Wanderings at Night (standard:humor, 954 words)
Author: St George	Added: Jun 16 2003	Views/Reads: 3677/3	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
You would have thought that with the amount of time I spend wandering around the house at night, I would be good at it. You would be wrong to think that. Take a walk as me at night.

WANDERINGS AT NIGHT 

You wake up. Goddamn it. You wander what time it is, looking over at the
green glowing readout on your clock-radio doesn't help. Of course you 
can't see the time, you can't sleep unless the room is very dark. This 
is why you always balance the TV remote, on its side, in front of the 
readout, covering it up. You'd better move it then, but you're so warm, 
you don't want to reach out from under the covers. Oh well. You reach 
out, you can just reach the edge of the table, but no more. The TV 
remote is still an inch away. Mankind can go to the moon, but shuffling 
your body an inch and a half to the left is beyond you, so you stretch. 
With a comically spastic lunge you hit the TV remote. It falls to the 
floor. Goddamn it. You'll pick it up tomorrow. The time is 3:42. This 
is more of a tragedy than anyone else can know. You only got to sleep 
at 3:05 after watching channel four's creature feature double bill. 
Your brain is fuzzy from waking up and your body is dead from lack of 
sleep. It's more or less at this point you begin to realise that your 
bladder seems to be playing host to a good portion of lake Windermere. 
You decide to ignore it. Your body, so recently unable to move at all, 
now seems to despise lying still. You decide to ignore it. You'll just 
lie here squirming and bursting and get some sleep. Now you know why 
your bladder is so full. It's because there is not a single drop of 
liquid anywhere else in your body. That's ok, you'll just lie here 
squirming and bursting and dieing of thirst and get some sleep. Will 
you bugger. The time is now 3:45. You have to get up. Goddamn it. You 
reach out to switch on the bedside lamp, something else joins the TV 
remote on the floor. You'll pick it up tomorrow, whatever the hell it 
was. You try the lamp again, and succeed in switching it on. That's a 
mistake. Rising from your pit you head for the door, opening it, you 
realise what a mistake you have made. Beyond your door is your own 
personal black hole. Your eyes, so recently bathed in light are now 
useless in the dark beyond. No matter, you know where you're going. 
Stumbling zombie like through the ink you find the banister. There's a 
thought one of those films you watched was about zombies. Brrr. What 
are you, 12? Grow up there are no zombies waiting in the dark. What was 
that noise? Grasping the banister you descend carefully. There are 13 
steps, you don't count them, so when you reach the floor, you try to 
put your foot through it and stagger forward. ARGHHH!!! The blob has 
got you. No it hasn't and you know that, but for just that tiny 
nano-second, every nightmare monster you don't believe in was real. So 
if it wasn't the blob what just touched your leg? Curling around your 
ankles the cat seems to be mocking you for your cowardice. It looks 
like you aren't the only one out for a stroll that this hour. You head 
for the kitchen and reaching around the doorframe, gratefully put the 
light on. Idiot. First things first, you walk through the kitchen to 
the utility room, and into the toilet. You don't close the door ‘cos 
its 3:46 in the morning. The cat walks in. Goddamn it. Your standing 
there like a garden fountain and he's winding himself around your 
ankles. You try in vain to imagine less convivial circumstances. 
Everything which comes to mind falls under the heading ‘war crimes'. Do 
you flush or not? Do you risk waking the other occupants of the house 
or not? You are now faced with the biggest dilemma man has ever had to 
wrestle with. Returning to the kitchen you make a drink, still feeling 
guilty, whichever choice you made. The cat, so recently omnipresent has 
now vanished, of well. You drain your glass and take an apple from the 
fruit bowl for good measure. Naturally, the moment you turn the kitchen 
light off, the impenetrable dark returns. So do the zombies. No, you 
are a man of science, it takes more than a late night and a couple of 
thirty-year-old flicks to scare you. Stiff upper lip firmly in place 
you stride manfully through the black. One of your strides connects 
with the hall radiator. In the instant it takes the pain to race from 
your toe to your brain you live a tiny tortured eternity. Hobbling 
onward you tackle the stairs. One of the steps is slightly higher, 
slightly furrier and a lot more alive then the others. So that's where 
the cat went. The cat shoots of at warp speed and finds a suitably safe 
spot to curl up again. As you continue, the cat uses its highly evolved 
feline night-vision to glare at you. You can't see him but you can feel 
his eyes lasering into your neck. Or maybe that's the zombies again. 
Once at the top of the stairs your walk is not so much a manful stride 
as a particularly effeminate combination of limping and the kind of 
fast walking you do when you think your being followed. Retreating at 
last to within the safety of your bedroom you climb gratefully into 
bed. You cant just put the light out and go to sleep, you've got this 
wretched apple, it'd be a pity not to eat it. You wander what's on TV. 
Where the hell did that remote get to? 


Tweet