Chapter Text
Chris wakes up with an inaudible gasp.
His eyes flutter open in the dark, only able to make out his hand nearby his face, gripping the pillow. A wave of suffocating heat washes over his senses and he feels trapped within the tangled sheets, his chest heaving and his back clammy with sweat.
The room around him is quiet but for his ragged breathing and he remains still, trying to regain composure.
Only a dream, he thinks, trying to soothe himself. It didn’t really happen.
With his eyes getting used to the dark, he turns his head and sees his wife lying next to him, soundly asleep.
Chris feels the situation for what it is, and so he contemplates it only for a moment, then rises into a sitting position onto the side of the bed. His eyes drop with fatigue, but he knows he won’t be able to fall asleep soon.
He relieves himself in the bathroom and afterwards strips down his shirt which was sticking to his cooling sweat covered back. On his way out, he only pays a single glance to the bedroom, and with disquiet still gnawing on his stomach, he continues to the apartment’s living room, eventually sitting on the couch facing the window.
Chris inhales a few deep breaths, settles down the rest of the tension in his body and listens to the night’s lull of stillness.
His eyes serve the living room until they rest on a pile of clothes, neatly folded on the opposite couch. Those are his clothes, he knows, ready and set for his working day tomorrow.
Chris lifts his fingers to noisily scratch at his bare chest and frowns.
In his dream, he is running on a deck, chasing a train. His throat feels parched and dusty, and so while he repeatedly tries to call out to the driver to slow down the train and wait, that he is here, just behind the wagon - his mouth only produces a few shrivelled words, sounding like ragged whispers. Despaired, he slows down to a halt and stares at the diminishing train.
As he searches for other trains, buses, or any other means which might be able to take him away from the abandoned station, the night falls quickly and swallows him whole.
Swishing night breeze flows from the window and Chris shivers, but not only from the night’s chill.
A small book on the table draws his attention and he leans forward to pull it into his lap.
He had bought this book for his daughter, not too long ago. It is a children’s book, exploring the sun’s solar system and even presenting the Milky Way, earth’s galaxy.
Chris slowly browses through the pages, the fine images of stars and other wonders of space drawing his curiosity and imagination just as they did back in the store when he had spotted the book for the first time. His fingers roam over the last image in the book, a panoramic image of the brightest stars seen from earth on an especially dark night, taken in the Nevada dessert in the Unites States.
He closes the book, places it back on the table, and resumes staring at the night sky through the window.
Chris's thoughts travel to his wife, his children, his parents and brothers, his career.
Soon enough he turns his gaze back to the neatly folded clothes on the couch.
All is set. All is ready for work, he thinks, and an uneven huff escapes his lips.
I have everything I need in my life, he tells himself.
I don’t need anything else. Nothing is missing.
Impatient with himself, he rises from the couch and strides towards the bedroom, trying to stifle the thuds of his bare feet meeting the floor.
A howl is sounded through the window and he halts. An animal’s howl, tight and hacked.
It sounds like laughter, he muses. As if someone out there is mocking him.
Chris lets out a barely muffled curse and resumes walking to bedroom,
determined to go back to sleep.
Tomorrow he will go back to his life’s regular routine, and nothing, he thinks, nothing will be missing.