A Goodnight's Sleep

I was a light sleeper. I always had been. My anxiety made it worse. The story goes, every night, I would try to lie down for some sleep, battling my insomniac brain. When you suffer from insomnia it just means you were born to live in darkness. You were born to roam the desolate streets when everyone else is asleep. It’s great in theory but not so wonderful when living in a mediocre world where the majority of the population find their productivity during the daytime. Who even came up with those rules?

I would awake from anything. The slight creaking sound from a foot meeting the kitchen floor downstairs. The sound of leaves crunching under a shoe down the block. A cabinet shutting close in the bathroom or my parents starting the shower downstairs and water rustling through pipes inside the house. 

I hadn’t got a good night’s sleep in a long time. I woke up about four times a night and sometimes I couldn’t fall back asleep for 45 minutes. I looked up some remedies for being born to live in darkness, remedies that could help with pretending mediocrity but I only found the Deep Sleep Earplugs. That would have to do plus they had a five star rating on Amazon so there’s always that. 

The earplugs came in on a Friday and I couldn’t wait to test them out that evening. It was a normal Friday night for me. I curled up in bed and watched Nightmare on Elm Street, the first one. I took a sleep aid, a fitting thing to do given my current movie of choice. Deep down inside, I hoped that maybe I would meet this infamous Freddy. When I started to doze off, I grabbed my Deep Sleep Earplugs and shoved them as deep as they could go. All sounds muffled out. I don’t know when I fell asleep because I drifted away into such a deep sleep that I slept through the entire night without ever waking up. 

I woke up and looked at the time. I slept in until 11, something I also hadn’t done in a long time. Usually my parents would have called me down for breakfast. That was strange. I stood up, took out my earplugs, and stretched. I held the earplugs in my hand and headed downstairs to show my parents my awesome new find on Amazon. I opened my bedroom door and stood at the top of the staircase. I stopped to listen. The house was silent. Had my parents left? 

I walked down the stairs, still waking up from my long night’s rest. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The couch had been gutted and white cotton covered the floor. The flat screen had been pushed off the entertainment center and thrown onto the floor. 

Was I dreaming?

I walked into the kitchen and it was worse than the living room. The white kitchen tiles were smeared with streaks of blood. Every tile was covered. Someone had gone out of their way to smother each square. Footprints ran across the blood. They were small, dainty, and bare of shoes. Our kitchen knives were laid out on the center island, lined up neatly like a buffet. In the line up, there was one spot, the fourth from the right, that had a knife but it was missing. Through the kitchen, my parents’ bedroom door was open and I could see the bright sun rays that shone through their window shooting across their doorway. Someone had opened the curtains to their room. I walked toward the doorway and could still only see the brightly lit entrance from the natural sunlight from that Saturday morning.

I peered inside and just like the couches, my parents had been gutted. Blood was everywhere. The bed sheets were so soaked it looked like someone dipped them in a swimming pool of blood and put them back in the room. My dad was laid out on the floor at the end of the bed and my mother was on the bed. 

I stared down at my hand and opened my fist, my Deep Sleep Earplugs lay in my palm. I had slept through the brutal murder of my parents and all I could think was, damn these earplugs are great and at least I finally got a good night’s sleep. 

Hope you enjoyed and thanks for tuning in,
Sterp