Soul-crushing retail slavery is a proven method to wear a human being down to a nub.
Or at least that's where I've chosen to dump the blame for all my troubles; Not dropping out of college and dedicating myself to scaling the vertical wall of story-telling as a career, nor blowing too much money on junk food and early Halloween candy. No, my natural laziness compelled me to seek easy answers for all my complicated problems. Which is why I turned to another trendy device when a months-long battle with insomnia got the jump on me.
I found the watch at a flea market on one of my annual Saturdays off. I'd never heard of the brand, some Italian-ish word like "Formarsi." It looked like a rip-off of those basic fitness trackers you're supposed to link up with an app, showing just a clock and a step-counter rendered in tiny digital lights. The tag I've long since lost also suggested it could track sleep patterns, which my tired, hopeful brain tricked me into thinking would be useful.
So I brought the thing home for one large pizza's worth of bills, only to discover no matching app on the Play store. And all sales are final, in case you've never shopped at a flea market.
So I was stuck with a cheap step counter and no desire to go jogging.
Good old-fashioned denial kept me from just tossing it, and I ended up wearing the damn thing to work the next day. I tracked myself right up to 14,700 steps by midnight. I remember this clearly because I actually counted off and paced the hallway to make sure it rolled up to the next even hundred, and then I tumbled into bed with the thing on my wrist hoping I could find another way to harvest the sleep pattern data later.
Most nights I lay for hours staring at the window opposite my bed. A tall spruce has leaned against my side of the house longer than I've been alive, and the lowest of its boughs glowed blue in the moonlight and scratched across the glass like fingertips. Little me had nightmares about that sound, placing it to monsters lurking in the shadow of the tree and desperate to lure me out for a feast. As I grew older, the gentle scraping of needle on pane became a second home, and until my recent troubles it could have sang me to sleep in a hurricane.
Then insomnia left me conscious in bed for hours, counting the thick needles grazing the window to rein in the thoughts racing through my head. Sometimes I would just feel myself begin to drift off before the wind would pull a branch and slap it back against the glass, knocking the few dusty shreds of a dream from my eyelids and starting a peal of thunder in my chest.
But sleep came fast the first night I wore the tracker, creeping over me like a blanket drawn up by a mother's hand. The tense muscles in my legs eased first, and the feeling of relaxation drifted up into my core and down to my fingers. I had counted three hundred and forty six needles before it reached my head, and the last thing I saw was a pair of gently glowing orbs stirring in the dark outside, like a car pulling around the bend past my neighbors backyard as the sandman took me.
I woke up not perfect but refreshed. Cobwebs still clung to my eyes as I levered myself out of bed, and I sat on the edge of the mattress praying to whatever god would listen that this would be the first step to a satisfying recovery. As I stretched my arms and reached for the glasses on my nightstand, my eyes grazed over the tracker bound to my wrist.
Sunlight spraying through the trees outside lit the step counter on its face. It read: "14,758."
I blinked.
Maybe the cheap watch counted my tossing and turning as steps. But I felt like I'd slept well for once.
As easy it could have been to write it off as faulty hardware, I just couldn't let it go. I counted my steps to the bathroom and the kitchen just to see if I forgot a mundane visit in the night. The former was a thirty-step round trip, and it took even longer just to reach the fridge at the other end of the house.
Whatever my suspicions, I still had to work. I reset the counter on my watch, pinned my name to my chest, and set out for another day's grind. And a draining grind it was, too, so I returned home at night too tired to care about my silly watch and its budget sensors. I didn't even take it off. I just laid down and listened to the scratching branches, counted their needles, and waited for the car to come around the bend just as I slept.
Branches scratched. Needles counted. Headlights flashed.
The next day, I woke up with 58 extra steps.
The day after that gave me 58 again.
The day after that gave me, again, exactly 58 extra steps.
And that's when my slow-drip brain decided to get serious.
Every night I slept a little deeper, and every day I woke a little brighter. Something inside me inched closer to normal ever since I bought the tracker, and I was honestly half afraid to question it. Was I sleepwalking? Where was I going in the middle of the night? What lay exactly 29 measured steps from my bed, and what did I do when I arrived?
By the end of the week I was maddened by the consistency of my secret journey, and I elected to seek the answer. My neighbor's son was an old pal from high school, and it took just a small bluff about neighborhood prowlers to borrow a set of expensive trail cameras for a night or two. I placed three along the hallways of my house and one each in the bath and bedroom. I even put one out on the back porch just in case, shivering at the thought of all the dangers I could stumble into half-asleep in the darkness of the woods beyond my yard.
