John Cannot Sleep
[Writing Prompt] You have insomnia and haven’t slept for over a week. As a result of your sleeplessness you somehow develop strange powers.
Sleep never came easy to John.
As a baby he would cry for days at a stretch. His parents could find nothing wrong with him. The doctors said it was colic, but had no idea why it was happening. Baby John just wouldn’t sleep.
As
Puberty was where it all went down the drain. Sleep and John became fiery paramours, relishing eachothers company, sometimes for 24 hours at a stretch, only to fight and part ways, not to speak for days at a time.
When John went more than four days without sleep, which happened once a month at least, he would begin to write. Long, loping journal entries, encompassing every conceivable topic. He wrote stories and critiques, and – on especially long benders of awakedness – sometimes he wrote screeds. Genuine, senseless polemics on whatever topic his sleep-deprived mind happened to fixate on.
Eventually, sleep would find John again, taking him in the most unexpected places – the middle of a supermarket, mid-conversation with a friend, or just standing up and walking around the apartment.
Recently, at 18, John was on his longest stretch of insomnia yet. John looked up from his frenzied journaling, his eyes like two maraschino cherries sunk into a clay face.
“Mom.” John’s voice surprised himself and he twitched. The twitch felt like an electric jolt through his spine, a pure instinctual response. “Water.” He called out again, but no answer.
John had not slept for three weeks. His parents left him briefly, just to go to the supermarket. The windows were all locked, as was the front door with an interior/exterior key John did not possess a copy of.
Time means less to the sleepless. John sat and waited for an answer, chewing his fingertips ragged and sucking up bits of blood. He could not have said whether 5 seconds or 5 hours had passed, but no answer came.
An idea crawled into John’s addled mind, to get up and get water himself. He allowed the notion to ripen, let it linger on the edge of action, until, at last, a decision was made.
John stood at the kitchen sink, a glass of water in his hands.
He had no memory of getting up and coming to the kitchen, picking out a glass and filling it with water. One moment he was in his room, ruminating on the kernel of an idea to get water, the next he was here, water in hand.
“Impossible,” John muttered to no one. He resolved to test an unlikely hypothesis. He brought to mind the image of his room. I will go there now he thought, closing his pained eyes and, when he opened them again, lo, he was on his bed again.
John let out an excited yelp. What power had he uncovered? The implications were astounding. Feverishly, he wrote in his journal at length and then did more tests. Snap, into the living room. Snap, into the bathroom. Snap, into the bedroom again.
It was real. Some fluke of human physiology brought on, John reasoned, by the extreme psychic pressure of his sleeplessness. He had walked the
But why restrain himself to the apartment then? This power was too great to waste on trivialities. John could change the world with this new found potential. What were the limits?
He envisioned the hallway. The apartment door, he knew, was locked. It was always locked. Could he, by sheer force of psychic will, circumvent that lock?
The hallway. John focused on the hallway until the focus hurt. He closed his ripened eyes and when he opened them – there was the cheap carpet, the poor lighting. He had done it. He was in the hallway.
“Yes!” John loosed an ecstatic yell! His power was real! It was more than he could ever have dreamed. He closed his eyes and flitted back, easily and without strain, to his bedroom, where he augmented his journal entry, discussing one final test. He would teleport to Central Park, the Mind Tree, and back again. When he did this thing, he would know for certain, and then John would make greater plans, and see the world, one teleportation at a time.
John’s father arrived home from the supermarket carrying several bags of food. He struggled to get at his keys as he approached the apartment door, only to drop everything and gape in
The lock was smashed, the whole door
Fear welling up, John’s stepped over the fallen door, into the apartment. On the floor, among shards of wood and chips of paint was a dented hammer and bent
“John!” He called into the apartment. The place was chaos. Water all over the floor, broken glass and fallen lamps. The bookshelf in the living room had toppled over. It looked like a burglary like
“John!”
John’s father ran to John’s bedroom. The door was shut, open only a crack. With trepidation, John’s father reached out his hand to push it open and felt a cold breeze coming from inside the room. He said John’s name again, although his heart had already sunk.
John was not there. On his bed, the pages of John’s journal flapped back and forth in the stiff wind from the shattered window. The words on the pages flew by. So much gibberish, just a collection of meaningless scribbles, hardly even discernible as a written language.
John’s father walked toward the window and noted that a couple of the shards near the bottom of the frame were covered in smatterings of blood.
He knew he needed to look out the window, and knew also what he would find there, 34 stories below. But he could not make himself do it.
Instead, he sat on John’s empty bed in
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