Sleep Paralysis

Every night, he dreaded falling asleep. Every night, he tried to fight it. He'd drink a pot of coffee. He played loud music. He downloaded addictive games onto his cell phone. He exercised. He'd write down everything he did that day. Tried an expensive lamp that mimics daylight. Ice-cold showers. Caffeine pills. Other, less legal pills. 

He got rid of his bed. Broke it up with an axe and burned it in the backyard. Threw every pillow and blanket into the flames. 

Every night, he'd fight it, and every night, he'd fail.  No matter what, at midnight, his body would betray him. He'd slowly collapse, deflating like a balloon. Crumpling onto the ground, he would fall asleep. But he wasn't asleep. He could hear, and he could see. But he couldn't move. 

Then the beast would come. 

He heard the claws clicking against the floor. Guttural growling, deep, that he could feel in his chest. It lumbered towards him. It looked like a brown bear, except for its face. The head was a elongated skull, like a horse skull, gleaming white and slicked with viscera. 

It hunched over him. The grinning maw pressed up against his face, snuffling and snorting through its bony nostrils. The incisors click-click-clicked. It tilted its head and turned an empty eye socket to look into his. It opened its bony jaws and spoke. 

"Go the fuck to sleep."

THE END

The Gods In The Woods

There were still gods in the woods. Little ones, mostly. Scampering through the roots of the great trees, or wrapping themselves in blankets of moss. They bounce up and down on the caps of mushrooms, and sail down the streams in boats of woven grass and leaves. 

They will hold mock battles with twigs for swords, and the cupules of acorns for shields. Dances are held every full moon, and they songs, lilting and chirupping compositions are older than the forest itself.

The old man limped into the woods to feed them. He brought nothing but his walking stick and his simple robes of rough-cut cloth. He found a warm patch of sunlight streaming through the towering trees and sat on a fallen log. 

And he did nothing. 

The gods of the woods do not need anything from us but our attention. Not even that, really. They need us to come back to them, for a little bit, and inhabit that hidden space that is apart from life and death. To be human is to exist in binary, a duality of us or them, losing and gaining, and agony and ecstasy. The gods don't do this, and they serve us by reminding us that we don't have to think like that anymore, if we don't want to 

He would not call it inner peace. His old injured leg hurt today, his back hurt every day, and his stomach hurt because he hadn't had anything to eat yet. And to all this, he said yes. We are always at the place where we always are. 

Just like the gods in the woods. 

THE END

Author's Note: I looked for the big gods, but I did not find them in this draft. Maybe they'll show up the second or third. 

Your Billion Future Selves

It has been only a handful of generations since humans had unlocked the ability to edit their own genetic code, and now there were no humans left. No true humans, anyway. They still looked like  humans, but biologically, they are now siphonophores. 

The Portuguese Man O' War is often mistaken for a jellyfish. It is related to jellyfish, but the jellyfish is a single organism, with one genome. The Man O' War contains multitudes. It is a colony; multiple units of creatures called zooids. Genetically identical, all from a single egg, but still individual. Each zooid becomea specialized to its role in the colony. And from the outside, it looks like one big jellyfish. These things that look like humans, are made up not of cells, but of, essentially, tiny humans. 

Before, a human might lose a finger. But now, there is no human to lose it. The finger was born to be a finger, the hand was born to be a hand, and the arm, and the torso, and the head the eyes the brain all of it, each one a zooid. The lost finger is alive, as a finger, and it knows it is alone. It will not survive long without the rest of the colony. Not long at all. 

It's confusing, I know, why anyone would want this. They're immortal now, functionally, these new humans. If a liver or a kidney fails, the lab can grow a new one. If the new human were to be cut in half at the waist, and the lab was sufficiently prepared, each half could be made into a whole. This wasn't done, at least not yet, but it could be. 

Individuality, down to the last body part.

Immortality achieved, at the cost of the self.

These new humans appear content, on the whole. Except those of us who work in the labs, raising the zooids into the parts they will play. We monitor every vital sign, every nerve, every . We get the same patterns, the same jagged waves on the electro-cellulargrams, over and over again. 

They are screaming. 

Author's Note: I really thought tonight was going to be the night I ended my streak. It's late, and I'm tired, and work was hard. But then Sibbitt went and wrote this really cool poem about a different kind of immortality and that got me to thinking...

