Muse: A Short Story
Jessica just wanted to sleep. She glanced at the clock and panicked. It was 2 AM. 2 AM, and she had school in the morning! Her mind would not be quiet, though, no matter what she tried.
“Dreams are for sleep,” she hissed at her disobedient brain. Still, the story continued unfolding, as it had the past two nights. Then it looped. She tossed and turned against it, but she was trapped. She couldn’t fall asleep with this unbearable urge that she couldn’t understand, pressing at her to get up and pace, but she also couldn’t get up because she needed to sleep.
Finally, she gave up and started pacing. She gave into the voices narrating in her brain and watched the story, interacting as the main character. Finally, only two hours before she had to wake up, she was too tired to stay awake for another moment, and she collapsed into the oblivion of sleep.
“Jessica! Wake up!” Her mother shook her and Jessica, heavy and sick to her stomach with exhaustion, forced the glue apart from her eyes. Her heart was racing, and she could barely breathe. All she wanted was to go back to sleep, but her mother was ranting at her that she needed to get up and get moving. That she was going to be late for school.
She stumbled around the room, grabbing clothes without really looking at them and went through all the motions of getting ready. Clean underwear, bra, shirt, pants, socks... she wasn’t sure if the outfit really matched, but she couldn’t focus beyond what was needed to mechanically take each step in getting dressed. She walked into the bathroom and glared at her reflection as she yanked a brush through her hair. Five minutes later, she was being yelled at while she shook herself awake from falling asleep on the toilet.
She managed to remember her backpack as she tripped down the stairs, her stomach knotted and her heart still slamming against her chest like she was being chased. She desperately didn’t want to go to school, but she had no choice. She had tried to use this panic as a reason to stay in and sleep in the past, but her mom only responded with telling her that she needed to go to bed earlier.
What useless, garbage advice. Could other people so easily choose to fall asleep?
She cursed when she banged her head on the door as she slid into the car and her mother flinched in sympathy, thankfully not berating her for her strong language.
“You wouldn’t feel so bad in the morning if you’d just...”
“Go to sleep earlier,” Jessica finished with her mother, irritably.
“Well, it’s true,” her mother muttered as she pulled out of the driveway. They had a quiet drive to the school and Jessica got there in time to grab breakfast in the cafeteria. Her mom chirped, “I love you; have a good day at school!”
“Love you, too,” Jessica muttered. “Have a good day at work.”
She slumped out of the car and scurried to the cafeteria in time to grab the last ham and cheese croissant. She ate it quietly, sitting alone at a table in the nearly vacant room. She had just swallowed the last of her chocolate milk when the bell rang.
She deposited her tray at the window, dropped her milk box in the trash and hurried to her first class. She regretted that it was Government, because she didn’t stand a chance of staying awake. The bell woke her up at the end of class and she groggily tore herself away from her desk, wiping her face and ignoring the teacher’s angry look. She hated sleeping through class, but if they were going to hold school so stupidly early, it couldn’t be helped.
Two years ago, she had no problem at all staying awake in class or getting up early. Not until the day that she was assigned an art project that was supposed to be accompanied by a poem. She did her project, the subject inspired by the average 12 year-old girl’s love of unicorns. Up to that assignment, she had always been a rather average girl. Well, if you ignored the in-depth, full-sensory dreams she had, both asleep and awake.
That night, one of those dreams had kept her awake, rather than lulling her to sleep as they always had in the past. She had been inspired to act it out for hours before wearing herself out. She thought it was just good fun at the time.
Then it happened again. And again. Eventually, the novelty wore off and the exhaustion set in. She would be forced to participate in the daydreams until the entire story had been played out, over and over. She couldn’t sleep until she was so exhausted that her body overrode her brain.
It wasn’t every night, by any means. But it would happen several nights in a row and she would be sick from it by the end of it all. Words would assault her, tangling in her brain, looping like a scratched record.
Today, those words begged to rhyme and she idly organized them into tidy, neat rows and scribbled it into a clean composition notebook. She closed it and put it in her backpack, not giving it a second thought for the rest of class.
It was lunch when the strange peace that had filled her the rest of the tiring morning changed to a nagging feeling.
‘Why is it so quiet?’ she mused. Then she wondered why she thought it was quiet in the middle of the noisiest room in the school.
