The cords of death entangled me;
the anguish of the grave came upon me.
I was overcome by trouble and sorrow.
Psalm 116:3 NIV
Slow-moving through the bedroom, I don’t notice the slick, dark inky vines coming up and stretching across my bed slowly, forming a wall. The red glow of the digital clock fades, as my eyes, having already adjusted to the darkness, see nothing but the void.
I hate that clock. Placed facedown, there is still a thin line of its digital redness. My wife insists on keeping it. At night, she had started placing it down when she noticed I wasn’t sleeping but rather watching the time pass. There’s only so many Insta-reels you can watch before you lose the vibe. That was fine.
Nothing works as far as insomnia goes. Exhaustion becomes a habit. Drifting through your life, sleep is something that happens while waking, and dreams are only the reality of every conversation. I can’t remember the last time I was excited about anything new. Every movie seems like the last. What had Solomon said? “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
Everyone blames my young kids for my worn out and dragged down appearance. But truth be told, they sleep through the night rather easily. I’m afraid to tell people the truth. It’s easier to let them blame my kids rather than have them speculate on the reasons of my insomnia. If sleep is like a kind of death, then what is being awake for all hours?
When the room begins to grow darker, more than what my eyes had adjusted to, I blink rapidly, wondering if my eyes haven’t just closed. They haven’t. I can hear the soft breathing of my wife next to me, but as I reach out to touch her, something in the darkness makes a low growl that causes me to tremble.
A soft, musky scent fills my nostrils. I don’t move; I wait in the dim nothing, thinking of all the potential items around the bedroom that could be used as weapons. But alas, nothing is nearby. I can throw my complete works of Shakespeare or even the framed picture of my kids’ hands and feet dipped in paint to make a wreath hanging by my bedside since last Christmas. But no weapon would be sufficient.
I hear the vines twitch as they stretch out across my body then my wife’s. They don’t seem to hurt. They search. For what, I don’t know. I wonder if I’m sleeping. What is real anymore? They bind me closer to the bed. I can’t move.
After a short time, the room lightens. The growling that I had heard retreats into the shadows of whatever place it had come from. By the first break of light creeping in through the curtains, I’m convinced that it was just a figment of my imagination. Add sleep paralysis to my insomnia. Dreams in the waking hour can sometimes be more terrifying.
***
“How’d you sleep?”
“Fine.”
My wife stares at my tired eyes. I look at her blurry face. She seems as out of it as I am. Before I can answer, one of the babies begins to fuss. My baby just saved me from having to lie. Little mercies.
Twin daughters is a blessing but also a curse. Love shouldn’t be this dangerous. We don’t know what we’re doing. Immersed with two little babies at the same time feels like being railroaded.
Someone asked me if it was just too much cuteness that it was exhausting. Yeah, we can call it that. Love is one of those things they talk about, hell, everyone talks about it. When it comes to your kids and your family, it’s such a frequent topic that it feels stale to hear about. Then you feel it. The avalanche of it all. Nothing in the entire world prepares you to feel completely broken down like the love you have for your children. Inside I’m wrecked for them. Sure, love for your significant other is special. Love for your children, who are weak and helpless, is also special. Maybe so much love is exhausting.
Then the sleep goes. It’s easy to lose track of your life as you drift through it from one thing to the next. Memories might be dreams. Reality may not even be real. Who knows what’s really going on? Not me.
***
The drive to work is littered with school zones. Driving slows as kids walk and shout moving faster than my car. I look out the window to see the kids rushing by when a car horn startles me. Had I dozed?
One of the kids looks at me. I can see something lurking behind his eyes. Something that isn’t supposed to be there. I sound like a crazy person even to myself. I hear what sounds like bushes being brushed as my car comes to a standstill. The boy, he’s small compared to the group, slows his pace.
He stares into my car like I’m an art exhibit. The sound of leaves crunching kicks up again and then another of the dark vines shoots up in front of my eyes. Outside the car but in front of boy, another stream of black crawls down and attaches itself to my car. I feel my car shudder. I stare at the boy. The boy stares at me. Jarring me out of it, just as the car begins to rock back and forth, the world in quake as a car horn blares.