This story needs work; I think the distinction between a single organism and exactly what siphonophores are is not explained very well. It's okay, because I think overall the story is headed in the right direction in evoking an atmosphere of existential dread for that very reason. At least that's what I'm telling myself because it is late and I must sleep. To learn more about siphonophores, visit your local library! Or you can read these notes I copied from Wikipedia and pasted below to re-read ah I struggled to convey how these things are very much alike in concept to a single organism, but the way they go about it is still uncanny as hell. Goodnight!

Siphonophores are highly polymorphic and complex organisms.[4] Although they may appear to be individual organisms, each specimen is in fact a colonial organism composed of medusoid and polypoid zooids that are morphologically and functionally specialized.[5] Zooids are multicellular units that develop from a single fertilized egg and combine to create functional colonies able to reproduce, digest, float, maintain body positioning,

The Town of Crows

The town of Corvus lay nestled in the verdant Carrina Valley. It was surrounded miles of cornfields, the engine of the town's economy. A railroad ran through the valley, ChenIn the middle of the largest field, Woodford Bennett was starting his last shift. He climbed up onto a wooden platform, pushed up the brim of his straw hat, and looked up into the clear blue sky, scanning for crows. 

The Carrina Valley was special. The crop yield per acre was three times that of the entire rest of the state. The town had to protect their investment. 

They had tried traditional scarecrows. But these crows knew. They would come by the thousands, darken the sky, and ravage the corn until there was nothing left. 

But they wouldn't hurt the corn if an actual person was watching over it. Woodford had been hauled out of an empty railcar by the railroad cops when the train had stopped to load up the corn. He had fallen on hard times, as evidenced by his threadbare flannel shirt, torn, frayed overalls. The railroad cops had made him an offer: keep the crows away from the corn, or get locked up in jail. He chose the scarecrow job. 

The cops had treated him real well after that. They even gave him a huge breakfast in the diner. Coffee, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, bacon, sausage, and pancakes. Woodford hadn't eaten that well in months. He would have liked some scrambled eggs, but the server had said they didn't have any today. 

And now he was standing on the platform in the middle of a cornfield on a beautiful spring day. Best job he'd ever had, so far. He bent his head down to light a cigarette. 

A shadow fell over him, and he heard the sound of thousand wings. He looked up, and the crows were upon him. 

The corn would be safe for a few more days. 

THE END

The Skulking Terror That Came To Wash

She didn't feel like planning for the hunt, not tonight. The villagers would have what they always had: torches, blades, a few flintlock rifles, and sheer numbers. They knew she would come when the moon was full, and the forest that surrounded the modest village of Wash, practically swallowing it, would be shrouded in the steam fog from the lake; typical of the warm summer nights. It was perfect cover for her; because she was a sleek, silvery-grey cat. From a distance, she appeared to be a regular house cat, but for her size. She was as large as a panther, and much more powerful. Her kind were rare, and she had no name. Cats have no use for names. 

The villagers has tried to stay inside at first. Barricaded themselves behind locked doors and boarded up windows, as if against a natural disaster. And yet, when the morning came and the villagers undid the fortifications, one house would not awaken. All the doors would still be locked from the inside, all the windows still fastened shut, and no trace of the former inhabitants. 

Now, on the night of the full moon, the villagers gathered and went out into the woods to hunt for the creature that took entire families. 

She easily slipped past them and made her way into the village. 

She found the very first house that had been taken, months ago. The doors had been broken in by worried villagers, but had since been boarded up. The windows were also still shut and sealed. The houses were treated as cursed. 

She was able to get inside by going through the chimney. It was a tight fit. 

She investigated the entire house. The kitchen chairs were knocked over, the cupboards were open, and drawers were pulled out completely, their contents strewn across the floor. Almost looked like the work of bandits. But there was no blood, and no real damage. Nothing to indicate people had been battling for their lives. 

She moved on to the second house. Again, she entered through the chimney. It was much the same, except this house was from a more well-to-do family. Their portrait hung on the wall, a painting of the mother, father, and two young children. The children had one peculiarity; their eyes were different colors. The mother had green eyes, and the father had blue. The children each had one green eye and one blue eye. Heterochromia. And no sign of any of them. 

And so she searched the next house, and then the next, with no further insights. She knew she was missing something. All these houses, each left  undisturbed after each disappearance. Why, the neighbors hadn't even bothered to clean up the mess...

