Crimson Stains on Cotton White Sheets

She couldn’t remember how to do it. How to close her eyes.

She couldn’t tell when, exactly, sleeping had become – like eating healthy homemade meals, going to the gym, or taking a walk in the park – a privilege. And also, she had decided, it was extremely unnecessary. Human beings are in continual evolution, isn’t it so? So. They must eventually evolve to the point of not needing sleep. Sleeping is the biggest scam of nature, invented in a time when men couldn’t leave their caves at night because – fuck that, imagine having to deal with fucking bears or whatever in the dark and with no proper weapon? – and – God, what were they supposed to do all night up with no TV. Or phones. Or books. Or the new season of Shark Tank to binge in a sitting. She had googled it at some point. How much time do human beings spend sleeping in a lifetime. 9,125 days. Time is a precious thing. Minimum wage is £7.49 an hour. We basically throw away £68,346.25 just by lying on a piece of furniture every night. Anyway. She had a deadline, that was the point.

You just need to keep your brain busy – that’s what she found out – and it might eventually forget ever needing to sleep at all. She sat in the dark, only one AirPod on, blasting her study playlist. The iPad on the left corner of her desk was playing her favourite true-crime podcast – “her father-in-law had rented an apartment in Lung Mei Tsuen and turned it into a splatter-proof body disposal workshop where parts of Choi’s corpse were later found in pots of soup”– and a half empty half cold half undercooked pot of noodles was staring back at her from the other corner, as if begging her to finish it, but she forgot she was hungry and anyway she couldn’t type and eat at the same time, could she.

So. Keeping busy. Finishing the essay. Ignoring the burning eyes from the screen light of her laptop (she didn’t have time to find the blue-light-blocking glasses she got off Amazon just a week ago that were probably hidden under the monstrous hill of clothes at the back of her room) and just keep writing. Abbi Choi was killed for her money. Write. In the flat they found meat grinders, chainsaws, long raincoats, gloves and masks. Write. She was 28 years old. The alarm on her phone went off, startling her (why was she so on the edge? How long until her anti-anxiety drops started working?). Another way she found to keep awake was to take tactical breaks. Twenty-five minutes of uninterrupted work. Ten of break. She looked into her coffee mug – empty, like the three cans of Monster on the floor next to her. Maybe she needed a power-nap. Six minutes, max. To stop the burning of her eyes. The responsibility of human evolution wasn’t in her hands anyway.

The bed was cold. Stiff as stone. The room was too dark for her to see the ceiling and she thought maybe she should get those sticky fluorescent stars that you put on the walls and that shine at night. Her father used to tell her tales of when he was young and his father would take him camping in the Alps to see the stars. She never went camping, hated the idea of it. She didn’t like the bugs, the dirt or the French. So camping wasn’t ideal. She shut her eyes, rolling over in bed. All that thinking of Alps and French and stars made her brain bounce. The timer on the nightstand was already coming up to two minutes. Only four of nap left. She could feel the tips of her fingers tremble against the white cotton sheets. Three minutes. She struggled to keep her eyes closed. Weird. Really weird. Usually, her body shut down the exact moment it touched the mattress. She reached for her phone. The bright light of the screen illuminated her face. She started her playlist again. Classical music. She laid in the dark listening to the andante rhythm of the notes on the piano. The phone was new, the latest model of one of those cheap but amazing quality Asian brands. And it really was good. The sound resolution was astonishing. She could picture the keys of the piano being pressed. The fingers pressing them. A man’s fingers. Thick, curated cuticles, hairy knuckles. Attached to strong arms, in a tuxedo. Bare forearms, white rolled-up shirt. Big biceps. He was in the room with her, sat in front of the long-tailed piano in the corner. The music stopped, and he stood up, and he laid on top of her, on the bed, and his thick, hairy fingers played her skin like keys of a piano, and she screamed but instead of moans it was notes. She was touch starved. She was starving, full stop.

Her stomach rumbled. In the dark, she looked over at the noodles on the desk. Fuck no. One minute left on the timer. No nap, then. She stood up, annoyed. Grabbed the empty crusty mug and left the room, descended the three floors of stairs to the kitchen on her tiptoes. Her housemates were sleeping. She felt a rush of jealousy, for a moment, but she swallowed it as she pressed the switch on the wall of the kitchen. Bright neon lights blinded her, for a moment. Her head started bumping, and she downed a pill of paracetamol with the last sip of Coke someone left on the counter. Coffee. She needed more coffee. Her hands went into auto-pilot mode, opening the cupboards, grabbing a clean mug, the bag of Starbucks’ branded ground coffee, putting it into the coffee machine, warming up the milk, pouring coffee, adding the –

No sugar. She stared into the empty jar next to the machine. That was a problem. No sugar meant no coffee, unfortunately. But no coffee meant not being able to do work, so. Unless. The convenience store at the end of the street was probably open. It would have taken her less than ten minutes. Yeah, she decided she could afford that.

She put the mug back on the counter, but her brain must have been more fucked up than she thought because, somehow, she missed it. The mug fell on the floor, and the brownish liquid flew everywhere. On the floor, and on the cupboards, and on her legs, and –

It bounced.

The mug rebounded against the floor as if it was made of rubber, jumping back up and landing perfectly on the counter, there, exactly where she had meant to put it.

What. The. Fuck.

