Screams in the night

Welcome to the first ever miscellaneous Monday.

I was going to write about the twittertales (writing a real-time tale each month is starting to make me crazy*, so I’ve decided to start using regular stories, hastily cannibalised into a twitterable form. It turned out to work really, really well – as you’ll discover in April, when “Cinders” happens).

But I decided not to talk about that.

Before we were married, I slept in a single bed and CJ slept in a double. That partially explains why, when we go to sleep, I’m curled up waaaay on the very edge of my side of the bed, and CJ is curled up RIGHT up against me, with his arm around my belly.

It’s all very sweet and romantic until I want to move. How to de-spoon from CJ’s dead weight**? Who knew an arm could be so heavy? Where can I possible move to anyway, with only millimeters to spare and a wall of husband blocking all feasible options other than the windowsill?

But it’s fine, because CJ doesn’t just sleep promptly – he sleeps thoroughly.

So I simply turn over as well as I can, and he – without in any way waking up – instinctively turns over and shifts to his side of the bed. Easy!

Or so I thought.

Last night, in a haze of sleepy contentment, I began the usual nightly operation of mutual turning over.

CJ began sleepily turning over, as always. About halfway into his unconscious turn something in his mind snapped. He finished the turn at rapid speed – and kept turning, faster and faster until he fell off the bed with a scrambling thud.

I heard violent battle commence at once between CJ’s limbs, the floor, his bag, and his shoes. It sounded bad. I screamed. CJ won the fight, however, and charged for the doorway (after a brief but fervent altercation with the dressing table), where he slapped on the light before he was fully upright.

The lightbulb above the bed blazed into luminescence, and I saw CJ, still hunched from his flight, staring fixedly at the light. He spoke with the deep voice of a man still crouched ready to grab a weapon: “It’s. . . it’s gone.”

By this time I was sitting up in bed, very concerned the corner of our dressing table had brained my husband. “What is it? What’s wrong? CJ?”

He didn’t break his stare at the light, evidently not quite believing that the threat to us had passed. His voice was still deep, clipped, and utterly serious.

“Dragonfly,” he said.

I stared at him in disbelief, and he began to realise something was off. There was a long and mutual pause.

“. . . a big one,” he amended.

I laughed hysterically for the next hour, gasping for breath. My unconscious mind regularly comes up with ravening zombies, nests of vampires (not the sparkly kind), gun massacres, automatons with knives coming out of their fingertips, and so on.

CJ has a nightmare about a bug. A pretty bug. He assured me it was “as big as a pigeon”.

That didn’t help.

Next Monday: Top ten awesomenesses to play along at home.

*er

**He’s pretty much always asleep before me. Cue comments about “no rest for the wicked”, “guilty conscience”, etc.