She dashed back to the first house and wriggled down the chimney. The house smelled...like a house. Not exactly a clean house, but not a dirty house. No hint of rotting food. She checked the trash cans. 

They were empty.

She raced through through the other houses, down the chimney and back out again. Again, they were all the same. Empty trash cans. 

She had a hunch. 

She ran into the forest, slipping past the prowling villagers with ease, and searched the forest. There, in a foggy glen, she found two little raccoons. They looked up at her, shivering in fear, each with one green eye and one blue eye. 

She licked their faces with her rough tongue, and soon the little kits clung to her. She ran deep into the forest and took them to her den. Then she ran back to search for the rest of the transformed villagers. She could not find them. Perhaps they had been scared away by the mob of villagers, or had been caught in the many traps that had been set out. 

The great silvery cat did not return to the village. She cared for the baby raccoons. They grew much larger than regular raccoons, and the three of them would go on to have many adventures. 

She still didn't have a name, because cats have no use for names, normally, but her kits needed to call her something, so she allowed it. They called her "Mom."

THE END

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I apologize for how rough this one is; you can absolutely tell where I just gave up trying to describe things mid-sentence, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. It's late, which is why there's no explanation given for the original source of the vamp-raccoon, if you will, but I assure you there is one. As the title suggests, I was kind of going for Lovecraft's The Lurking Fear and The Doom That Came To Sarnath but with... raccoons. And a cat detective. 

Right. Thanks for reading. This was fun. Kinda wish I didn't have a day job because I am going to be hurting tomorrow. Oh well. That's future Guillermo's problem, not mine. 

Goodnight!

The Library of Babel, Abridged

There are definitely pros and cons to being trapped inside this infinite library. I have always loved reading; in school I was constantly getting in trouble for reading. I'd hide mysteries in my textbooks, or use my foot to hold open the pages of a sci-fi novel on the floor under my desk. Most of my teachers gave up eventually and let me read. 

The con of this particular infinite library is that a lot of these books aren't very good. Which makes sense. We take for granted that are English classes are giving us "good" books to read (which they are, usually, they're just not taught in a very good way) and we don't really think about how all these great works of literature came out right alongside a bunch of crap that people had to wade through to find the best stuff. 

This is making me sound like a snob, which I'm not. I believe everyone has a thousand terrible stories in them, so we all need to hurry up and write as much as we can and get them all out. Then we can get to writing the good ones. 

The food situation is strange too. There are little tables set out that will sometimes have food and drink laid out on them. I've noticed they only appear after I've read an entire book. I'm a pretty fast reader, and the meals have enough food for an entire day and night.

There's little water fountains everywhere, but the water pressure is so low it comes out in only the tiniest arc, so small that I almost have to put my mouth on it. It's maddening. It's always cold though, so that's nice.

There is light, sunlight, that comes down through the shafts. Oh, I guess I should try to describe this place. It's kind of like a beehive, maybe? No, a honeycomb. The hexagonal walls are made up of shelves of books, and walkways with stairways and bannisters. The center part is an open shaft, and sunlight comes in from the top. This is also strange, because the sun would have to directly overhead to each shaft to shine all the way down with casting any shade. I've walked for miles in the same day and have never seen a shadow. 

There are nights. A slow dimming over the course of an hour, with no oranges or reds like in my memory of sunsets, and then total darkness. There is no moon, or at least there's no moonlight. 

It's really not bad in here. I do wish I had someone to talk to about these books. Also, since this library is infinite, statistically speaking there must be a book that explains how this place works, and maybe even tells how to get out of here. 

I do wish I had someone to talk to about escaping. I mean, someone I could see and who could talk back. 

Because I am talking to you now, I think. There's nothing to write with here in this infinite library. I've been composing this narrative by tearing out words from the other books. I only steal a couple from each. And I'm leaving this story, word by word, like a trail of breadcrumbs, so if you are reading this, then keep following it and you'll find me, eventually. 

I can't wait to meet you. 

THE END

Author's Note: With apologies to you, Jorge Luis Borges. But I'm pretty sure you'd be cool with it. 

Five Rules For Doppelgangers

First things first: The scenario I'm going to talk to you about is impossible, it will absolutely never happen, and it isn't something you will ever have to face even if you lived a hundred lives. 

But if it does happen, you can't say I didn't try to prepare you. 