Since when did ceramic bounce? She took it, hesitantly, and started questioning, for a moment, whether that was just a dream. I mean. She had tried to fall asleep. Maybe she did. Maybe she just started dreaming of not being able to sleep. Then why was she still there? Wasn’t that how dreams worked? Like. You realise you’re sleeping and that’s when you wake up. Or maybe it was a… what are they called… like, a sleep paralysis, or something?

So she did the most reasonable thing anyone would have done.

She threw the mug on the floor.

Thousands of minuscule, sharp pieces of ceramic flew around the kitchen. She must have used more strength than she intended, because when some of them reached her legs they penetrated her skin, deeply, and she was left bleeding, incredulous. And the pain was real. So, fucking, real. Not a dream. Fucking fantastic. She was just going insane, apparently. And that’s why she needed sugar for her coffee.

The cold breeze of the night helped with the migraine. Her mind was so all over the place that she had left her phone at home, so she couldn’t say what time it was. It was hard to tell. The sky was clearly dark-ish on the other side of the foggy layer that separated her from the stars, but the neon signs of the stores were too bright, lighting up the heavens like the ceiling of a nightclub. It could have been anytime between midnight and five AM. She rushed down the street. Her shoes squeaked at every step she took, and that made her slow down. She looked at her feet. Took a step. Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. Fuck me had they always been that loud? She rarely walked without headphones on – gotta make those Audible credits worth their price you know – and was that what everyone heard when she was around? So annoying, God. Her head started bumping again. She had to stop, just for a second.

She never realised how loud the city was. A dizzying cacophony of honking, and music from a party somewhere, and yelling, and the wind, and the ding ding ding ding from the stoplight, and the clang clang clang clang from the Casino behind her, and the tip tip tip tip of the rain – when did it start raining? – and a “this is not real!” shouted in the street.

Wait.

She crossed towards the man shouting on the other side of the crossroad. He smelled like beer and naphthalene and piss. He looked like he hadn’t showered in years. He was fat, with a fat nose and a fat beard and had a fat orange cat under his arm. What the fuck. He looked at her and smiled.

“This is not real. You know that, right?” he repeated, without shouting, to her ears only.

She asked what he meant. But he had a crazy glimpse in his eyes. He laughed in her face, dropping the cat, which didn’t move, and she wondered if it was alive. Then the man demanded she’d give him her purse. She didn’t bring one. Her wallet then. She didn’t take that either. Phone? Nah, sorry mate. He picked up the unmoving cat and left, quietly, disappearing into a dark alley.

The guy behind the counter in the convenience store pointed out that her shins were bleeding. Oh. She looked down at her legs and her white socks and brand-new tennis shoes were dyed in crimson and how do you even wash blood off white? When she had gotten her period for the first time her mum had made her throw away the white cotton sheets of her bed because there was no way to clean them. Since then, she had been throwing away all the pairs of panties she had ruined with blood. Cheap white ones. Expensive lacey ones. She wondered how many salvageable pairs of underwear she had wasted just because her mother didn’t want to touch her blood. She picked up the stain remover from the shelf and put it on the counter next to the bag of sugar. Cash or card, asked the man. Neither. She had neither. She forgot the only fundamental necessity to buy sugar. It’s okay, you get it now and pay tomorrow, the guy said. And strangely that was the most surreal thing that had happened that night. But she didn’t say no. She picked up her things and left.

The street was louder than before. The squeak, and the ding, and the clang, and the tip, and the “this is not real” and a bang. And a second bang. She turned, the squeaking stopped, and a man was lying on the stiff cold pavement on the other side of the road in a pool of blood. His white cotton shirt was turning crimson. She wanted to go and ask him if he thought stain remover could wash blood off white but he wasn’t moving. The fat man who smelled like naphthalene stole the wallet from his pocket and threw it to the fat orange cat who caught it in his mouth and ran away. The guy laid there, unmoving, even after the cat and his man had disappeared in the night.

Oh. Oh.

It was a dream! She was so fucking stupid. The insomnia, and the mug, and the naphthalene guy and the convenience shop and the cat. She was dreaming. Of course she was dreaming. A sleep paralysis, clearly. She should have realised before. She must have fallen asleep. Had it been ten minutes, yet? Why wasn’t the alarm going off? Was she so deep into that delirious nightmare as to not hear the fucking alarm? That was a problem. How long had she been sleeping. She couldn’t waste any more time. She had to find a way to wake herself up. But how? How do you interrupt a sleep paralysis? The blood on her legs had already dried out at that point. She looked up at the Casino – clang clang clang – and she got in. The bouncer didn’t ask for her ID or question the blood – a dream! A fucking dream! – and she headed right away to the elevators. The rooftop of the Casino was windy, and dark, and quiet. The layer of kaleidoscopic fog separated her from the street and she couldn’t tell how far it was and how tall she was but it must have been fucking high because she could see the stars. For the first time in her life. Not plasticky neon spiky pentagons on a wall. Weak, white dots on a pitch-black canvas and she had to look away because the darkness and the silence made her claustrophobic.

She dropped the sugar and the stain remover and hopped on top of the fence. The points of her crimson-stained shoes went over the edge. She breathed deeply. Just a dream. The threat of the black starred sky behind her pushed her. She jumped. She felt her body falling. Closed her eyes. The icy wind scratched her face and it felt so painfully real. Wake up. A glimpse of neon signs outside her eyelids. Those sounds. Ding. Clang. Tip. This is not real. The seconds went by, slowly, and she begged her brain to wake up once again.

But she couldn’t remember how to do it. How to open her eyes.