A Sleep So Deep by Brian Cosgrove
As the unforgivingly cold winds bite at my face, I struggle to unscramble my thoughts. The crunching of leaves under my feet and the distant howling of the wind only add to my utter confusion. Still, I trudge on through midnight. Where too? I have no idea. All I know is that the black sky, hidden by the many trees which surround me, truly covers my world. My very life now seems to be swallowed by a dark shadow which I myself have cast.
I don’t know where I am going, but I know that I seek peace. Peace from the world, peace from the darkness, but most of all, peace from myself. I wish I could die, not only to save myself, but to save others from the monster that intends to consume my soul. It all seems like a horrible nightmare…
I woke up one morning same as any other day. “Thank God for Saturdays,” I thought to myself, glad to not have to worry about getting up for school. As I stumbled out of bed, I noticed my hands were covered in dark red. I looked in the mirror and saw that my face was crusted with dried blood. “What the hell?” I thought to myself beginning to shake. “There must be some kind of reason for this. Maybe….maybe I had a nose bleed in my sleep!” It seemed to make sense, so I took a shower and thought nothing of it.
I went down stairs to see my parents quietly talking about something. Something was wrong. “Brandon, we have something to tell you,” my dad said. Yep, something was definitely wrong. “Edgar is gone.”
Edgar was my Golden Retriever. Yes, I named him after Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe not the best name for a dog, but I wasn’t about to name my dog a boring name like “Rex” or “Lucky.” “All right, I’ll go out looking for him,” I said. Edgar was a very imaginative dog that would like to go out and explore once in a while. It wasn’t too rare for him to wander off, so I wasn’t very worried.
“No, son,” said my dad beginning to choke up. “He’s dead. Mr. Phillips from next door heard something last night. He looked outside to see someone walking into the woods dragging something that appeared to be Edgar. He’s been killed.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I went upstairs to my room. I turned off my phone, and sat in my room for the remainder of the day. “Some son of a bitch killed my dog, and for what reason?!” So I wrote. I wrote poems filled with anger and sadness. I wrote until the sky darkened, and my eyes felt heavy. Soon I drifted off to sleep.
I woke up the next morning. My face felt dirty and crusty. Looking at my reflection through the mirror, I noticed again that my face was covered in blood. This time even my shirt was stained in crimson red. “Man, I should probably see a doctor about these nose bleeds.” I threw my shirt out and washed myself clean in the shower. After getting dressed, I looked out the window to see three police cars parked next door.
I walked outside to see what was going on. I found Mrs. Phillips in tears, trying to give the cops some kind of information. I saw my Dad walking out of our house. “What happened?” I asked hoping he would know something.
“Mr. Phillips is missing. His wife said he went out for a walk last evening and hadn’t come back all night. Nobody has seen him anywhere.”
It seemed very strange. Mr. Phillips seemed to be happily married to his wife and had no real reason to leave his home. Although I didn’t know him very well, I knew that he was a kind, gentle man. Leaving his wife seemed very out of character. Perhaps...something has happened to him.