The kid breaks off his gaze at me. I jump but don’t look ahead and see behind the kid’s neck. One of the vines is connected to him. He’s working for the vines. He’s connected to them. Is it real? I don’t know. How much of this is the lack of sleep? How much is really happening to me?
I look ahead and drive forward for a few feet until the crossing guard stops me and the other cars for kids to cross the street. I see each child walking across. The boy looks at me again. Dangling from some unseen apparatus, each child is attached to the black vine. The crossing guard turns, and I see the briefest flash of the black vine dangling down her neck, reaching down into the unseen nothing.
Should I hit the gas? My mind races, seeing the kid look at me. As I feel my foot begin to move, he looks away. Maybe not. Maybe it’s a dream. I don’t know.
The car fills with the scent of jasmine. I wonder briefly if I’m having a stroke as I drive forward sixty feet before hitting another intersection. Kids are all around, but the vines are gone. Inside, I know they’re not gone. They’re just out of sight.
***
Work drifts by me in a blur. I begin a coughing spat in my office that I can’t shake. I use my garbage can to cough into trying to get a piece of mucus off my lungs that refuses to yield. Am I sick? I don’t know. I look in the garbage can and see black leaves. Where did that come from? Before I can respond, I hear someone telling me to go home.
I hold my hand up. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“No.” The office secretary who oversees the offices on the seventh floor stands in the doorway. She looks afraid to come in the room. “You don’t look fine. Go home. Get some sleep.”
They’re good people. Understanding despite everything, I wonder how long their understanding will last. How long will they give me slack before they tighten the noose? Then everything is over.
***
I stop at a fast-food place and order two burgers, fries, and a coke. I’m getting fatter. I can feel it. Is it that I can now taste the chemicals that they put into these hamburgers or is that they don’t even bother trying to hide it? Real food doesn’t taste like this.
I park two buildings away because I don’t want the attendants at the fast-food place to see me sitting in my car eating. There’s something comforting about sitting here, eating. There’s something nice about being alone. Not having anyone jumping up and down on me. Feeling the solitude press in.
I put on a TV show on my phone. Something stupid with a laugh track to distract me. I begin only hearing the laughter. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But it’s been so long since they originally filmed the laugh track that the people who were laughing are all now dead. I find I can’t do anything but stare forward hearing only the dead laughter. There’s nothing real anymore.
I finish the food and stare ahead for a few more minutes before thinking maybe I can get out of here and go home and maybe—just maybe—sleep.
***
When I open my eyes, I’m in bed. There’s nothing around. There’s no sign of movement or life, but I recognize the gentle in and out of my wife breathing next to me. I reach out to touch her but recoil as one of the dark vines grazes my hand. She doesn’t stir.
I put my hand on my face. Does lack of sleep add up to needing weeks of sleep? Am I stuck repaying a debt or will a few nights get me where I need to go? I don’t know.
As I rub my face, I feel something, and I creep out of bed into the bathroom to look in the mirror. I’m losing touch with myself. I’ve lost it. How I saw myself before is no longer who I am now. I’m stuck. I’m lost.
As I splash water on my face, I hope for some feeling of refreshing spring. I close my eyes. I hope for something as my hands go from my face to my hair and then lock behind my head when I feel it twitch.
I turn my head in the mirror seeing the vine sticking out. Seeing it attached to me, holding me in place to the place dark and down there.
I tug at it, but it doesn’t budge. I reach for the vanity scissors in the cabinet. The small pair of scissors that shouldn’t be able to cut anything but can be found in almost any vanity cabinet. I struggle with the scissors ineffectively and drop them in the sink with a clang. Then catching my expression, I see in my own face the odd, almost uninviting enchantment to look down.
When I do, I find the laughter comes from a place I’ve never known before. The bathroom tiles that we had so carefully picked out don’t exist anymore. Dark and cavernous ruins bubbling up in the transfixed nothingness fill with red and pumping nothing. I can hear people crying and shouting. My eyes lock with my own in the mirror below as I see a whole other universe expanding in the dark below. My bathroom fills with insane laughter.