Then I put myself to bed. I reset the tracker and I began to count the needles. The gaze of another coincidental car slid around the bend, headlights bright and pale as moons, just as my brain slipped into the shadows.
As expected, I woke up with 58 steps the next morning. But now I also had eight hours of night vision footage from the high corner opposite my bed.
I sat down at my computer straight away to watch the feed.
I watched myself drift to sleep right around 3 AM. Video-Me pulled up to a sitting position along the foot of the bed about fifteen minutes later, staring straight out through closed eyelids at the window. I could see the shadows of the needles dancing along my chest as the glow of headlights drew closer and brighter, brighter than should be possible until it almost seemed like the car had driven right up onto my yard and parked itself just out of view behind the glass. Video-Me stood up and, still asleep, turned the lock above the window sill. He gently grasped the bottom of the window and began to pull, sliding it up with what I know from experience to be a grating squeal of metal on metal that should have woken me.
Hell, I can hardly do it in the daytime without wincing from the pain in my ears. But Video-Me did not wake.
Instead, he stood and listened to the night song of crickets and other insects I couldn't name, eyes screwed shut tight, alone before my open bedroom window while the headlights outside waited. And then...
Then an arm reached through the open window.
It loomed huge and woolly like a ram's back, all matted gray hair and toned muscle. I stared in horror as it drifted into the camera's narrow view, reaching out like it might grasp my neck and toss me across the room. Instead it offered me a leathery hand, palm up, beckoning.
And I took it.
The hand guided me out, holding the brunt of my weight as Video-Me folded himself out the window and set off in the company of... Something. Hours later I returned, tumbling back through the window, shutting it, and collapsing in my bed mere moments before waking.
That was two weeks ago. I returned the trail cameras and deleted all the footage from that night, and I've lived in denial ever since. In fact, I'd nearly convinced myself it was all a dream until this morning.
See, a bad storm rolled through my town last night, the kind that tears up business signs and uproots bushes around the school. I lost power for hours in the very early morning, and I know this because my alarm clock blinked 5:02am when the daylight shook me awake. It was also the kind of storm that turns the garden around your house into a mud pit. As I leaned out my window this morning to survey the damage to the yard, I noticed a pair of deep grooves in the dirt just outside the sill.
Footprints led to and from my window. One set was mine. The other was larger, but long and thin and pointed, like a hulking deer walking on its hind-legs.
And the tracker? It read exactly 58 steps.
Or at least that's where I've chosen to dump the blame for all my troubles; Not dropping out of college and dedicating myself to scaling the vertical wall of story-telling as a career, nor blowing too much money on junk food and early Halloween candy. No, my natural laziness compelled me to seek easy answers for all my complicated problems. Which is why I turned to another trendy device when a months-long battle with insomnia got the jump on me.
I found the watch at a flea market on one of my annual Saturdays off. I'd never heard of the brand, some Italian-ish word like "Formarsi." It looked like a rip-off of those basic fitness trackers you're supposed to link up with an app, showing just a clock and a step-counter rendered in tiny digital lights. The tag I've long since lost also suggested it could track sleep patterns, which my tired, hopeful brain tricked me into thinking would be useful.
So I brought the thing home for one large pizza's worth of bills, only to discover no matching app on the Play store. And all sales are final, in case you've never shopped at a flea market.
So I was stuck with a cheap step counter and no desire to go jogging.
Good old-fashioned denial kept me from just tossing it, and I ended up wearing the damn thing to work the next day. I tracked myself right up to 14,700 steps by midnight. I remember this clearly because I actually counted off and paced the hallway to make sure it rolled up to the next even hundred, and then I tumbled into bed with the thing on my wrist hoping I could find another way to harvest the sleep pattern data later.
Most nights I lay for hours staring at the window opposite my bed. A tall spruce has leaned against my side of the house longer than I've been alive, and the lowest of its boughs glowed blue in the moonlight and scratched across the glass like fingertips. Little me had nightmares about that sound, placing it to monsters lurking in the shadow of the tree and desperate to lure me out for a feast. As I grew older, the gentle scraping of needle on pane became a second home, and until my recent troubles it could have sang me to sleep in a hurricane.
Then insomnia left me conscious in bed for hours, counting the thick needles grazing the window to rein in the thoughts racing through my head. Sometimes I would just feel myself begin to drift off before the wind would pull a branch and slap it back against the glass, knocking the few dusty shreds of a dream from my eyelids and starting a peal of thunder in my chest.
But sleep came fast the first night I wore the tracker, creeping over me like a blanket drawn up by a mother's hand. The tense muscles in my legs eased first, and the feeling of relaxation drifted up into my core and down to my fingers. I had counted three hundred and forty six needles before it reached my head, and the last thing I saw was a pair of gently glowing orbs stirring in the dark outside, like a car pulling around the bend past my neighbors backyard as the sandman took me.
