“In” by Allen Forrest, oil on canvas

Tina listened to the hostess list the potential side effects of the gong bath: anxiety, nausea, flushing, feelings of cold. “Muscle paralysis,” said the woman, folding the pinky and fourth finger of her right hand spasmodically to her palm. She was lit in an orange glow, the votive candles at her feet reflecting off the gong and casting the yoga studio and its forty or fifty occupants in a soft coat of gold. “Just a mild paralysis,” she continued and slipped off her shoes, settling cross-legged next to the gong in front of a half circle of singing bowls. “But these things aren’t certain to happen,” she assured them.

Except Tina was pretty certain they would happen to her. She immediately regretted not wearing socks, a chill across both feet already blooming in soft little bites. The woman continued to talk, introducing herself as Shoshanna, and her silent, bearded husband, as Richie. They were percussionists trained in reiki, all kinds of yoga, massage and voice. Shoshanna mentioned something about Tibet, but Tina zoned out for a second, transfixed on the giant gong, and the way the candlelight danced across its five-foot diameter, turning the hammered metal into a golden, rippling sea. It was tuned to the Cosmic Octave, the frequency of the earth’s rotation around the sun, and its vibrations were supposed to be healing. After seeing the event advertised outside the yoga studio near her work, Tina had mentioned the sound bath offhand to her husband over dinner the week before. “You should do it,” he said, his mouth still full of her pasta carbonara. Tina laughed, knowing how embarrassed she and her husband felt for the people who believed in those things. It was silly, she thought and looked at her husband, for a sign that he was joking. After a minute of silence he placed his silverware across his half finished plate, walked to the computer in the living room and registered her for the event online.

The room would have to warm up with all these people and candles, Tina thought, rubbing her icy feet together, eying everyone else kneeling on their mats, looking temperately excited and expectant. She admired this about the new-agey yogi types, all so eager and calm about being vulnerable. She wanted to be more like them. She did. She did or she wouldn’t be here.

Shoshanna instructed them to lie on their mats, heads towards the gong. She asked them to close their eyes and choose an intention, one word or idea for them to focus their energy on. Acceptance, Tina thought immediately and she felt for a second that coming to the bath was the right decision. For two months now her husband had been trying to get her to accept that “these things just happen”. Which she knew. She did. It happened all the time. But still, everything just happens all the time to everyone until it happens to you. And then it doesn’t just happen all the time, it happens once and that once is real and haunting and infects you not once, but all the time.

“Illumination,” said Shoshanna, giving intention suggestions for the less prepared people in the room. Either Shoshanna or Richie started playing the singing bowls, rounds of dings like small bells, their notes expanding and floating over Tina’s head like a silk scarf. Even as one thread of the song went silent, it didn’t seem to Tina to die out, it seemed to simply drift away, en route to another ear, another room of supine yuppies that needed their toxins nudged from their blood. This gave her momentary comfort until another chill ran through her. “Peace,” whispered Shoshanna and the rolling notes of the singing bowls meshed with the sweet pitch of her voice and resonated right through Tina, her jaw and calf muscles relaxing, reminding her to try to relax the rest of her body. Tina stretched her legs and brought her shoulder blades together towards the center of the mat so that her neck tilted slightly upward. “Love.” Too obvious, thought Tina, tension releasing from the skin of her forehead. “Hope,” said Shoshanna and Tina dismissed this as a rather audacious suggestion. The room was getting warmer and the woman next to Tina audibly exhaled.   Finally Tina relaxed her fingers and let them take their natural furl. “Clarity,” said Shoshanna and Tina didn’t know why but the word sounded so incredibly beautiful in that moment. Clarity, Tina thought, Clarity. It sounded so much bigger than her, but maybe not impossible to get. And like that, she switched her intention.

“One more thing,” said Shoshanna. “The flash near the end. It’s going to be loud.”

The surge of the singing bowls swelled and then a drumbeat began behind it. A bead of sweat formed at Tina’s temple. “Now imagine a light in your heart,” said Shoshanna. “A little light in your heart.” And there it was. It surprised Tina that she found it so quickly—a tiny circle of yellow floating in that dark pump in her chest. Oh there you are, Tina thought, delighted. The light didn’t radiate—it looked more like a hole leading outwards, a pin-prick pathway to a field of light, and it undulated in the waves of her now drumbeat paced heart. Then Tina became concerned. So easily had she found this light that she was afraid it had always been there and she had been overlooking it. She felt bad about how that tended to happen to things, small things. Like her husband not caring enough about their baby just because it had been only the size of a kiwi fruit.

Tina named the light Dierdre, Deedee for short.