Do you know what to do if you encounter a doppelganger? A separate, physical duplicate of yourself, or another person in your life? I'm not talking about a split personality, or a Jekyll and Hyde situation. I mean when the person you thought you knew is not themselves. They look like them, talk like them, act like them, but they're someone else.

But we'll get to that. 

First and foremost is the biggest problem: how can you know when you've encountered a doppelganger? Because you have to be sure before you act; otherwise you'll just look crazy. If you go around accusing people of not being who they are, you'll quickly find yourself locked up in mental institution, or worse. Making you seem like you're insane is the doppelganger's greatest defense. SO DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONVINCE ANYONE ELSE. If anyone else is going to realize the truth, they have to figure it out for themselves. For now, you have to consider yourself completely on your own. After all, there may be other doppelgangers that you haven't spotted yet. Here are five rules for dealing with doppelgangers:

RULE #1. No duplicate is ever perfect. They're not perfect because people aren't perfect. There will always be something that doesn't quite match up. Sometimes you'll get lucky and it will be something really obvious, like eating a food they always said they didn't like, or forgetting a story you told them the day before. For me, I don't like licorice, so if you see me eating it with any kind of enthusiasm, that probably isn't the real me. I mean, I will eat it if I'm really hungry but I don't actually enjoy it. I'm nice to most animals too, dogs and cats especially but pretty much all animals. I'm not afraid of bees, for instance, and if they land on me, I don't freak out. They almost never sting you unless you threaten them first. I don't like wasps though; I will crush them at every opportunity. Damn flying parasites. Lastly, I have a ravenous appetite, like I'm eating for two. If we're out and I'm not ordering seconds, or not even finishing my meals, that's a huge red flag. I'm telling you this now in case I'm replaced, to make it easier for you to catch on. And for you, if there are people that you love, you need to tell them at least three things that you would NEVER do. It's not the case that you can expect your doppelganger is just going to stumble on their own and do these things in front of you; you will probably have to orchestrate a scenario in which they have the opportunity to do the behavior. Like taking me out to a movie and then buying licorice from the concession stand. Stuff like that. 

Again, you have to be subtle. You do not want to look crazy, or worse, risk them finding out that you know.

Which brings us to:

RULE #2. Rescue the real one, if possible. There is always a chance that the doppelganger hasn't murdered the person they've replaced, and are holding them hostage. We don't need to get into all the different types of doppelgangers; that would REALLY make me sound crazy. The two camps are basically the ones who need to keep the original alive, and the ones who don't. Once you've reached near-certainty that you're dealing with a replacement, your next objective should be to learn where they are keeping the original. I'm not saying you will be able to get them back; if it's rogue scientists cloning everyone around you, the originals might be in a secure government facility somewhere that no civilian has a chance of getting into. If it's dark magic, you'll probably need to know the exact counterspell, which you won't. If it's aliens, the originals may not even be on the planet anymore. Still, it's something to be aware of. If I were being held somewhere I'd want you to at least consider rescuing me. 

Oh and you can't try to interrogate the doppelganger. They are expert liars. They already lie with their whole bodies; lying with words is even easier. If you capture them, even torture them, they'll just pretend to cry and bleed and beg and act like they have no idea what you're talking about. They'll probably tell you that YOU'RE crazy. 

They'll even decompose like real people. They're that good. 

RULE #3. Find out what they want. It's not always a grand scheme to take over the world. Some doppelgangers are just visiting. Some may have even made a deal with the original; some kind of bargain to swap lives for a while in some kind of search for personal growth or what have you. Once there was a guy who teleported his mind into his past self's mind, so not technically a doppelganger but he presented as one. Of course that's just what he said he was; I don't see how his future self could have sent himself back into his past self if his past self was destroyed shortly after I learned what he was. 

I'd say most of them are not trying to take over the world. Usually they're targeting you, specifically, to make you feel unloved, that you're not good enough, that everyone is laughing at you behind your back, and to take away anyone in your life who would truly understand and connect with you.

Usually. 

RULE #4. Sometimes you might think the doppelganger is you. This isn't what you wanted. This isn't who you thought you'd be. You wanted to be good person with family and friends and coworkers and pets. But you're not you. You look like you, you sound like you, but underneath you're someone else. You shouldn't be doing these terrible things. 

Don't be fooled. That's just the last of the doppelganger's tricks. If they fail to get everyone else to believe you're crazy, then they'll try to get ME to think I'm crazy. But it's not going to work. It'll never work. Because of the last rule. 

