Background Check #3

It was three in the morning and she couldn't sleep. Drip! Drip! Drip! The sink sounded. The water dropped, it came to her mind, from the tap coz it couldn't get itself to squeeze out of her eyes. They were red from want of sleep. Her ears were red and smarting from listening too much. She felt her face and it was flushed. The bed-linen was wet, there was an alien wet patch that had snuck under her covers and persisted like an insolent cat on her bed. If she listened hard enough, she could hear it snoring.

She explored the length of her body. From her face to her hands. They seemed frail, even to her. Then to her chest, she was skinny and her ribs, she felt, would crumble under the weight of her palms. But she was numb. Down, Down, Down to her waist, past the pelvis to her thighs where something unearthly oozed and smeared the sheets. But she dare not pull her knees apart. They shook. Like when the doctor tapped them with a rubber mallet to check her reflexes last summer. But they hurt a thousand times more. Feet, cold and clammy, her toes wiggled searching for the bedpost to hold on to. But will had fled, left her body like the voice behind her clenched teeth. Her cries were an amorphous, hoarse exhalation of air drowned by the metallic ring of water in the sink. Drip! Drip! Drip!

Over the years, she had mentally tuned herself to muffle down the heavy snoring that emanated from the room down the hall. But today, it was louder than ever. It brought to life snippets she was trying to blank out, with ever increasing futility. The heavy patter of bare footfall on a wooden floor. The shrieking heartbreak of a wooden door pushed reluctantly and carefully open. The stench of sweat on a hairy hand brought powerfully over her face, the whispered assurances and the silent din of claustrophobia doing its work. And the snoring in the adjoining room after.

Helplessly, she clutched at the covers. They reeked of sweat, her own intermingled with the musty odour of repulsion. With a herculean effort, she heaved the covers off of her and stared. Red smeared black in the dark spread like lava on her. She unclenched her teeth. Pain, now crushing her insensate presence of being shot through her legs, welling up and searing through her till she found her voice and screamed.

She screamed till sunlight splashed her closed eyes. She screamed till she no longer cared if the sirens were near. She screamed till she no longer cared whom the waning sirens carried away. She screamed till the affairs of the night were replaced by daffodils and unicorns.

She was six when Lemon Grass met insomnia. She could never remember why.