The gong started as a slow rolling. Each of the sounds—the singing bowls, the drum beat, and the gong—seemed to orbit one another, each one asserting itself individually and then being pulled into the others’ gravity. Tina thought about the sun even though it was dark now. She imagined the space between the earth and the sun, the space the cosmic octave was resonating through at this very moment and it looked like such a short distance from her perspective, especially as the vibrations of it pulsed through her own blood. She imagined herself floating in that black space, just as Deedee floated in her own heart. Tina felt the freeze of the darkness and the warm warm warmth of the sun, and the sound surrounded her like twinkling stardust and her breathing began to quicken. Did she feel nauseous? A bit. Dizzy was more like it. She might be sick. She might definitely be sick. But she didn’t want to make a scene. She didn’t want attention, any attention. Instead she focused on Deedee in the toxin-tainted blackness of her heart. Deedee flickered happily, like the dance of a bright star, and Tina’s fatigue overtook her. As Tina fell asleep, she felt at peace drifting through the dark dark universe.

Tina’s attention returned to the room when the paralysis started. Her right pinky and forth finger twitched towards her palm and her smallest toes curled. The gong sound was swirling, like an agitated sea, and it felt like Tina’s lungs were shrinking. She couldn’t hear her breath in the gong’s great roar. Tina found Deedee again, having lost her in her short sleep and in the panic of her paralysis. Her fingers and toes still cramped and immobile, Tina willed them to move, jerking her arm accidentally onto her neighbor’s. She recoiled quickly and apologized wordlessly in her head. The muscles unknotted and she placed her arm carefully back on the ground, opening her eyes to make sure she didn’t again graze the woman next to her. Though it was odd, wasn’t it? That they were all pulsing at the octave of the universe, contributors to one giant cosmic current, and no one was even touching.

She felt a twinge of guilt. “We’re wasting body,” her husband had said to her the night before. She had curled away from his erection that had been poking insistently against the small of her back as they spooned. “We have to do it sometime,” he had said, rolling away from her and leaving his arm heavy on the comforter between them. “It’s too soon,” Tina had said. “Doctor Feinburg said it’s not too soon.” “Too soon,” she had said again, thinking that her husband could not possibly understand that it was always too soon to learn that she might be a graveyard. After a few minutes, he rolled towards her once more. “We could use a condom,” he said, tracing the arc of her earlobe. Tina pretended to have fallen asleep; she was busy listening to a ghost.

The gong’s cries intensified even more. This must be the flash, Tina thought. It was loud. It was really fucking loud and it would have been of no use to cover her ears. It was like a plane flying right overhead but made of no metal, just light. Tina looked inward to Deedee who was starting to expand, now the size of a quarter and quivering. Tina closed her eyes again to watch her grow. Deedee was bright. She was bright. She was getting too bright, too big, and had now swallowed Tina’s heart whole and Tina had to turn away. She pictured herself again in orbit, another moon between earth and sun, and she considered the sun, considered its distance and its too-loud song, the gong now blaring.

Tina felt Deedee tug at her, but Tina wouldn’t look. She gasped for breath and looked out into the galaxy, at the tiny lights twinkling far away. She loved the stars, the company of their light. She thought about what she knew of them: that they were all dead. She wanted to watch their calm, sad glimmer a little longer, but the sun bore down and Deedee’s yellow light pleaded and Tina felt the gong prodding at her bloods’ toxins’ firm grip. Tina’s cells were rattling at the frequency of the universe and she unhinged. Everything unhinged, the earth unhinging and hurtling towards the sun. Tina wanted to scream, jump up from her mat and knock over the gong that was shrieking. But she didn’t. She took one long breath, recalled her intention, and then let in all that light.

Kristin Walters is a yoga and writing instructor in Champaign-Urbana. She will finish her MFA from the University of Illinois in May 2016. Her guilty pleasures are watching movie trailers, eating all the strawberries and wearing flip-flops in the rain. She is learning and teaching how to live a mindful, memorable and expressive life.

“Seattle Post Alley” by Allen Forrest, Oil on canvas

It was almost the New Millennium and he couldn’t sleep. The hospital room wasn’t dark, and the soft blips of the various monitors were punctuated irregularly by voices, doors closing, objects dropping. Considering the places in which he’d slept, he found this amusing.

Out of long practice, he passed the time identifying hallway noises and falling objects by sound, as he had been trained. How many footsteps, how fast, how frightened or angry, how far had they traveled. For objects: Focus on that which was not obvious. Metal or plastic was easy enough. Size, shape; density, a little harder. Full or empty. One or more. He could tell a lot from a single crash.

