The Rat
I fell asleep early last night, exhausted from a week of late nights out with friends and days spent pushing thousands of words around on my laptop.
I woke again just before midnight to see something crawling up the bedside table beside me, scurrying off into the dull light of the alarm clock.
“Oh my god! Wake up!” I hissed to Mr Musings, who was lying on my other side in half slumber. “Something just crawled onto the bedside table. We have to see what it is!”
He shifted a little, but didn’t do anything.
“Get your phone out and shine the light on it,” I said. “Something crawled up beside me, and we have to see what it is. Hurry up!”
He sat up groggily, turned on his phone and directed it at the table. But it was too late. The creature had gone.
“It’s gone now,” I said sadly. “There really was something there, but now we’ll never know what it was.”
I sat back down and pulled my sleep mask over my eyes, in an attempt to shut out the memory. And it was only as I drifted off to sleep again that I realised that in fact there had been nothing there at all. In the tradition of adolescent creative writing, “it was all a dream.”
