trying not to make a sound. He could see something on the side of the rock, which in the dusk looked like it could be part of the rock. Closer now, he saw it was a hand! A long, slender grey hand. Unthinkingly, he reached out to touch it, the unnaturally long middle finger, and it felt cold and almost rubber-like. He noticed that there were four fingers and no fingernails! Suddenly, the hand pulled away and he could hear giggling from behind the rock, a sound that a gleeful child would emit at what they found the funniest thing ever. He looked round the side of the rock and the child—was it a child?—moved quick as lightning to the front of the rock. He tried again, jumping to the top to try to see, only to catch a glint of a greyish-blue light-filled shape tapering off around the rock before disappearing. He stayed nearly all night to see if they would reappear, but they never did. That was almost a decade ago.

The second time it happened was a year later, almost to the day. He had worn gloves and his warm tweed coat, and he had given up hope of seeing anything again. He stood, as usual, looking at the stars from his favourite vantage-point. And, so unexpectedly and amazingly, he saw blue lights, fantastically bright! The lights were moving in formation, circling each other, merging in and back out. He was transfixed! Abruptly, as if someone invisible caught him by the shoulders and pushed him down, he was on his knees, face still upturned. With a horrible dawning realisation, he found he could not move from this position! It was like he was set in stone. He could see the craft descending. He had the most foreboding feeling and wanted to cry out, but couldn’t, his tongue was stuck fast to the roof of his mouth.

A blinding light filled everything, the entire night sky, like a nuclear explosion, white and brilliant. Inside the light, he could see thin grey forms. Two came toward him, extraordinarily fast, and picked him up still stuck on his knees with upturned face. He was frightened now, and his heart was not beating fast but incredibly slowly and it didn’t feel right. He felt an energy pulse all around him and wished he could move his head downward to catch his breath. The forms carried him into the craft which—to his surprise and disbelief, even as it was happening—looked exactly like the flying saucer in one of his favourite films, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Was this what going crazy looks like? He could feel their rubbery hands lifting him onto a table, well something table-shaped, as everything in the space was part of one thing in a way he would not afterwards be able to describe. He saw a table and a door, but both were the same material as everything else with no seams, very shiny metallic silver but not any metal he could name. It looked tacky, something out of a B-movie. He had studied film, had a degree in it in fact, and he knew about sets, effects, props, how it all works together. He was thinking of what kind of props and lighting this could be as they undressed him.

The three of them were removing his clothes, his gloves, unbuttoning his coat, pulling off his jeans, very quickly. He tried to scream but it was like his tongue was superglued in place. One of the things, as he thought of them now, at the table’s end had an object that looked like a comb made of bone with razorblades at the top. The other two things pinned his arms down so hard it hurt while the third thing scraped the razor-comb along his stomach, and it hurt like fuck. They put his skin-scrapings in a container that seemed to be the same material as everything else, it appeared to open but when it closed had no visible joining, just a polished-looking metal shape that wasn’t square, and wasn’t round, but was somehow both shapes at once. 

He opened his eyes and held onto the side of his bed, shaking. Every time his mind went back there, he remembered a new horrific detail. Following the first experience, a decade ago, he tried to keep going as normal, not tell anyone, pretend it never happened. But he couldn’t fucking sleep. He started messing up at work, manager who didn’t like him anyway started picking on him until one day he just quit. It took so much energy to do anything, legs and arms felt heavy, it was so much effort to even get dressed. He was the lethargy-king. He’d got so down in himself he stopped going out, read books at home about myths and legends and faraway lands until even that stopped making him feel better. He felt so bad that he thought about taking his own life. 

It was on Halloween he decided to do it, dramatic. He didn’t even bother dressing warmly, just a t-shirt and jeans and a light jacket. He headed for the hill. He passed a group of girls dressed up like Playboy bunnies, voices high-pitched and nasally, grated on his nerves. Next, a bunch of little kids dressed as ghouls and witches with their bags which would be filled with cheap sweets soon. He walked on, empty and sick feeling. This was to be the last look at the stars before he ended it all and he was going to savour it.

