Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

“Whoa,” Lila said. “Do a lot of people have those?”

“Just about twenty of us. We’re all people who worked at a sleep research center at the university. We fixed ourselves. Lee did, anyway, with Porter. I was the first to volunteer.”

No reason to tell her about the disaster with Kitov, she figured.

“Everyone should get one,” the girl said.

Felicia agreed. “That’s why I came out here,” she explained. “To take my family to the center, if they’re still here.”

The mask stared at her for a long silence.

“Will you take me?” Lila finally asked.

“Of course.”

“Is there food?”

“Hope you like pasta,” Felicia said, smiling at the thought of all the pasta she had eaten at the center. The security team had found what appeared to a hundred years’ worth of the stuff in the university’s emergency stores.

“Cool,” Lila said. “Pasta’s awesome.”

“Then you’ll like the center,” Felicia said. “It’s down in San Diego, overlooking the ocean. It’s practically a resort.”

She winced. That was laying it on pretty thick.

The girl was quiet for a long time and Felicia thought maybe she had fallen asleep, until she asked, “So do you have a boyfriend?”

Felicia lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “I did,” she said.

“What was his name?”

“Chase.”

“I like that name. What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. We broke up just before all this started.”

“Why did you break up?”

“We had issues.”

“What kind of issues?”

Felicia paused, not sure she wanted to get into all this, especially with a kid. “It just wasn’t working out,” she finally said.

“Were you sad?”

“Yes. It was awful. We knew each other since we were kids. Even younger than you are right now.”

“Where is he now? Chase.”

“I don’t know,” Felicia said. “The last I heard from him was a voice mail, saying he and our friend Jordan were going away on a road trip, and that he would be back in time for my birthday. That was before we knew what was happening,” she added, going silent as her thoughts raced on.

Lila was silent too. Felicia sat up and studied her. The girl was sitting on the mattress, leaning against the wall. Her mask pushed forward, and those big eyes staring at her feet. “Are you asleep?” she said quietly.

“No,” a small voice said from inside the mask.

“Go ahead. It’s safe.”

“I believe you,” the girl said.

She decided to leave the girl alone, give her some space. Maybe she’s thinking too much. Maybe she thinks I’m going to attack her.

“I’ll be quiet,” she said.

For a while, she watched the girl’s foot move. It was wagging slowly. From behind the mask, she said, “I will never go home. I don’t want to see it.”

“See what?”

“Them,” the girl said.

“Your parents?”

“Yeah, but dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“They told me in a letter,” Lila said flatly. “They said they were going to do it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Felicia said.

The girl said nothing, but her silence seemed to send a message. Her silence and the big still eyes of the mask. Yours will be dead too, they seemed to say.

IN THE morning, at exactly seven o’clock, Felicia awoke to find herself alone in the room. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. All the furniture they had used to barricade the door had been pushed aside. Felicia went to the door and saw that it was still locked, the wind chime still in place.

She must have gone out, locking the door behind her, Felicia thought. But why would she do that?

The girl’s backpack, she noticed, was gone.

She opened the door and called out for her. The house was quiet.

Felicia dressed and went downstairs, walking right into the trip wires Lila had set up the night before. The cans clanked and rattled like dull bells. She picked her way through them and entered the garage, squeezing between the cars parked there.

Oh no no no, she said, looking up and down the street. Why would she leave?

Then she was running down the street, calling out. The houses stared out at her, blank, empty. No sign of the girl.

Felicia returned to the garage of the house and waited, peering out at the street. Maybe she’ll come back, she thought. Maybe she went to find us something other than power bars to eat for breakfast. But the fact that she took her backpack said otherwise.

She stared out at the street, or watched flies zigzagging in the air, passing through dust-filled shafts of light. The sun moved over the houses, pushing shadows across the cluttered yards.

A few men passed by, stumbling along and talking to themselves. She ducked low, watching them for any hints. It was clear they were lost, disoriented by their sleepless state. She could smell them though they were thirty feet away.

I can’t wait all day, she thought, but I will wait as long as I can.

Later, a woman came down the street and looked directly at the house.

Felicia put her age somewhere in the midthirties. She had a dirty face under a ratty tangle of hair and a slipper on one foot. Her simple flower-print dress was torn. She was wearing it backward.

The woman lingered in front of the house for a minute or so, staring up at it as if trying to remember something. Her mouth was moving. She was either chewing something or silently reciting some endless conversation.

Felicia let her wander off. But when the woman came by again, only minutes later, she decided to try to talk to her. She was kicking at a crack in the sidewalk when Felicia stepped out of the shadowy garage. When the woman saw her, she froze and stared with exhausted eyes.

As Felicia approached, the woman appeared to recognize her, but was then immediately devastated to realize that she didn’t. She wavered on her feet and Felicia went to her side and held her up, gagging at the sharp tang of urine.

“Have you seen a girl?” Felicia asked. “About this high? Wearing an owl mask?”

The woman just stared, her eyes moving over Felicia’s face. She was searching for something, her mouth frozen open. She said, “Dreams got so upsetting to him because he had to watch every one of them and they were so ugly and evil that no more sleeping and dreaming was allowed to happen in our heads.”

This was a new one to Felicia. Lee would be interested in hearing it, but what about Lila? It was clear this woman was too far gone to help. Felicia lowered her to the curb as the woman’s face continued to flash between joy and despair. There was something electric about it, as if the different motor cells of her brain were being shocked with a probe, causing her face to open and close like a fist. Felicia could see the muscles working spastically under the skin as she backed away.

Two hours later, she decided she had to move on.

FELICIA turned the corner and looked down the street of her childhood. She was having doubts about actually entering her house. It was easy to imagine how she would find them, after what she had seen yesterday.

Did she really need specifics to haunt her? Dreamless sleep was a blessing, she had already learned. No dreams, no nightmares.

She stopped and sat under a parkway tree, setting the backpack on the curb. The neighborhood was silent. No barking dogs, she observed. No hammering from construction sites, or airplanes flying over. No rumble of school buses. This kind of sunny September day would still bring the splash of neighbors doing cannonballs into their pool, the referee’s whistle from the soccer field. The pulse of bass from a car going by, the whine of the gardener’s blower.

What had happened was this, she realized: the world had been turned inside out. That was the only way to describe it. That was the result of a world without sleep. All outside things were now inside. Everything else that we kept in our heads, in our hearts, has flooded out into the open air.