I feel the first tug of the black vines pull my head back. I think this would be where you slit my throat, but nothing so advantageous. One by one, the chords pull, digging into my skin. The breaking of the mirror below and the shattering of the heavens above. Darkening out the sun, I moan in a weird mixture of pain and pleasure.
The first few chords dig in and I can see the hooks, rotted and jagged like they were made for fishing. I feel my body torn back into the great dark down there. Suspended in air, more chords come out and dig into my flesh. Keeping me lifted in pain like a fly caught in a spider’s web. The first tug from them confirms it’s not a dream but my new reality.
I hear the gnashing of teeth and the weeping of so many souls that there is no joy to be had. Still, I laugh, lost in the void. I can’t help it. The laughter doesn’t sound like my voice.
Each chord brings a terrible truth, a revelation meant to sting but only sobers me to what the universe has been waiting for: my mind to catch up to my daydreaming, nightwalking body.
It’s over. Hell is everywhere just like heaven is. I see it. The mirror is the last thing to fade away to this new reality. Nothing else exists now. Not even me.
The menace of everything halts abruptly as I stop at the red light. The girls in the back. The wife looking carelessly out the window. The cavern fills with a soft lavender and sage scent, musky and heavy that means—it must mean—the flowers came from death. Of course, they would be.
While the scents exist only to remind me of the foolish world I’ve left. Never knowing just how good it was. Never seeing it for how it was meant to be.
The red light – my eyes heavy and close for the last time. Am I looking at the braking lights ahead or the face down digital clock? Is that a light at the end of the tunnel or the glow of headlights?
***
The sound of branches moving tells me she’s coming. Not my wife, no, the revelations only come to cause more pain. I know that she and my daughters are not in this terrible place. The true horror and agony as I look up, chords pulling on my skin, unwilling to let my eyes close to see that they are up there in that dark and sacred place.
The leaves move, murky and shaking as if this place were only made of shadows and ash. She comes to me then, drifting upward, not by the wings on her back, but the chords know to lift her. Bring to me my angel of death, my mother of misery, the shadow queen beckoning me to all the lost and forgotten knowledge that I had not even known I possessed.
I let out a scream as I can hear my daughter’s laughter up above, past our house into the happy place. The happy world above where they are drawn only for an instant to look down at me. They look down and just as fleeting and twice as painful, draw their eyes away, unable to look at what I’ve become. My scream rattles me to see it’s not my laughter that is filling this pit. Nor is it my daughter’s. Who is laughing?
The shadow queen, the dark demon strokes her fingers on my cheek and whispers to me about the drunk driver. The red light. The lost world that even if awake, I could not spare them. But I had dozed at that light. So, who’s to know what would change?
“Because I dozed?” I ask for the reason of this torture. Even the question, I know, is wrong. It’s not because I slept. It’s because of something else.
She teases me with all the delusions that I had lived by. The ultimate sins I believed and allowed to consume my universe. The sins that brought me into this vacuum. Work. Work. Work. Early bird. The red light of the clock being nothing but a reminder that nothing in this world is really constrained until you choose to abandon that which is most precious. Make it happen. Manifest success. Paying your mortgage. Mowing your yard. Living your life. The lies that I am providing and the awful laughter in the depths of hell as I see now, more than ever, not that I was providing but rather someone else, something else.
That is where I hang, suspended by vines, now and forever, hearing God’s awful laughter. As if I have any control over any of it. Desolate and forsaken. Abaddon, my new home, lifting and stretching me out, the never-forgetting chords of death.
About the Author
Kris Green lives in Florida with his beautiful wife and two savage children. He’s been published over 50 times in the last few years by the wonderful people at Nifty Lit, The Haberdasher: Peddlers of Literary Art, In Parentheses Magazine, Route 7 Review, BarBar Magazine and many more. He’s won the 2023 Barbe Best Short Story and Reader’s Choice Award for his short story, “Redemption”. Currently, he has regular nonfiction articles being published by Solid Food Press on fatherhood entitled: “On Raising Savages”.