He was a soldier—with a battlefield commission, as his mother had bragged so many years ago. He didn’t tell her that such things meant he was not quite as good as the other kind.

War justifies the existence of the military, but wars (on the whole) do not last long enough to justify military careers. Especially for true soldiers, not uniformed civilians who typed or filed or drew blood or drove trucks.

With effort, true soldiers could survive even in peacetime: he had found his place eventually. He had excelled through perseverance, not inclination or aptitude, his superiors said, implying a lesser accomplishment than surviving a military academy. Without war, official or otherwise, there would have been no advancement at all, so he volunteered for every clandestine skirmish, removing his rank insignia and dog tags so often that he joked he might be a general by now and not even realize.

He had spent years (broken into months and weeks) in places that never made the news. Geography was a matter of mud and sand, mountain or ravine, exposure or cover. Politics reduced to orders. Friend or foe were concepts without emotional content or complications, which suited him fine. He liked his life, when he thought about it, and it, too, suited him. Though no longer a kid, he swung a full pack as easily at forty-nine as at twenty.

Compared to the new hard bodies, his was aging, though not badly. Before this Thing, anyway. In a sense, the Thing was an unjust surprise. For almost thirty years he had been primed to eat a bullet, lose a ’chute, take a knife through the spinal cord, to join many companions and a few friends as a broken corpse. He would live—immortal until his time came, just as they had been.

It was the civilian side of life that set his teeth on edge. Feeling pressured to wear something other than olive drab and khaki. Rent checks and bills. Shopping for food. Cars.

Cars. Accustomed to making his way on foot, his car gathered more dust than miles. His wife had driven it, and he’d never seen the need for anything newer, fancier, bigger. She had complained lightly about the hard manual shift, stiff ride and steering, but never asked for another. After the divorce, she had bought a Lexus or Infinity or some such Jap box, in unspoken rebuke.

Maybe if he had told her that he needed a car he could understand and fix, she would have understood. It was too late now. The New Millennium and already too late.

The blips of the machine quickened, drawing his heart rate with it. The toxins dripped into his bloodstream.

Once, a slant interrogator had rammed a pitted needle into his arm, a mixture of sodium pentothal and poison, designed to sicken the target, terrify it into revealing—what? He could no longer remember. Maybe he had never known. When they had released him (a surprise as big as the antidote), he had laughed. They threatened him with the one thing that did not scare him—a painless death. What did they expect to get for that?

Down the hall, a woman laughed. He wasn’t good with that sound: was she young, thin, fat, old? There had been a Pashtun boy who could tell almost everything about a person from a few syllables or sounds. The language did not matter. An amazing gift; the boy had been killed by a Russian bomb with no appreciation of his skill.

Shrapnel from that same explosion had carved a fist-size chunk from his right thigh. The wound healed, leaving the leg ugly but functional, strong as before.

Of twelve on his team, only he had survived. He never knew who had risked carrying him on the long trip to the UN hospital. When he finally came to, he lay in a curtained section of the ward, feeling oddly important.

The doctors were Swedes, the nurses German, and they wanted to save his leg and his life, even knowing that such efforts were a poor allocation of resources. An American soldier (his fluent German and lack of identification fooled no one) with so grievous a wound should not take the antibiotics, plasma, bedsheets that by rights belonged to children or their mothers. His injury challenged them, however. As professionals, the staff craved what he represented: an achievement rendered monumental by the steady diet of failure in such places. They kept him alive to be airlifted to Germany.

Idly, he ran his fingers along the crater in his thigh. The skin grafts had been a disaster, both at the source and the wound, the American doctor in Stuttgart later declared. Patient would have been better off with Saran Wrap and duct tape, the white coat had sniffed to a tape recorder as if the patient were profoundly deaf or catatonic.

Saran Wrap and duct tape were harder to forage than a few snips off a soldier’s ass, he had thought, though that yahoo medic wouldn’t have known that. The doc’s idea of hardship was a time delay on TV baseball.

After the leg, there had been fewer, minor physical trauma, as if some checklist had been ticked. Disease, injury, torture, PTSD—now only death remained. The body, after all, could take so much and no more. The head generally failed sooner.

When they had first diagnosed this Thing, he was sure they were wrong. He felt well enough, had just completed a mission, garnered another small commendation, the large promotion.

It’s a mistake, he had thought: wasn’t he now—finally—receiving the recognition he had earned? In his world, timing was more than key, it defined the mission. This timing was beyond bad.

The discovery had been an accident. A high-clearance, silent pair of hands, presumably a doctor’s, with no face or name examined him after every mission. Other strangers probed his head with questions. It was the drill and he had no expectation of privacy. He assumed every wart report went up the chain of command, though he doubted any of it interested the brass.

