Sleep
By Liam Lawrence


3:20 A.M. Distant memories plague, locusts on the wind, never ending beyond a point of no other change or possibility besides the ones that seem implemented into the unconscious.

A three year old baby girl, blond, trapped in a well that looks more like a sewer pipe and the harsh camera lights cheapen the rescue; a desire for sewer drains and so on to be as nice as the ones in New York, because living down there would be quaint; a woman giving birth to a sludge-covered demon child and mom not bothering to change channels and the age is three, also, maybe even four.

Memories so vague, yet the visual so vivid, and it allows for potential assumption that the experience had occurred just moments ago, and these memories become haunting revelations that only seem to exist as a reminder of a life before now, an existence otherwise unimagined.

Where has all the time gone?

A teenage girl’s life taken by two boys, who only treated her as a friend to aide their own morbid curiosity, which led to them shooting or stabbing or beating her to death, leaving her body in a field and going to eat at a twenty-four hour diner that serves breakfast day and night – which can never be visited again – and returning later to bury her remains. The field off a back road, and everyone who takes it voicing their remorse with an air of disgust for themselves, that it was almost six days later before her body was discovered, and the consensus was that no one could believe the number of times that road was traveled and in turn having passed her unintended burial site with no knowledge or regard whatsoever - a layer of filth that can never be washed away.

Phone vibrates.

Red eye blinks.

Unrecognizable number.

Probably deleted at some point.

Message reads “Sissy”, with an emoticon wink face.

Disregard.

Do not care.

At all.

Roll over, disenchanted, neck strained and stomach swollen.

Sleep.


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I am a graduate of Texas Tech University, with a degree in Creative Writing. I call Texas home (for now).