The Bed

Here’s a bit of flash fiction. Picture from Pixabay

As she sat in her desk that took up half of one of the walls spaces in the small room, she sighed. It was a sorrowful type of sigh. She turned to face the wall behind her and there it was, its headboard to the tiny window…...her bed.

She feared that bed more than she feared catching covid. The bed to her symbolised, not sleep, but nightmares……bad ones! She had been getting them for most of her adult life, but lately they were so violent and vicious that they made her fear sleep.

She sat at her sizeable desk, the wardrobe to her right, and put off going to sleep for as long as she could. She put it off so much that she fell asleep in her desk chair. As her desk chair had no arms, she slipped off of it with a thud, and slept on the ground until she woke up cold. Only then did she lay on top of the bed to finish the night……

……’Get them off, get them off!’ she screamed as a plague of locusts encompassed her being. She tried to brush them off but more and more kept coming. She sat bolt upright in the bed gasping for air. The locusts had disappeared. She shook her head, ‘Bloody bed!’ Before she could do anything about it, she was running from a man with a knife through the woods. ‘Come out come out wherever you are!’ he said in a sing song voice. She stepped on a twig, the loud crack filling the air. The man ran towards her and just as his knife descended towards her heart, she sat bolt upright again. She clutched her chest and looked down the top of her saturated pyjamas to see if there was any blood. She was relieved to see there wasn’t.

She looked at the clock, it was only 6:27. She sighed again and rose from her bed to her desk chair. She turned towards the bed and sighed. ‘Why?’ She asked it aloud, ‘why do you hate me so much?’ A single tear escaped her eye which she quickly wiped away. She didn’t want the bed to see it had gotten her so emotional. She was treating it like a person…as if the bed was someone she curses at because she couldn’t curse at anyone or anything else.

‘You can’t control your dreams!’ she repeated over and over as she let the dull light of day into her tiny room, relieved that she had escaped it…...for now.