RULE #5: DO NOT LET THESE RULES FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS. It occurs to me that now that I've told you all this, I can't let you go. I can't risk the other doppelgangers learning about all my safeguards against their tricks. 

I am sorry. Now, where were we? Oh yes, I believe you were going to tell me where you hid the real you. Oh, you have no idea what I'm talking about? Of course, of course. I see you're not only a liar, you're also a really bad listener. 

Well that's unfortunate for you, doppelganger. Because I've gotten very, very, good at this. And if you don't tell me, then maybe the next one will. 

THE END

Author's Note: The best part of writing unreliable narrators is that I don't have to stress over the genuine compositional inconsistencies detracting from the narrative itself. Which is great because I am very sleepy. 

In seriousness, the narrator is supposed to start out sounding a little off, but harmless enough. I remember putting in the line in rule 1 where one of the examples is "forgetting a story you told them a day before" because...we've all done that someone, where they were telling you something but you were only half-listening and then they bring it up later and you maybe didn't remember every little detail. 

So yes, what I'm getting at is that in writing a story like this, it's fun to let an awkward phrasing stay awkward, and how an abrupt transition or tangent can add to the growing unease. This is one of the longest stories so far because it's honestly easier for me to write like this. 

Perhaps I should be concerned that my wheelhouse appears to be people who grow increasingly unhinged as they circle the drains of their own minds, but hey, everybody's gotta have a hobby. 

Oh, but I do really not like licorice. I will eat it though, if I were really hungry, or bored, or maybe trying to impress a lady. So if you do see me eating it, please don't jump to any conclusions. 

Unless it's black licorice. I forget that stuff still exists. If you see me eating that, kill it with fire because that is not me. 

Goodnight! 

Whir, Click!

The heavy brass manacle on his wrist had a flip clock, and the clock dictated his every moment. The split-face cards whirred and clicked, and the numbers gave their command. When he awoke on his cold hard, bamboo sleeping mat. When he ate his cold gruel. When he took a cold shower. When he was sent to work outside in the blazing desert. When he could take a sip of hot, tinny water from  his canteen. When he could suffer. When he could despair.

The memory of warmth brought him comfort when he was freezing. The memory of shivering through the cold nights cooled him when the relentless sun baked his skin. The memory of home kept him moving forward, even though he didn't know where he was going.

Whir, click! 

He dug his pick into the rock, questing out the metals.

Whir, click!

He loaded the ore into the heavy cart.

Whir, click! 

He strained against the cart and pushed it laboriously to the blast furnace.

Other prisoners, each with their own brass manacle, fed the coke, ore, and flux into the top of the furnace, while other prisoners pumped the bellows. Rows and rows of crucibles the size of wine barrels stood ready to pour their molten contents into depressions of wet, unbaked sand manacle-shaped molds. Yet another prisoner would fill his empty cart with the castoff slag and he would push it back down the long, winding ramp of the open-pit mine and begin again.

He did this for years. He didn't know how many, not exactly. The manacle clocks did not tell the date, only the time. There were seasons, of a sort. There was no vegetation to bloom and denote the coming of spring, no trees with leaves to change color and drop away. The days got shorter, the days got longer. There were bad days, and there were less-bad days.

His life was ebbing way, rolling down an ever-growing pit, in slow, concentric circles. 

Whir, click!

One morning, the other prisoners awoke to find him gone. Inside the blast furnace, they discovered his manacle clock. It lay in a warped, twisted lump on the ground. Fused within it, now a part of it, was a brass fist, clenched in pain and defiance; a lost-wax casting of a human hand.

THE END

Author's Note: Has it been a month yet? I think it has. Yet here we are. Also, I'm pretty sure lost-wax casting doesn't really work that way BUT let's try not to take things too literally today. Thank you. This is another blank-page story, which means I sat down to write something, was scrolling through my dozens of drafts (not real drafts, germs of ideas mostly) couldn't decide on one, and then this came out. 

You can't see it, because that's not how reading works, but there is a literal hour between the last whir-click and the last paragraph. That whir-click was the original ending. I hated it. I didn't want it. I sat and stared at it, loathing, seething, foaming at the mouth a little. And I hit my head against it until it became something different. Now to sleep, perchance to dream, oh and I think there's some leftover Halloween candy in the fridge. Aw, but I already brushed my teeth. Goodnight!