Frantic (a short, short story)

“Sh, shhhhh, shhhh, sh, тиха, тиха, it’s alright, shhhh, shhhh, it’s alright, calm down,” comes a familiar voice.

I come to. Open my eyes to pitch black.

It’s Polina.

“You were yelling.” She’s trembling, tears held off by floodgates of shock.

“Was I?” Check my pulse. Normal. Check hers. Like the Minotaur is around the next corner. Like a now-live bomb. Like an artery will burst all over my second-world, empty-wine bottle supported foldout couch-bed, where we’ve been sleeping all night.

Except it wasn’t all night. Computer reads 21:55. We fell asleep around 21:00.

“I’m terrified,” she whispers, slowly starting to weep silently.

“Come sit in my lap,” I offer. She leans back, and I embrace her tightly. “It’s okay. This is real life. Shhh. You just had a nightmare. It’s okay. Everything’s alright.”

We sit together, statuesque and confused.

“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t yelling though,” I say. “Maybe it was in your head.”

“I just felt like you lost control, and I wanted to say your name, but couldn’t remember it. It was,” sifting through sobs for words, “...terrifying,”

Check her pulse again. Warp speed, still.

“Let me tell you a story,” I start.

I flip the lights on.

I tell her about the time I -- I mean an 8-year-old mini me -- had a cold-sweat nightmare about a red, hairy monster in our kitchen. After a mid-night terror, I had stood up. I walked to our kitchen to find nothing. I had searched everywhere for anything, but nothing was everywhere.

“Come on, let’s check it out. It’ll make you feel better,” and she agrees. Like two explorer kids searching for solace against their own soured imaginations, we didn’t find anyone or anything under or behind the bed, on the balcony, between the shower curtains, or inside the kitchen cabinets. The outside light still burning bright, I double lock the front door. 

“Feel better?”

“Maybe it was because the bedroom door was open,” she suggests. So I shut it and switch off the main lights, plugging in a strand of holiday light-ups for a leg up against the dark.

We lay back down, the room lit, holding each other. Her sobs stop seething, her eyes still alert on the qui vive.

“Did I ever tell you about the time we yelled at traffic?” I’ve got to distract her from herself.

“No.”

“Well, when I was in college, I had this crazy roommate. He started dating this girl, but he told me he didn’t feel very peaceful about it and it was pretty rough from my eyes too. So I took him to a secret spot I knew, off the beaten trail at a state park that overlooked a 100 foot drop to I-40. I told him to yell - to really yell. He did with some fervor, but I riled him up some more and got him talking about how he really felt about Angela. I said, ‘Do you have what it takes?! Is she worth it to you!?’ He screamed back like a bus-ad lawyer in defense of him and her, almost bellowing me off the ledge. Well, they broke up two weeks later. I never saw him happier.”

She smiled genuinely and distractedly shut her eyes.

I stay awake reading.

**********

“Bzzzzt!” I slap at a fly.

Polina jolts upright, wide-eyed like a general woken by a raid, heart pounding, body frozen with fear.

“IT’S A FLY, it’s a fly, it’s a fly. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just a fly.”

We embrace. She cries.

I don’t let go.

Slowly, we both come to and realize.

I fetch the swatter.

**********

AFTERMATH:

“I was so terrified I couldn’t even trust you - even when the light was on and I was awake.”

“Fucking ghost-fly.”