Fast-Tracked And Other Stories

Animiser

Brisk. Leaden. Rasp on and quickly fade off before becoming too much. Rasp on, fade off. Rasp on, fade off.

On, and off.

Peachy light poked at the corners of her eyelids. How she wanted to delve back into the warm and cosy darkness from whence she'd been forced to emerge. Does the session have to end now, Mr Sleepguard? It isn't like I'm asking for time to climb all the way up to the top diving board. It felt to Judith like her sluggish thoughts were being radioed in from a different timezone. Please Mr Sleepguard, if you'll just allow me to dip back into that oily black pool for forty winks of perfect sensory deprivation.

Rasp on, fade off.

Not fair, mum! How many parts of me are you going to do that to? It can't be morning already. Last night must have been the session to end all sessions because Judith had zero recollection of any of it—where she'd gone, who she'd went out with, what she wore—she must have been in a right state when she rolled in, promptly collapsed in a heap and just like that it was morning and her mum had come up and flung the curtains open and

Rasp on, fade off.

Right okay, you can quit it now—are you trying to grate my skin so you can sprinkle it on chips and beans? No need mum! I'm awake!

But no, not entirely eyes-wide-open awake; she encouraged the darkness to solidify and blot out the creeping eminence of those peachy corners.

Something came to her. A reflection in the metallic black. A great oak

(A memory of last nights session? Did we end up in the Oak & Acorn?)

overhanging a freshly filled

(Drink with Gemma and the girls?)

coffin overhanging a freshly dug grave. Perhaps it was time to leave the sleep pool but that snug rectangular hole looked ripe for a blackout snooze.

If only the relentless scrape-scrape-scrape lighting up her arms, her legs, her face would give it a rest. So maybe she came home late and slammed some doors without realising. Maybe she was heavy-footed and didn't exactly tiptoe up the stairs. She could even have bumped into the phone stool and knocked off those stupid mug-sized see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys. Did any of that entitle her to being wakened before her body was naturally ready? Doubtful!

Rasp on fade off rasp on fade off rasp on fade off. There was pain below this, she now noticed.

Knock it off mum! I'll get up when I'm good and ready! Seriously, was her mum trying to peel her like a potato or shine her like brass?

Judith made a desperate dive into the metallic black, aiming for the pitch-dark pit of the Polaroid grave on the inside of her eyelids. If she could just return to her subconscious she'd be out of reach from that non-stop rasp on, fade off. And just where had her mind sourced this image from anyway?

The last time Judith'd been to the dentist was when she was fourteen to get three teeth yanked—this was the inevitable product of growing up with parents who were too soft to police her Haribo intake, and mostly encouraged it. In the clove-smelling waiting room, Judith sat leafing through the boring magazines (deigning herself too old to play with Lego) and skimmed one of the less boring looking articles entitled Dreams And Where They Come From. It was pretty simple, Judith believed—dreams were just random snapshots (except when they involved marrying Hot Rod from the year above) and didn't come from anywhere in particular.

She didn't get to the end of the article before the dental nurse called her, but one detail from it was stuck front and centre in Judith's mind when the mask was over her mouth and nose and she was kindly instructed to count backwards from ten—apparently your brain sources the faces you see in your dreams from a log it keeps of all the people you've seen in your day to day life. Those mugshots are just stored up for no other reason than to wheel them on from stage left when you nod off to sleep. And if this applied to faces, it was hardly a massive leap to understand that it could apply to the rest of the stage-dressing, too.