It hit her like a good scratch against a mosquito bite. There were no words bombarding her brain. No voices filling it with stories she couldn’t turn away from. Finally! There was quiet in her brain. The cycle must have ended. Relief flooded through her as she expected that she would finally get some sleep again.
She wasn’t wrong about the sleep, but the words came back before long. Again, they were barraging the walls of her brain, but this time, they were drowning out a lecture that she needed to be paying attention to. The more she tried to hear what the teacher was saying, the louder the words grew until she was blind to everything around her. Her head began pounding and she was so full of frustration that she grabbed her composition notebook and scribbled down the noisy letters until they went away.
Quiet again.
Jessica easily pieced together what had happened. She looked at her notebook and read the poem she couldn’t remember actually writing. She remembered letters and words, but the content was blank until she reread it. It was like someone else had written through her hands. She shivered.
After a few minutes, she stopped being creeped out and got angry.
‘I don’t want to be a writer!’ she thought furiously. ‘There’s no future in this trash!’
She couldn’t bring herself to destroy what she’d written, though. She recognized that it wasn’t well-written by any means, but it was such a strange thing that had happened to her that she had to keep the evidence. Even if only for herself.
Two years went by and this behavior continued. She would try to ignore the words and voices, and they would overwhelm her senses until she had to organize them onto the pages. She had filled one book and started another in that time. Her grades had deteriorated because she was still drawn into the worlds she couldn’t bring herself to write down at night. She watched the sun rise every day in the summer before going to bed.
Finally, frustrated by what was going on, she threw a powerful shout into her brain, demanding it give up. That she was not and would never be, a writer.
“You were born this way,” a voice answered. “I’m not your enemy. I am you.”
Jessica closed her eyes and tried to decide if she really wanted to answer. The voice was quiet, letting her mull it over. The quiet in her brain was absolute until she finally broke the silence.
“Fine. Who are you and why are you doing this to me?” she asked.
Eyes opened in the dark, large and green. They moved upward and she was standing in front of the massive head of a dragon, its—no, his—blood red scales silken and inviting. She didn’t hesitate but a moment before reaching out and touching his snout. A peace like none she had felt in years filled her. She sighed, leaning against him.
“I am Zopyros,” he answered, “Your muse.”
Jessica stroked the soft, matte scales, climbing onto his muzzle and up to grab the black horns on either side of his head.
“You’re the one who torments me,” she accused, climbing higher until she could swing herself around to slide down his neck, settling against the protruding, sturdy spine a few identical spikes above his thick shoulder and wing muscles.
“You’re the one who ignores me,” he purred back, standing up and turning his head to look at her. “We used to have such adventures when you were younger. Then you invited me to your hand. When I came, delighted that you wanted to finally marry us together, as we are meant to be, you shut me out. You shunned me.”
His rumble was accusatory.
“I have to live in the real world,” she explained.
“What a plain thing to say,” he said, crouching down, his muscles bunching. Jessica clutched tight to the spine in front of her as he leapt into the air, his wings beating down and throwing her forward and then back down before beating again. “It does not become us.”
“It’s the truth.”
“What a vile thing.”
“You’re a vile thing,” she countered as the black faded into a brilliant world she had never seen before.
“You could not be without me,” he replied.
“You love me,” she told him.
“With everything I am,” he promised.
“We have a problem,” she said, shaking her head. Music was blaring around her. The violent rise and fall of his enormous body shook her both painfully and wonderfully. She was in his world, and she didn’t want to leave. The thought of leaving was as physically painful as ignoring him.
“Let me in,” he said, simply. “I was born with you, for you. I am yours.”
“And I am yours,” she whispered back as he relaxed and glided through the cerulean sky.
“Stop fighting me,” he pleaded.
“Stop fighting me,” she demanded. They flew lower and lower, aimed for a thick green forest rimming a deep blue lake.
“I am here. You must give in to me.”
“I can’t! I’m not a writer!”
“You are what you are,” he insisted. “We are who we are.”
“You’ll never let me go,” she said, tears burning her eyes.
“You are mine,” he agreed. “Be my voice. Bear my heart.”
“Let me live,” she begged.
“What life is there without me?” he asked her. Jessica opened her eyes. She climbed out of bed and threw open her bedroom window. She stared at the stars until she could see color in them. She stood there, looking out, for so long her skin grew cold, and her room took on the scent of the night.
It would be years before she gave into him, but when she finally did, it was glorious.
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