He had been wrong. Within a few days of his last debrief, he had been summoned to receive the news. His CO delivered it. Another star silently twinkled.

At first, he hardly understood what they were saying. Unexpected disease was a hazard of the duty: he’d been given casual news of malaria, dysentery, even a skull fracture at the end of debriefs. This time, they barely mentioned the mission. They talked about the Thing.

“Metastasized.”

“Baseball.”

“Liver.”

What did these things have to do with pallets of supplies delivered in a jungle? With sudden storms and firefights and getting out in one piece? Packets of paper, computer disks, maps, and money pressed into the right hands, observations made and recorded, could be worth a man’s life. These things mattered. The Thing did not.

They did not order him to treatment. They arranged it on the correct assumption that he would report. The VA facility was enormous, and he waited endlessly for admission, amused by the bluster of stars and clusters trying to get better treatment based on rank. Did they wear rank insignia on their hospital gowns, asses exposed but brass polished? Would the scalpel be sharper or cleaner, the pain less intense, because that second star had come through?

In their fear, they wanted Obedience. In the field, he gave orders with a look, a gesture, a nudge, and his men obeyed. He owned their obedience and their lives. He spent them carefully. Those he could not trust to obey were left with the paper pushers. Like him, his best men wanted the mission to define them. Focus on the mission quelled the incoherent panic and pounding fear that defeats discipline and training. Fear did not earn Obedience.

Sudden nausea overwhelmed him. Leaning over the bed rail, he barely grabbed the basin before vomiting acid. Ruefully, he imagined his lungs in a corrosive puddle, eating through the plastic basin as the Thing ate through his body.

The night after the first treatment, all the short gray hair on his head had fallen out. His eyebrows thinned to invisibility. He had been prepared for hair loss, though finding a matted clump in his shorts had startled him. No one had mentioned that the toxins would not distinguish among follicles.

Lying back, he thought of his wife, lying in bed next to him. She slept soundly—more so than he did, though he remained as motionless as she did not.

When it was time for her to stop sleeping, but while she was still reluctant to be awake, she would move closer to him, backing into his still body, her nightgown pushed aside. He would reach for her or remain as he had been, and she would take her cue from that, sensing when to move, pressing her silky butt against his thigh or stomach. She would unfold, unwind, bloom like a flower in time-lapse photography, moving from sleep to sex seamlessly.

When he responded, she adapted to him, his motion, his lust, sensing his passion, his aggression, even his exhausted fear locked in places he never mentioned.

It was strange, he thought, there in the hospital, that they never spoke of those moments, not even when the moments stopped.

He knew he should not think of his wife. To think of things gave them power. But some things did not relinquish their power, even if you pushed them out of your mind.

The Pashtun boy.

The chain of command.

The Thing as it grew.

The softness of his wife against his cratered thigh.

He decided that the Thing was all he could fight.

Reluctantly, he thought about the Thing. The doctors did not say it, but they believed that the Thing would kill him. That is, if the treatment did not kill him first.

He had researched It carefully, delving into its minutiae as he had reviewed the science of armaments, iconography of maps, the saving power of machines. He evaluated the lines of engagement, Thing and poison at once covert and fully engaged.

And had come away no wiser. According to his intelligence, the therapy worked or didn’t on an almost random basis. To achieve full effectiveness against the Thing necessitated a level of collateral damage that would almost certainly kill the patient.

So they skirmished inconclusively—poison, doctors, healthy cells, and the Thing.

Like Phoenix, he snorted silently. Or Fire Brew—missions where the enemy was vague and politics worked against objectives. Success was measured in increments so tiny that only his superiors could discern it at all.

Desk jockeys knew that success was a matter of how the report was written. A mission blown to hell by bad intelligence transformed itself into victory through fingers on a keyboard. Through a process as erratic as sandstorms, a fucked-up extraction in Somalia became Hollywood heroics.

The opposite was true as well. “All as planned”—his measure of success—might sour into disaster. He had read newspaper accounts of engagements in which he himself had figured (though namelessly) and found no common ground with his own experience.

He was spared this for the most part, as little of what he did warranted public disclosure. He accepted that his view from a rice paddy was not the same as from an office in Washington or a breakfast table in Des Moines.

Paper victory, though, would not be enough against the Thing. Incremental damage to its position needed cumulative impact. He tried to imagine It munching through his liver, targeting his bones. Unlike a strategic force, It did not weaken by acquiring multiple objectives. Instead, It grew stronger.

