WriteInvite.co.uk - Short Story Competitions

Becoming Someone Other

by Uta Coutts

The 10th Jul 2010 WriteOnSite Winning Entry

What is it that wakes you from sleep, transgresses that barrier between the unconscious and the conscious, tells you you’re no longer in that safe untouchable place? A sound perhaps - a dog barking, a car going by, a bird with a particularly aggressive courting trill, a gurgle in the central heating when it first kicks in, some teenagers on their way to school walking past the front of your house arguing or laughing depending on their mood swings, or maybe just the light as it stabs through the glass and past your curtains and through your closed eyelid at your retina, telling you it's daytime, rattling awake your circadian rhythm.

I never thought one could be woken by silence. No dogs barking, no teenagers, no birds, no electrical hum from a random appliance. The sort of silence you’d expect in a stretch of desert where nothing grows, no water’s ever erred, abandoned even by the wind because there’s nothing to blow against. That sort of silence, which you’d find in the center of a pillow or beneath the bark of a tree or under the ashes of a fire long burnt out.

But that’s what it is: the silence. Waking up to nothing, and knowing something’s not right and not recognising what it is. Reaching for the light switch because it’s still dark out, the click of it intrusively loud against the nothingness, and the light not coming on. Like in the winter when it’s snowed overnight and muffled light and sound, except it’s May and unlikely to snow, but I get up and look out of the window to check anyway.
It hasn't snowed. The street is there, as it was yesterday, but dark and still when it was lively and noisy.

I look for a clue to tell me the time. There's no moon out, or if there is, it's hidden behind someone's chimney, or a thick duvet of cloud. I fumble for the alarm clock on my bedside table to throw on the backlight, but it doesn't work, which is odd. I should be able to see it. In the darkness, I sweep my arm across the surface and come up against a resistance, the feeling that I should have knocked over something but didn't, the way one glides through a cloud.

A whisky bottle. It takes shape in my mind. And alongside it, another bottle, a smaller one, with a childproof cap. I can't see it but I know it's there. Empty now. Two or three of the pills spilled on the floor and I meant to pick them up but didn't, in the end.

I sink down on the edge of the bed. I'm not surprised when the mattress does not give beneath my weight. I will turn around, eventually, and look at the shape in my bed, unmoving, the innate wildness stilled, the desperation and the sadness finally extinguished. I will embrace the shape one more time, the shape I was trapped in for so long, that lonely diseased shell. And then I'll disappear like the flame of a candle when someone, in their mercy, blows it out.