Where Sleep Ends, Blood Begins
Night after night, Elara hovered between two doors: one that slept and one that bled. The city’s streets exhaled a chill that smelled like rust and rain, seeping through the cracks of her apartment and into her bones as she sank beneath the sheets.
In the dream, a long corridor stretched beyond the edges of the world. Doors hung in midair, each etched with a memory she preferred to forget. When she touched a handle, the dream shimmered; when she opened a door, the room on the other side bled into light and sound from a life she had collapsed years ago.
“Dreams keep their own clocks,” whispered a voice that sounded like the walls themselves. “You woke up yesterday; now you wake up again.”
By morning the room carried a copper tang in the air, and the lamp shade wore a smear of something dark and metallic. The clock on the wall would tick backward for a heartbeat, then leap forward as if nothing had happened. A note of unspent fear settled in her chest, a memory she couldn’t name but could only catalog in the margins of her day.
Her attempts to anchor herself in routine only sharpened the bleeding line between sleep and waking. She kept a journal, not just of dreams but of the way the waking world rearranged itself around them:
- Where the mirror reflected her face a heartbeat late, as if someone else stood behind her in the glass.
- Footprints appearing on the kitchen floor, leading to a door that wasn’t there yesterday.
- A rainstorm that began inside the living room, dripping from the ceiling with a rhythm that matched the pulse in her temples.
- A clock that dripped from its numbers, pooling on the carpet like dark honey.
One night, the dream bled into daylight in a single action: she reached for the doorknob at the end of the hallway and found the door wasn’t between rooms but inside her own chest, a thing she could turn only with a choice she wasn’t sure she could make.
When she finally faced that choice, the world offered a mirror more honest than any friend. The face that looked back bore the same eyes but carried a weight she hadn’t earned. If sleep was a door she could not close, perhaps the courage lay in choosing what kind of night she would allow to fall upon her head.
Dawn after dawn, she learned to listen for the gap between breath and heartbeat, to mark the moment when sleep would begin and the red thread of memory would tug at her sleeve. If sleep ends, she realized, perhaps blood begins not as a wound but as a name you finally learn to pronounce—the name of the night you finally invite in and decide to live with.