He and the poison could not mount a frontal assault. Still, he had witnessed rebels, little more than kids and old men, eliminate superior forces, fueled by ideas like “Freedom” or “God” or “Family.” At the time, he had found their deaths pathetic: bodies of children thrown down as bridges so that other children could cross to their deaths.

Now he thought he might understand. His life once more had been reduced down to mission objectives. Go there. Achieve X. Return with as many men as he could. From his first mission, everything was finite. Today he squatted over a hole to take a dump. Next week, he’d be drinking beer, evaluating his chances of screwing the blond waitress.

He had learned slowly that invaders were never victorious. The rebels were in for the long haul. There was no end, no escape. Their entire life was defined by the mission; it would not end with extraction. In complete contradiction of sound tactics, they rushed from positions of relative safety into firefights. They held nothing back.

He imagined the Pashtun kid, howling with primeval rage at Russian tanks. Costa Rican peasants, Tutsi farmers, Cambodians, Montagnards, serene or terrified, willing themselves to rush headlong toward a massive black Thing of incomprehensible power and brutality. Exploding bits of bone and brain matter, torrents of blood, talent, skill, love, anger reduced to body parts: efforts grotesquely beautiful in their futility.

Could his body launch such an insurgency against the Thing?

He could not catch his breath. The machine blipped impatiently. A predawn gray chill improbably spread from the sealed windows. Voices in the hall signaled shift change. Nurses and orderlies would go home to their beds and beers, extracted to safety.

How much longer? Usually, he estimated the amount in the bag, noted how long each drip took, determined the length of time he had to wait. But he had lost count.

His mind was quick with figures, with the calculus of war and deployment. Not just the easy ones, miles to klicks, ounces to liters, but the harder, more attenuated—piles of equipment to backs and backpacks, bullets to avenues of escape.

Yet he had been stymied by simple arithmetic: a boy of eighteen signs up plus his years in uniform equals a life gone by.

The resident appeared and noticed he was awake. With a tight smile, she compared his chart to the readout on the machine, writing in medical hieroglyphics. She hesitated and despite himself, he felt his heart leap.

Did she notice something? Had the Thing retreated? He knew the machines were calibrated only to measure heartbeats, blood pressure, toxicity levels, the rate of poison dripping into his blood, yet perhaps she sensed—no, she knew that the battle had taken a different tack.

Good soldier that she was, the resident betrayed nothing. A tight smile accompanied her soft words. They would keep him for observation, she said. Twenty-four hours at least. Too bad about New Year’s Eve.

A few more tasks, then she was gone.

As in the field, dawn energized him, releasing cramped muscles and sending new blood into his wits. A nurse arrived, removed the IV, chattered with detachment, left.

As his head cleared, he planned his mission.

D Ferrara has been an active writer and ghost writer for more years than she cares to admit. Articles, essays and short stories are her continuing obsession – several publications, including The Main Street Anthology – Crossing Lines, East Meets West American Writers Review: 2014 Holiday Edition, The Broadkill Review, MacGuffin Press, Crack the Spine, Green Prints, Amarillo Bay, The Penmen Review, The Law Studies Forum, and RIMS Magazine have fed this mania by including them. Her short story, “Then and Now” was long listed in the Able Muse Write Prize for Fiction. “Arvin Lindemeyer Takes Canarsie” was a Top Finalist in the ASU Screenwriting Contest. Her play “Favor” won the New Jersey ACT award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play, while “Sister Edith’s Mission” and “Business Class” were produced at the Malibu Repertory Company’s One Act Play Festival. Three of her full-length film scripts have been optioned. She recently received her M.A. in Creative Writing, where it joined her J.D., L.l.M. and B.A, amid the clutter of her office.

Read an interview with D Ferrara here.

“Piano” by Allen Forrest, oil on canvas

My roommate and I are insomniacs. We are not aware of this shared affliction on move-in day. Within the cement confines of our undecorated dorm room, we survey one another coolly. I am small, wiry, frequently mistaken for athletic; she is wide and puffy, with hair the unflattering shade between yellow and gray, except for a single strand dyed moss green. It dangles, looking vaguely vegetative, beside her left cheek.

She extends a hand. “Grace,” she says. It comes out like an order. Bow before me. Say Grace.

“Lola,” I say. It comes out as it has my whole life: two mocking, singsong syllables that recollect ukuleles and piña coladas and my aging parents on the night they accidentally conceived me at the Alana Moana Hotel.

I expect Grace’s handshake to hurt. Instead, it’s floppy and indifferent. We are two transfer students arbitrarily stashed in a residence hall with defective windows and penis graffiti carved into the desks, the handshake seems to say. Let’s not make more of this than it is.

