a goat type person · @Chiligoat
31st May 2014 from TwitLonger
GRAVE ROBBER'S CURSE // A @ChuckWendig FLASH FICTION CHALLENGE. // http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/05/30/flash-fiction-challenge-random-title/
My mother has tinnitus. What this means is that I had what the doctors would call a "sensitivity", meaning I could easily get it too and like a tit, when I was fourteen, I went to a concert and I blew my eardrums right out. Now I have tinnitus. It's gotten worse with age. It started as a faint beep, like the flat-line you would hear on a hospital show, maybe. Now it's like whistles and bells. It rings loud over traffic and in the silence.. in the silence it's an abyss into which the mind plummets helplessly. I don't sleep much.
I met John at a support group for insomniacs. He had it bad. I only went a few times because honestly, it was less a support group and more a place for people to circle-jerk each other's misery and talk about smoking weed to be able to calm their lives, but I liked John. He kept his mouth shut. When I decided to stop coming to the group we exchanged numbers, and then we hung out a couple of times. He didn't say much then either. We would rest without sleeping in each other's company, watching the stars, or porn, and sometimes we would even cook pasta. We ate it without sauce.
One time, I went with John to a party. It was a bad party, we didn't have fun, but he brought a girl with him home because she offered to drive us to his place in her dinky old car. She was as dinky as her car, all knees and elbows and bone, but she was pretty, in that dead person kind of way. She told me she'd seen us both at the support group for insomniacs, and I believed her. She looked the part.
I sat on the porch while they fucked, and I looked at the stars, and my mind could rest from the abyssal howling of my tinnitus in their soft grunts and the springs of John's old mattress.
When the girl came out to sit next to me on the porch she was wrapped in this large sheet with a washed-out orange colour, some old bohemian pattern, and she said it was the nicest thing she'd ever seen, and was it all right if she lit a smoke out here? I told her yes, and that she should bring the sheet with her and sew a dress out of it, because it was already soft with wear and looked quite sweet on her. I told her I could help her, if she wanted to. My mother had taught me how to sew. I told her I loved the ring she wore. She told me it was made from her great-grandmother's bones and I told her it was very fetching.
The girl told me she was like John, that she couldn't sleep. I asked her why, and she told me that it was because of the ring. I told her that was a pretty funny thing to keep a person awake. I have never seen a person so grim before as when she looked at me then, and slipped the ring on my finger. In my ears, the alarum of my tinnitus was blotted out by a great-grandmother's tuneless hum, and it was the most soothing sound you could ever imagine when your head has been filled with vacant scream of an abyss for almost all your adult life. I asked her why? Why would this keep a sane person up at night, but she just looked at me. I told her I would give her anything if she gave me the ring to keep, anything at all. Wouldn't she please?
She whispered, she hadn't slept a good night's sleep since her mother gave the ring to her. A mother's mother's finger bone, stolen from her grave as a token of respect, had brought more than just a memory along and she said that she wasn't certain that she was ready to cancer another person with it.
I had laughed myself into tears when John came stumbling out with his hair on end wearing just his skivvies. I laughed when I put my arms around the girl's scrawny, bony shoulders and I laughed when I told him that I would cure his new girlfriend of her insomnia, and that she would cure me. John went inside and he came back with a pen knife and he stabbed me right in the knee. He screamed at me with eyes blown wide and blunt from lack of sleep that if anybody deserved to be cured, it was him, and I could just shut up, and she could just shut up, and he demanded that we cured him.
I absolutely lost my shit. I screamed like a gutted pig and the girl screamed so loud her voice turned raw and strained, and eventually John began to screaming as well. Uncertain at first. He ran back into the house and slammed the door and it was the last time I saw even the back of him. I stood there and the pen knife sat lodged in my knee-cap.
Wrapped in her sheet, the girl took me to the hospital in her dinky little car. I think that I passed out in the waiting room. I hope that she made a dress out of that sheet, when she got home. It was beautiful against her sallow skin, pale and soft like the way her downy arm had brushed mine there on the porch, smoking her cigarette. I still wear he finger-bone ring and in my mind drones her great-grandmother: a voice grating hollow and insistent over the piercing scream of my tinnitus. I will probably insist on being buried with it, when it's my time to go. Maybe by then it won't matter, every night now I sleep like the dead.