I woke up not perfect but refreshed. Cobwebs still clung to my eyes as I levered myself out of bed, and I sat on the edge of the mattress praying to whatever god would listen that this would be the first step to a satisfying recovery. As I stretched my arms and reached for the glasses on my nightstand, my eyes grazed over the tracker bound to my wrist.
Sunlight spraying through the trees outside lit the step counter on its face. It read: "14,758."
I blinked.
Maybe the cheap watch counted my tossing and turning as steps. But I felt like I'd slept well for once.
As easy it could have been to write it off as faulty hardware, I just couldn't let it go. I counted my steps to the bathroom and the kitchen just to see if I forgot a mundane visit in the night. The former was a thirty-step round trip, and it took even longer just to reach the fridge at the other end of the house.
Whatever my suspicions, I still had to work. I reset the counter on my watch, pinned my name to my chest, and set out for another day's grind. And a draining grind it was, too, so I returned home at night too tired to care about my silly watch and its budget sensors. I didn't even take it off. I just laid down and listened to the scratching branches, counted their needles, and waited for the car to come around the bend just as I slept.
Branches scratched. Needles counted. Headlights flashed.
The next day, I woke up with 58 extra steps.
The day after that gave me 58 again.
The day after that gave me, again, exactly 58 extra steps.
And that's when my slow-drip brain decided to get serious.
Every night I slept a little deeper, and every day I woke a little brighter. Something inside me inched closer to normal ever since I bought the tracker, and I was honestly half afraid to question it. Was I sleepwalking? Where was I going in the middle of the night? What lay exactly 29 measured steps from my bed, and what did I do when I arrived?
By the end of the week I was maddened by the consistency of my secret journey, and I elected to seek the answer. My neighbor's son was an old pal from high school, and it took just a small bluff about neighborhood prowlers to borrow a set of expensive trail cameras for a night or two. I placed three along the hallways of my house and one each in the bath and bedroom. I even put one out on the back porch just in case, shivering at the thought of all the dangers I could stumble into half-asleep in the darkness of the woods beyond my yard.
Then I put myself to bed. I reset the tracker and I began to count the needles. The gaze of another coincidental car slid around the bend, headlights bright and pale as moons, just as my brain slipped into the shadows.
As expected, I woke up with 58 steps the next morning. But now I also had eight hours of night vision footage from the high corner opposite my bed.
I sat down at my computer straight away to watch the feed.
I watched myself drift to sleep right around 3 AM. Video-Me pulled up to a sitting position along the foot of the bed about fifteen minutes later, staring straight out through closed eyelids at the window. I could see the shadows of the needles dancing along my chest as the glow of headlights drew closer and brighter, brighter than should be possible until it almost seemed like the car had driven right up onto my yard and parked itself just out of view behind the glass. Video-Me stood up and, still asleep, turned the lock above the window sill. He gently grasped the bottom of the window and began to pull, sliding it up with what I know from experience to be a grating squeal of metal on metal that should have woken me.
Hell, I can hardly do it in the daytime without wincing from the pain in my ears. But Video-Me did not wake.
Instead, he stood and listened to the night song of crickets and other insects I couldn't name, eyes screwed shut tight, alone before my open bedroom window while the headlights outside waited. And then...
Then an arm reached through the open window.
It loomed huge and woolly like a ram's back, all matted gray hair and toned muscle. I stared in horror as it drifted into the camera's narrow view, reaching out like it might grasp my neck and toss me across the room. Instead it offered me a leathery hand, palm up, beckoning.
And I took it.
The hand guided me out, holding the brunt of my weight as Video-Me folded himself out the window and set off in the company of... Something. Hours later I returned, tumbling back through the window, shutting it, and collapsing in my bed mere moments before waking.
That was two weeks ago. I returned the trail cameras and deleted all the footage from that night, and I've lived in denial ever since. In fact, I'd nearly convinced myself it was all a dream until this morning.
See, a bad storm rolled through my town last night, the kind that tears up business signs and uproots bushes around the school. I lost power for hours in the very early morning, and I know this because my alarm clock blinked 5:02am when the daylight shook me awake. It was also the kind of storm that turns the garden around your house into a mud pit. As I leaned out my window this morning to survey the damage to the yard, I noticed a pair of deep grooves in the dirt just outside the sill.
Footprints led to and from my window. One set was mine. The other was larger, but long and thin and pointed, like a hulking deer walking on its hind-legs.
And the tracker? It read exactly 58 steps.
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