Shortlisted 2024 WestWord Flash Prize
You liked to tease me for my compulsion to write things down, to leave little notes for myself, to make to-do lists on the backs of envelopes. “Surely you aren’t really afraid that you’ll forget to wash your hair”, you’d say, holding up one of the scraps of paper from the bench and raising your eyebrows. Or, if we’d reached the stage in a fight where it seemed necessary to cause each other pain, you would say that my lists are a substitute for actually living. “You make a list of goals every six months”, you’d point out, “and tinker with it for weeks—crossing things out, writing it again on clean pieces of paper, colour-coding it, and then put it away, satisfied, and go back to re-watching old sit-coms every night.” And I might snap back: “At least I have goals—not just logistics,” but you’d landed your shot, and you knew it.
Of course, making lists is how we live now—although even that’s become difficult. They say we’re in uncharted waters, psychologically speaking. But I go on writing, because what else can I do?
It took some time for us to realise that an entire city had stopped dreaming.
At first, you just assume that you’re forgetting your dreams, and forgetting having forgotten; and then, by the time you realise something is wrong—well, it’s not the sort of thing to send you rushing to the emergency room. This made it impossible to pinpoint whether everyone had been afflicted at once, or whether it had spread. In the early days, it was mostly a source of puzzled amusement. Shuffling blearily along in a supermarket queue, I heard a young mother say: “So, this is what we’ve been training for.” There were the usual speculations, conspiracy theories—Chinese bioweapons, government mind-control, old-fashioned witchcraft—but none amounted to much. It was just something that had happened.
The authorities, unwilling to take chances, imposed a temporary quarantine; began deliveries of food relief. This, too, was met with a certain dark humour.
You mostly took it in your stride—although you’d always been precious about your sleep—but I felt a real pang of loss. As a girl, I’d had such vivid dreams of unwrapping a new toy, or of my father coming home with a kitten, that I often awoke and set about searching the house from top to bottom for my nocturnal playmates. The clarity and illusory solidity of these dreams had hardly faded with age, despite the change of subject matter, and I’d been in the habit of wriggling myself into my nest of thick bedding in pleasurable anticipation of adventures to come.
The most immediate consequence of our loss of REM sleep was a general fuzziness around the edges of reality: like regular sleep deprivation, but less obviously debilitating. I would see shapes in my peripheral vision, turn to find nothing. You would trail off, mid-sentence, looking puzzled.
Work became difficult. We could all more or less go on doing familiar tasks, but it became harder and harder to learn anything new. You told me you’d explain an accounting issue to one of your juniors and they would be back, two days later, wincing apologetically. “Good to know some things haven’t changed,” I said. But in quiet moments, I began to hear the beating of immense wings all around, and soon, all I could do about it was to wiggle my earphones into place and go out running, at whatever hour.
Our emotional regulation suffered. My tendencies for anxiety and fear of abandonment; yours for depression and claustrophobia. I would try to discuss the future, gently bring up a timeline for our first child, working back from the rapidly approaching age at which the decision might be taken out of our hands. “What’s the point?” you’d ask. “At this rate, we’ll be senile before the kid’s out of diapers.” You’d pick up your book—you were going through a WWII phase—and grimly go back to the start of the same chapter you’d been reading for weeks. Other nights, you would come to me with tears streaking your face and snuggle into my chest while I stroked your hair.
“There has to be a cure,” you said. You would refresh your PubMed search every day.
We started to see fistfights in the supermarket, minor road accidents that spiralled into terrifying incidents of rage. It was no longer safe for me to go out running at night. Soon, I thought twice about going in the day.
One day, we just stopped going to work.
It became almost impossible to retain new memories. I wrote notes every day and read them when I woke up. I conducted our lives through to-do lists and checkboxes.
My notes tell me we had a screaming match one night and, in the midst of it, I slapped you. I know you don’t remember. I’m greatly tempted not to tell you, but I find I have to tell you every day and ask for forgiveness, because I don’t remember having been forgiven. I have to explain that your flash of anger, your balled fist are why we now leave polite little letters if chores have gone undone, or if one of us has said something tactless.
This morning, I left a written invitation for you to come to bed with me next to your cup of coffee. I know this because I just read it in my notes, but the last thing I remember is waking to find myself astride you, hearing great wings beating, gusts of warm air buffeting me. I hear the wings more frequently. At times, I turn to catch a glimpse of immense eye-patterns, on a rippling surface of grey scales.
Am I losing more than my memory?
We are still under quarantine. No one is coming to care for us, in our slow decline. All we have, in the end, is each other.
It will have to be enough.
Author: Steven lives in Perth, Western Australia, where he buys too many books, provides domestic services to two cats, and occasionally writes. He won first prize in WestWord's July Monthly Micro.