At the top, the damp grass squelching underfoot, he walked over to the oddly-shaped rock. He started to think about the rock and how weird it looked, he hadn’t noticed it before. He sat down and leaned his back against it, not caring about the cold ground. Who cares if you’re sick when you’ll be dead soon anyway? A memory came to him then, something he hadn’t thought of since he was a child. He remembered playing tip-the-can up here as a kid, maybe nine years old. His friend Cathal, designated as “It”, counted down while the rest of them hid, six kids in all. Cathal finished counting down from a hundred, which was a bit overkill, it should have been from ten, but this way meant they could hide in more unusual places making for a more exciting game. In the left of his field of vision, he could see Barry hiding behind a tree and Cathal heading that way. The other three kids had also run in the same direction, to the woods where there were a few places further in to hide. Then, he felt his whole body go rigid. He could hear steps approaching but it wasn’t Cathal because he could still see Cathal, almost at the edge of the woods now, and he could still see Barry by the tree and there was no way for the other kids to have come round without him seeing them. He felt sick. The steps continued toward him, deliberately and with him in sight, it felt. He couldn’t see anyone from the direction the heavy steps came, but the steps were getting closer. His body relaxed like he had been released from a vice. He covered his eyes with his hands. He could feel a presence standing in front of him, which stepped so close, he imagined it almost touching his leg. He imagined it wearing big black romper-stomper boots. He was too scared to look up. He could hear Cathal and Barry running to the can and laughing.

Now, getting cold and pulling his jacket around him, he put his head back against the rock and cried. He had a dejected feeling, like there were more memories to come, like his mind was accessing them piecemeal so it wasn’t too much. He closed his eyes to try to remember more, did he ever see what it was that stood above him almost thirty years ago? Eyes closed, he heard the grass whoosh as if the wind was blowing through it and the thought came to him that the grass was not long enough, and it was not a windy night. When he opened his eyes, to his shock he was inside a box. It was narrow like a telephone box, except matte black, and only high enough that he fit inside. The lattice part of the box by his face reminded him of a confessional. He could see that all around the box was a metallic-shining room. Then, the front of the box opened as if a part had just melted away.

Terrified, he saw a figure approaching. It wasn’t a thing, a grey, but a woman and she was naked. Her skin was very pale, but a whiteish beige, like the skin of witches in films dancing in moonlight. Like being hypnotised, his head moved to meet her gaze, and he saw that her eyes were massive orbs, black-shimmering-tar, long black hair, but the body was very much human woman! Was he losing his mind? He tried to speak but couldn’t, felt like his jaw was wired shut. He could feel the most amazing feeling like a hand had reached into his ribcage and squeezed, releasing a kind of squidgy vibrancy through his whole body. He shuddered. She put images in his mind then, of swirling colours, animals and birds he’d never seen, the most beautiful otherworldly landscapes, things he would never be able to describe in words. She held out her long, pale, beautiful hand and he noticed her fingernails were opalesque and very pretty and she only had four fingers. He wanted to take her hand so bad, but he was scared.

He had always liked predictability, run-of-the-mill girls, being normal. In certainty and sameness, his heart and mind were safe. He had never let himself get truly involved with anyone, not friends, and definitely not women. He liked close-proximity girlfriends that were always around but easy to get rid of, banality, a measured life where no-one could hurt him. If he couldn’t really feel anything, they could never damage him or even dent his ego. He would never give himself away to a woman, they were untrustworthy, messed with his head, could change their minds once he had committed to them and he wasn’t going to let that happen. He would always end it first, or not let it even start, say there is no connection between them, if it got too real. In this way, his life was comfort-zone, safe but boring. Now he was feeling overwhelmed, like all the repressed feelings were starting to pour out like guts after an evisceration. He wanted to get lost in her, in this intensity, like a zinging energy that was about to suffuse his whole being. 

Staring at the outstretched hand, he could feel she was upping the ante of this experience as she placed more images in his mind. He felt her presence strongly inside his head, not a voice, but her consciousness inside his mind, and he understood implicitly: she wanted to bring him on an adventure. She was showing him where they could go, into the melding colours and shapes, onto other planets, back to ancient civilisations. Oh, he wanted to! He could reach out of the box and take her hand! He knew that’s all it would take, all he had to do. His eyes were locked with hers as she gave what he understood implicitly to be the ultimatum-image, an indescribable beautiful connection between them. In an indecisive split-second, he broke her gaze, blinked, and was back on the ground by the rock, dropped like a fucking stone.   

Many thoughts were swirling in his mind, but any thought of suicide was wiped away. He had gone home that night with a focus and invigoration to fix his life, to mend himself. But it wasn’t so easy. He still could not sleep. He had little to no contact with friends after that, every social event felt boring, listening to people blabbing on about what they were doing and the thought in the back of his mind like: “If only you knew, what I could have done, where I could have gone!” He’d continued on for years, going up the hill, standing near the rock, staring at the stars. In sometimes bitter regret, he wonders what would have happened if he had just taken her hand.  

Dr. Jenny Butler’s first published book was the short story collection, Limerence for Lost Souls (House of Pomegranates Press, 2021). She has short stories published in numerous publications, including Corvus Review, The Raven’s Perch Literary Magazine, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Other Terrain: Swinburne University Literary Journal, and Thorn Literary Magazine. You can find out more about her on her website www.drjennybutler.com