Untitled at the moment. Chapter 1 maybe?

His heart is clawing against his ribcage, trying to find a gap big enough to break through. The pain in the depth of his neck suggests he has slept with his head lodged against rocks, but he can feel the pillow sodden with sweat and clambering around his ears ready to smother him. The darkness that surrounds him now feels more overwhelming than before his eyes opened moments earlier and so he searches the space around him with his ears, listening for some clue as to the state in which he finds himself. The sweat that sticks his hair to his head seems to be cooling at a rapid rate, down his spine, a river running against gravity. 

Starting any story with a nightmare feels like a cliche, but that is where this story starts, and as he comes around from whatever has ripped him from his sleep he too realises that this is the start of something, although quite what, he isn’t yet sure. It’s not like he hasn’t had a nightmare before, in fact they are fairly common for him and he has experienced every kind. Ones that are set in weird worlds with indescribable monsters; ones that are set in a more recognisable place, where men with balaclavas tear down doors and kick through faces, teeth flying and blood pooling, but all of these have more of a T.V quality to them, an HBO gloss. It’s the ones where he wakes feeling like whatever has occurred in his dream state has bled through the cracks in the wall between sleep and wake that really get to him. The ones when he spends minutes, sometimes even hours, feeling as though he really has been cheated on, or imagining a pain so strongly that it feels like he really was hit round they head with a piece of 2x4. This might be one of those but at the moment he has no real understanding of any detail, instead he can see an abstract picture; pastel scars cutting through blocks of colour like something he himself might have created with a brush, but this simply floats in his vision, through the dark it flies at him over and over, through the gaps in the pulsing red veins that project into the night laden room around him.

Finally he pulls himself into a seated position but there is a sickness pulling from deep within his stomach like hunger but with added acidity, it gurgles; a boiling kettle. He can hear her stirring beside him and wonders whether to make more noise in an attempt to wake her and receive some soothing words or whether he should instead try to limit any further movement so as to keep this feeling of dread at the gates, stop it from finding it’s way out of its poorly constructed cage. While these thoughts rush through his head he realises that he may have little choice about the matter. He can feel it moving within him, making its way towards his throat, burning a path. He bolts in the direction of the door, he hasn’t lived here long but knows it well enough to be able to navigate its modest size without the need for vision. Within seconds his head is over the bowl of the toilet and he is expelling whatever it is that has built up inside. iIt smells like something real but he knows it isn’t.

By some miracle when he makes his way back into the bedroom next-door to the bathroom she still appears to be asleep, either she really hasn’t heard or she is just too tired to deal with any disturbance, although knowing her as he does he doesn’t think the second option feels likely. Her caring nature would seem at odds with ignoring somebodies violent night-time sickness. For a second he toys with the idea that he may still be dreaming, but he knows too well that even in the realest of his night terrors the sense of touch always let’s down the facade. Here in this room he can really feel the carpet fibres pushing into the crevices of his feet as he stands in his pants. A slight paunch protrudes above the elasticated waistline and he places his hand on it as his stomach rumbles audibly. ‘Ok’ he says to himself, ‘I will deal with this in the morning’, and with this very thought his alarm erupts from the phone on his bedside table, the light of which cuts through the darkness and reveals his side of the bed, disheveled and wet.