I begin layering up for my second trip to the car. My first college sat in the humid North Carolina subtropics to which my parents relocated about ten minutes after my father’s retirement. But I welcome the return to the sub-zero temperatures of my childhood. I relish the burning numbness in my cheeks. When you are an insomniac, you are always numb.

At the doorway, I zip up my coat and turn back to Grace. “By the way, which bed—?”

She is already wrestling faded blue sheets onto the nearer mattress.

~

They give me the adviser dedicated specifically to “undeclared transfers.” It actually says that on a plaque on her desk—“Adviser of Undeclared Transfers”—and I think how clinical it sounds, like a hopeless diagnosis.

“Lo-la,” she pronounces, flipping the word off her tongue. She’s only a few years older than me and laughs at everything and lapses inexplicably into an English accent when explaining graduation requirements. Because I have signed up for genetics and human physiology, she mistakenly assumes I’m pre-med, but I just like the smallness of science. People are more comprehensible when broken down into curly chromosomes and fiery little neurons.

At night, I lie in bed. This is what you do when you’re an insomniac. Just lie there and stare at the ceiling. I have always been a finicky sleeper. As a child, I would stay up late and wake early to the sounds of my parents starting their day. This eavesdropping on their adult morning routine, the scuff of slippers, the running of water, always sent me spiraling into panic. These were not noises I should hear. This was not a world I should know.

Imagine my surprise when I got to college and encountered just the reverse: the elite nocturnal world awaiting those bold enough to seek it. In college, sleeping is weakness. To sleep is to miss out. And so I stayed up, night after night, wandering, witnessing, until a crisp white eviction notice from the Dean’s office arrived in my campus mailbox, with a second copy sent home. My parents were baffled. Of their four daughters, I had traditionally caused them the least distress. They blamed the environment. I would do better somewhere smaller, some place I could get the attention I needed. I would find my niche. They had faith in me.

The ceiling in my new dorm shows a single pair of smudged footprints directly above my lofted bed. I close my eyes and enter the misty corridors of pre-sleep. Most people aren’t aware of what happens in these halls. They’re in them so briefly. They just barely have the chance to get their bearings before sliding off to true slumber.

But I’m an expert.

Like a tour guide, I could lead you down these shadowed passages, pointing out the day’s residue curled in every corner. Here are my sisters, three heads sprouting from the same bulging body. Here are my parents waving too many arms. They mark my path of descent like scarecrows on the side of the road, not real, and not yet dreams.

I’m still aware of what goes on around me in this state. I can still hear the radiator, still smell the pot smoke seeping through the walls from the room next door. I’m certain I would hear Grace fumbling with her key in the lock, but she never returns.

~

When you are an insomniac, you awake in strange places. Sleep sneaks up on you suddenly, like a thief, and you have no way to ward it off. Professors take offense. They’re not interested in feeble excuses. The next time I mistake Dr. Chair of the Biology Department’s lecture for a lullaby, he suggests I leave and never come back. My Spanish professor takes a kinder approach, shaking me awake at the end of class and urging me to “cuidate, niña.” Take care of yourself.

Is this what I’m doing when I accept the little orange Adderall from the redheaded kid at the library? Taking care of myself?

His name is Seth. “Like Cain and Abel’s little bro,” he explains. “The one nobody remembers.” He introduces me to his friends, a mismatched group of burn-outs and hyper-academics in search of the next high. Over this band of misfits, he reigns as king, dispensing little capsules into sweaty palms at his apartment each weekend.

“Insomnia,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. “I’ve had that.”

If he can be believed, Seth has suffered a little bit of everything over his twenty-one years: depression and migraines, shingles and swine flu. “Nothing a little medication can’t fix,” he laughs, shaking a couple of bottles like maracas. His apartment is crowded and overheated. People sprawl languidly over leather furniture, almost invisible in the dim lighting.

“My mom tells me to drink chamomile tea when I can’t sleep,” I say. “She and Dad don’t really believe in medication.”

“Heretics!” Seth cries. “Heathens! Nonbelievers! Why—it’s pure sacrilege, is what it is.”

He folds two large pink capsules into my hand with a wink.

“Take with a full glass of water. It’ll be the best night’s sleep you ever had.”

~

Back in my room, I wedge the pills carefully into the bottom compartment of my jewelry box. My nonconformist parents made as effective an excuse as any, but the truth is I have become such a master of sleeplessness that caving now would feel like defeat. Insomnia incapacitates some people, but it surrounds me like armor. I am invincible in the state of semi-consciousness that dictates my days. Thick and unassailable. A brick wall.

