My editor (I love saying that!) has got back to me with more revisions for novel so Flash Fiction is paused. Will the world keep turning?

Today’s 60-minute flash fiction was triggered by an article from the BBC on sleep disorders 

The Sleephog’s Note

It’s been years since I held a pen in my hand. Probably not since school, come to think of it, so if what I write seems all wrong, that’s probably why. Or part of the reason why.

So, where to begin? Like most folks these days I’m thinking back to how it all started, the big sleep. Everyone can remember where they were and what they were doing the first time they saw a sleephog. I saw one walking down my street in the early days, stripped to his underpants and talking gibberish into his mobile phone.

At first there were just a few, of course. I can still remember the documentaries on the telly. They were called ‘parasomiacs’ then, but when their numbers increased, that soon changed to sleephogs. The BBC still call them parasomniacs but out in the streets they’re sleephogs.

Not that you see many people out on the streets now, and certainly not after nightfall, not since the rise of the hogs. They come out mainly at night, you see, but there’s plenty now in the daytime too. And they’re harder to spot then. I keep indoors myself. Haven’t been outside in weeks.

If we’d acted then, near the beginning, the beginning of the end, we could have controlled it. But we didn’t know it was a virus. The experts said it wasn’t.

We didn’t know they were dangerous. And besides, most of the time they weren’t dangerous. You slip in and out of, this parasomnia, especially in the early stages of infection. But after a few weeks you stop coming back, you stop coming out of it. You ‘cease to revert to consciousness’ as the boffins say.

We should have burnt them at the beginning. But it’s not easy to burn a loved one. One night you wake up and find your wife walking around the house in her nightdress, looking a bit dopey, but she’s still your wife. You don’t think “Oh, I’d better stab her in the jugular with a steak knife and then set her on fire out in the garden after I siphon some petrol out of the car.”

And the next day she’s right as rain, but a couple of nights after that she’s up again, watching the static on the TV, or spreading milk on a sandwich, or texting gibberish to no-one. And when you try to talk to her she makes no sense, answers questions you haven’t asked, responds to words in a sentence but doesn’t know what the sentence means.

A month down the line and there’s nothing left. I mean, the shell is still there. The body of your wife is still the body of your wife. It still eats and walks and talks but the mind’s gone. You’re married to a sleepwalker, sleeping beside a sleephog.

Of course, you know it’s just a question of time before the nightmares begin. Who knows what’s going on inside their heads, but if you happen to be nearby, then you’re the one they’ll be fighting against. If you don’t fight back, a sleephog will kill you, biting and tearing at you like a rabid dog.

That’s how I got it. She’d been infected for about three or four weeks by then, my wife that is. I know I should have called the SLEEPers, but I just couldn’t do it. Not after all these years together.

Besides, they’ve gotten real nasty of late, the SLEEPers. They started off as scientists in lab coats, then they needed coppers to make up numbers, then the army, then conscripts. Now they’re just scum with a badge.

And I’ve heard about the scorched earth policy too. The word on the street is that when you call the SLEEPers nowadays they come round your house and put a bullet inside the skull of anyone they find inside. Then it’s a few bags of quicklime dumped over your body and off they go, sticking a quarantine sticker on the door as they leave, after helping themselves to any valuables that take their fancy.

No, that’s not the end I have in mind.

But I’d better get a move on. I can feel my mind drifting off and that’s a bad sign. It won’t be long now. I think I’ve got me the virulent strain, ‘supersomnia’. It’ll be hours with me, not weeks.

So, everything’s ready. Mavis is tied up in front of me, gagged and frothing a bit around the gills, rocking back and forth like a … well, like a mad woman really.

I’ve just about finished my note and I’ve sharpened up the steak knife so there’s no putting it off any longer. It’s the kindest way really. It’s the kindest way.