just me then
by J. F. Gleeson

Have you ever had one of those nights where you’ve just wrapped up playing luigi’s mansion for the night and you’ve sat on the toilet reading about quantum field theory for thirty minutes and when you’re brushing your teeth you hear your mother cough in her bedroom which she does sometimes and you hear a small clunk noise that is the noise the pipes for the taps make but you cannot be one thousand per cent certain that the noise was not your mother falling out of bed just after coughing and it would be odd to go and ask if she’s all right at this time so you stand just inside your bedroom door with the light on waiting to hear a cough again so that you will know all is clear and when it does not come you go into the bathroom loudly and bang the door and latch and taps and flush in selfish hopes of waking her so that you will know she has not fallen out of bed and the cough still has not come so you lie in bed not sleeping looking up people on your phone from years ago to check if they are doing well so that you can feel bad about yourself and the mess of clothes you have no energy to clear and by now it is half past five in the morning and the muted television is showing how wooden brooms are fitted together in a factory and blue light has blasted your eyes and you can hear a couple birds and the small red light of the construction crane is far through the trees and blinds and you think at least tomorrow i can order this all and type it and send it to a website and in the midst of this last formulation having forgotten all about it there comes finally another cough and you can sleep now and nobody has fallen out of bed, for now, touch wood, cross fingers, but you have fallen quite far out of reality, existence, actual being

J. F. Gleeson lives in England. His work has appeared, or is soon to appear, in Maudlin House, Ligeia, Rejection Letters, Overheard, Goat’s Milk, Sublunary Review, the Bear Creek Gazette, The Daily Drunk, Neuro Logical, Bullshit Lit, Dream Journal, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Weird Horror. He has a website: deadlostbeaches.blog.

Image by Pexels at Pixabay.