Forgetful Sleeper

There’s a girl who dreams and dreams and dreams but when she wakes her dreams are nothing but black voids and streaks of colors in her vision. She can’t remember what she looked like or who she saw but she can feel the strands of her hair between her fingers and the taste of the blood on her tongue. Her skin feels raw from the way she scratched at it while she slept but she can’t recall why it itched and burned so violently and so viciously. She rubs at her oh-so-tired eyes and blinks three times to clear her sleep-blurred vision while wondering when was the last time I remembered my dreams? because it’s been months now and the blackhole dreamworld continues to swallow her nightly and spit her back out come morning. She was falling, falling, falling but now she sits up in bed with the nightmare spiders clinging to the webs of her sleep-addled mind. And as she tears at red gooseflesh on her chilled arms she thinks maybe this is for the best because even if she can’t remember the way she ran from bloody and faceless beasts or when she huddled over her brother’s broken and battered form she can still feel the adrenaline and night-terrors sticking to her bones like tree sap.

By Katie Mabry