I must sleep, because the next thing I know, I awake twisted like a contortionist in a nest of hot sheets, blinking in the glare of fluorescent light. The radiator burbles and clangs, and beneath that, a different sound—like pincers snapping shut. Directly opposite, Grace sits up in bed in leopard print pajamas, one leg extended in an awkward yoga pose as she cuts her toenails with a silver clipper. The shavings drop one by one into the blankets.

“That’s disgusting,” I say.

“This your bed?” she asks.

I rub my eyes and glance at the clock. Almost 4. Grace runs a thumb over her newly shortened toenails and, apparently satisfied, begins to examine her fingers.

It occurs to me that this is the first time we’ve been in the same room together in almost a week.

“Where do you go at night?” I ask.

“To work.”

“What work?”

Grace clips a fingernail and blows the green strand of hair out of her eyes. “My work.”

I imagine her planted on a scummy street corner in those leopard pajamas. Or maybe peddling stolen prescriptions for Seth. What other kind of work could possibly occupy you into the small hours of morning?

The better part of a month passes before I find out. By that time, I have become a regular at Seth’s apartment. Still boycotting the sedatives, I discover a paradise awaiting me in other regions of the medicine cabinet. A parade of Dextros marches through my system—Dextromethorphan, Dextroamphetamine. I am encouraged to maintain the use of these scientific names.

“No sizzurp or purple drank here,” says Seth importantly. “We’re professionals.”

And with time, it does become possible to think of the wealthy, well-dressed crowd in the living room as the staff at a hospital, and yes—to think of Seth, with his smooth voice and bottomless containers of pills, as their charismatic leader. I wonder what it would feel like to run my fingers through that curly hair. I begin staying later, lingering in doorways. One night, charged up on stimulants, I lose my head completely and drag him down for a kiss. He laughs and returns it, and I am floating, rapturous, radiating from my toes to the ends of my hair. Then he kindly but firmly pushes me away.

“Don’t sweat it,” his friend Mallory reassures me afterward. “That’s just the way Seth is. Doesn’t like to mix business with pleasure.”

So I do the only thing that makes sense: I buy more pills. I deplete my savings account, extinguishing all my earnings from two lousy summers waiting tables. I call home for more money, armed with the excuse of a stolen textbook, but my parents don’t even ask for a rationale. They wire it to me freely, their only stipulation that I am not, under any circumstances, to think of paying them back.

~

One night I awake in a place I can’t identify. High ceilings. Red carpets. A window overlooking shadowy, snow-laden trees. Only after spotting an ugly abstract statue in the corner do I realize I’m in the arts building, and what has woken me is the faint thread of music.

The song, a low, slow piano melody, draws me to a door propped open with a folding chair. I press my eye to the gap. Music stands and crates clutter the wooden floorboards. Against one wall, a row of tall cages houses various instruments, locked away for the night. Grace hunches over the piano in the corner. I can spy the seaweed strand of hair swinging back and forth, her round shoulders heaving fiercely, as though she is trying to expel something from her chest and onto the keys.

I can’t say whether she is technically good, whether her lurching and heaving over the piano is the sign of a master’s passion or an amateur’s poor technique. I only know that the music settles somewhere near my sternum, inflating me with a buoyancy altogether different from the giddiness of a high.

~

After that, it becomes a habit: On my way back from Seth’s apartment in the evening, I cut through the arts building and listen to Grace play. Her performance is so visceral, it’s almost like listening in on someone being violently ill, but I can’t force myself to leave.

When I finally get up the courage to venture into the room, Grace doesn’t acknowledge me. Her eyes are closed. There is no sheet music. I pace across the floor, feeling jittery, peering at the horns in their cages. When the song finishes, I turn around. Grace stares at me without surprise. It’s difficult to alarm an insomniac. Lack of sleep makes you curiously uncurious about everything.

“You sound good,” I say. “Is that what you do here? You’re a music major? I didn’t even know we had a program.”

She continues to stare. I know how I must appear: eyes bloodshot, lips cracked, hair that hasn’t seen a comb in days. Seth is a smart guy—you won’t find a mirror in his apartment. The glass pieces have been pried away from the medicine cabinet, baring plastic doors the sterile white of hospitals, the white of professionalism, the white of white lies—those small daily courtesies you grant yourself to continue placing one foot in front of the other.

“Sorry to bug you,” I add. “I was just passing through on my way back.”

Still she says nothing. She lowers her eyes to the piano and places her fingers carefully on the keys. A few stray notes jingle lightly through the air, struggling to take form. Abruptly, she looks up.

“If you’re going to stay, then sit down. All that goddamn pacing is making me nervous.”

