HALF LIFE by DZ WAGNER

After graduating with a MSc Creative Writing degree from Edinburgh University, DZ Wagner has written 3 novels and regularly contributes to literary websites and online magazines, including Danse Macabre and Pilcrow & Dagger. He currently lives in London.

Half Life

by DZ Wagner

Under night, he invades. His slick black shell glints as he scurries over my clothes, between my books, even the words. He’s in every crevice, on the sheets, crawling, tickling my skin. I slap my neck. He’s gone.

Dr. Berg asks what I think the dream means to me. I say he doesn’t feel like a dream, and look at the clock. After I pay my 80 bucks, I rush back to work, tripping over the worn strap of my case as I hurry down the steps of Dr. Berg’s red brick.

I think he’s growing. Thumb-shaped, he moves inverted across the ceiling as easily as he does the floors, in crackling bursts of those black wire legs, stopping and going, drum beats on all sides. I wake up early and scrub the floors and the walls. Chloride rises in my nostrils and seeps into my crinkled white shirt. The smell follows me to work where paper is piled up in two ragged towers on my desk. No matter how long or fast I chip away, the towers remain level.

Night is creeping in through the tall windows of Dr. Berg’s wood-shined study. He yawns and I look at the wall of books behind him, flaunting their spines. I tell him my dream again. He tells me to face my fears, and I pay my 80 bucks.

I stand in the light drizzle with the red bricks behind me. A mosquito buzzes around my head and I clap my hands. There it is, smeared on my palm. I feel bigger and rise up defiant against the rain. I wipe the mosquito on the sidewalk and wash my hands in the falling droplets.

The air in the apartment is still when I poke my head around the front door, scanning for him. I sniff chloride. No, go to sleep, I tell myself, and then - I flinch as I see something move across the hallway, but it is just my shadow. I breathe out heavily. Go to sleep and then, and then kill him.

The second hand tolls steadily around the white-faced clock above the bed. The duvet is screwed into a mound, ringed by dark crevices that yawn like jaws. I straighten the duvet and climb underneath it.

He’s back, bigger still. Busy, and alive. The size of a fist, he shuttles back and forth in a relentless, mesmerising daze. The clock has stopped, the hands splayed, but his thick legs beat out each torturous moment. This is my chance, but instead I scream silently and pull the sheets up, unable to tear my gaze from his restless duties.

He moves towards me. Instinct draws me up like a puppet and I raise my fist high.

Don’t come any closer, I scream, but he continues, and I jump from the bed and run. My foot knocks the dressing table, layered with wrinkled clothes, and a work shirt slithers from the top. It falls, and I stumble, arms outstretched together, and as we hit the floor, it wraps me in its thin embrace. I grapple and twist and tear myself from the shirt’s grasp.

I blur past the dusty mirrors in the hallway and thud into the front door. I wrestle with the chain but I can’t untangle it. I hear his beat coming closer, the non-stop click-clack so I turn and run again, to the bathroom, screaming in blind, simian shrieks and slamming the door behind me. I sit on the toilet, eyes locked on the door and breathing in and out through my nose. In, and the tap drips. Out, and the tap drips. I hold my breath and wait for the next drip. The world is silent, gloriously. The drip explodes against the stained enamel. I scuttle to the sink and hover over it. I stay there all night, watching the drip, awake and alone.

When the daylight comes in under the bathroom door, I creak it open and look around the apartment. He’s not here. I hold my breath and listen for him. Nothing, only the ticking of the clock in the bedroom.

On the way to work, I pass Dr. Berg in the street and I brighten and say, Hi, but he doesn’t hear me, or see me, and then he is gone.

I stay awake the next night, passing the time by pacing the walls, moving in step with the ticking clock. He doesn’t come back. The next, I break up my route and criss-cross the floors in the order of no particular order. The next, I walk backwards, always alert for his return. I ache and my eyes have retreated beyond the sunken pink trails above my cheeks, but I don’t see him.

Time fades and empties. Day and night have merged like passing clouds, consuming one another. But I’m free from him. I miss my appointment with Dr. Berg and save my 80 bucks. He doesn’t call.

I think I’ve been to work, but instead of tracing my steps back to the apartment, I’m in Battery Park and the sky is black. I can’t see the water; its shimmers stifled by a moonless sky, but I smell the bay; brine and anchovies and trash, as it whips the grass and shakes the trees. Leaves flutter and hush one another. The streetlamps dot the darkness with circles of sickly yellow light.

He emerges from the shadows and passes in front of me, as big as a bear. He stops, and turns to me, his feelers groping above his head.

Am I dreaming, we say together. We twitch and move back as one.

His feelers have curled in and are still above his dark outline.

He asks, Am I the dream?