Half awake, he groaned. ‘Oh, no!’

Had he been less dizzy with sleep he might have used a stronger term. But his intellect was one of the less awake parts of him; planned language was too great an effort in the darkness under the blankets.

Yet not unplanned language. His intellect might be stunned and confused; but his muse was awake and eager. His emotions were still running with the fire of the words that had arisen in his thoughts in the clear landscape of his subconscious, in the otherworld between deep dreaming and awareness. They pulsed in his mind with a vividness that, even despite his weariness, made him reluctant to let them go. There was a passion in them so vibrant that there seemed nothing at all more worth doing than to follow their course, like a kayak doomed to seek white water all the way down the river.

Yet his bed was warm; and the bedroom was freezing, after the east wind that had chilled all of the town for days.

He hesitated; and hesitated again. The words in his mind seemed huge, like the ringing of distant mighty bells that must be obeyed. They made his head feel swollen, to be frank, just as much as –

Aaargh! Why had he let that come to mind? Now he was aware that his bladder was swollen, too. Not that that was unusual; like his Dad before him he had inherited a small bladder; a nightly trip was quite usual. Well, that decided it. At least he could kill two birds with one stone.

Leaving his wife’s soft, warm side, he rolled, wincing, so that his feet landed on the floor. Cold? It was bitter! And he now desperately wanted a pee. He shuffled to the bathroom and back as fast as he could, crawled back into bed, pulled the blankets over him . . . . then remembered.

He lay there, torn. But yet again, the words started to flood through his mind like great ocean rollers, ones that were clearly going to break against the cliffs of his resistance until he crumbled. Groaning silently again, he reached one arm out of bed. Somewhere, he was sure that he had seen a scrap of paper on the floor last night. It was probably an old shopping list or a credit card receipt. He could overwrite what was on it in thick black ink - anything would do. And a pen from the pocket of his discarded trousers . . . ah – which one? He suddenly remembered that one of the two pens in his pocket had dried up. He had found that out on the creative writing course last evening, as everyone else had copied down some key detail and relaxed while he was still scrabbling for his second pen.

There – he was sure that that pen with the knob on the end was the one that worked. And – good – that was the paper. Light? No – he really could not. His wife had gone early to bed with a Lem-sip and a thick head, in misery, and she had a key meeting tomorrow. Was it too cold to creep, shuddering, back to the bathroom? Surely he could write in the darkness. With a black biro, in black night, on a piece of paper that could have anything on it, he scribbled down the key words that were resonating still through his grey cells. They had better be legible tomorrow! Finally, with a sigh of relief, he dropped paper and pen on the seat beside his head and lay back. The bed was really warm. He snuggled down, then sidled up next to his wife, warming his cold hands. He could sleep now for the rest of the night.

For how long? For some reason – it was just a personal quirk from further back than he could remember - he could never get back to sleep in the middle of the night unless he had some idea of the time. He would have to look. He stretched out one hand and picked up the alarm clock. He turned the face as far from his sleeping wife as he could while still seeing it himself, and pressed the button for the light.

The clock showed exactly three o’clock. Just then, there was a rattle against the pane as a blast of rain blew sideways onto it. Even under the clothes, he could feel a freezing draught blowing through the room from the loose window frame, all the way to the gap under the bedroom door. He shuddered again, this time with relief, and reached out to replace the clock, with its light now fading, on its little shelf.

As he did so, the light fell on the piece of paper on which he had written. He saw it clearly, for one moment just before the light fled. Most of the paper was black. Black?! Why was there a black paper by his bed? And the small area that was not, held the imprint, very faintly, of a pen that had contained no ink.

[George B. Hill (2013)]