~

Insomnia is a lonely business, a nocturnal transaction between you and the glowing numbers on your alarm clock. Like a relentless metronome, you keep count of minutes and hours; the rest of the world sleeps, their breaths creating a perfect harmony in which you have no part. Sleeplessness makes you special in the worst way possible. It reignites old anxieties and kindles strange new compulsions. You become, like the superstitious baseball player, convinced by the power of certain socks, certain ear plugs. Mere happenstance elevates into the refined workings of fate: If the distant clamor of a car alarm precedes a good night’s sleep, you will pray for that same obnoxious siren to sound the next night, and you will fixate upon and micromanage each detail of your pre-bedtime routine until just the thought of all the preparation exhausts you and you finally resign yourself to your lonely, baggy-eyed existence. In your darkest moments, you might even think you asked for this to happen.

Does Grace know all this? Can she possibly guess, then, what it means for me to have a place in her nighttime routine? She plays, and I sit in one of the fold-up chairs, reading a book or just looking around at all the instruments. We’re not best friends, and I couldn’t answer the most basic questions about her. But listening to her music, watching her roll and toss like a wave over the keys, I think that I’m beginning to know her.

I start to cut back on the pills, both because of the cost and the odd embarrassment I feel showing up stoned to Grace’s midnight recitals, but I still find myself in Seth’s apartment several nights a week. It’s the habit of his company that I can’t kick. For a while, I entertain the delusion that I can remain part of this elite group while boycotting the products that bring them together. For a while, it seems to be okay. Then the offers start to slide in. Half off. Free samples. It’s perfectly all right if I’d like to cut back—hell, Seth’s always been a big fan of moderation, it’s his middle name!—but wouldn’t I be interested in sampling this new product? He got access to it only recently, he got access to it just for me, he knows this is just what I want…

“Don’t tell me what I want,” I snap. Only it comes out far louder than I’d intended, loud enough to override the Bluetooth speakers softly cooing jazz and turn every head in our direction.

“Easy, Lola,” Seth laughs, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. “No pressure. You’ll do whatever you want, of course. I’m just here to help, all right?”

I nod, shaken by my own outburst, and permit him to wrap me in a brotherly hug. Then he strides off, whistling, and I return to my place on the sofa beside Mallory, trying to show interest in the muted sports recap on the TV. It’s no use. Something inside me has broken. Some room has been sealed off, and I will never walk into it again. I grab my backpack and head for the door, stepping over several pairs of legs stretched out across the coffee table. A few faces look up at me. They wear the bleary, slightly irritated expressions of people woken from sleep.

~

I cannot pretend that this confrontation cured me, that my story folds into a neat little victory. There remain sleepless nights. There remain eight weeks of atrocious academic performance for which to make up. The Adviser of Undeclared Transfers shakes her head in disappointment. “Lo-la, Lo-la.” The singsong syllables are embedded in a wistful sigh. “What are we going to do with you?”

Miraculously, the administration determines not to throw me out, provided I can get my act together for the second half of the semester and pass my finals. Now I spend my evenings in the library, thumbing through books and articles, silently mouthing Spanish vocabulary. When I go back to the dorm, usually around one or two, I do sleep. Not particularly well, not nearly long enough, but when you’re an insomniac, you take what you can get.

One night, Grace comes back to the room while I’m still awake, reading in bed. She looks terrible, deflated and unwashed, gray rings carved under her eyes. On the square of rug beneath my bed, she pauses. “I have a concert tomorrow afternoon, with the student orchestra. They gave me a solo. A big one.”

“Congratulations.” It seems like the proper response, but she continues to scowl at me, arms crossed, as if waiting for more. “That’s really great, Grace,” I try again. “Do you want—I mean—should I come?”

“I guess, if you feel like it.”

She doesn’t sound particularly happy, but I must have said the right thing, because she lumbers off to her desk without further reply. I watch her open her laptop. The bluish glow saps the color from her skin and darkens the circles beneath her eyes. Has she always looked so sick? I think maybe she has, only I never bothered to care. When you are an insomniac, it’s as if you’re looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. Other people’s suffering is so small.

I climb down from my bed. The pink pills are bigger than I remember. They skid a little across the wood when I toss them onto Grace’s desk.

“Take these with a full glass of water,” I say. “It’ll be the best night’s sleep you ever had.”

Tessa Yang is a recent graduate of St. Lawrence University, where she majored in English. “Moonlight Sonata” was inspired by several sleepless nights in a dorm room with a very noisy radiator; the story eventually became part of her senior year honors project. Starting in August, Tessa will be attending the MFA program in fiction writing at Indiana University.

Read an interview with Tessa here.