NoSleep TV

Moving to a new place was a big thing for me. 3 hours away from home, 3 hours away from the town I loved, the house I grew up in and the ex boyfriend who had been the thing to drive me away. In a way I was looking to escape. New start, new life, new me, that was what I decided when I moved away.

"Y'know, they say this city, it never sleeps." She tapped the ashes off her cigarette and gazed up at the neon lights. "But I'm just prayin' one day I'll wake up." I looked her over. Watched her adjust the shoulder strap of her dirty tank top, watched her shift her weight to the other high heel. She couldn't have been older than 17. When she had asked me for a cigarette outside the gas station, I had reluctantly obliged, but now she stood beside my car as I filled the tank.

I wake up feeling a small pain on my upper back. It’s tiny, but noticeable. I know what to expect now. It’s going to be yet another small scratch that seemingly came out of nowhere. My logical mind tells me that it was only me scratching my back while asleep, or my skin just being too sensitive for the sheets and getting cut. I believe my mind, but I still have an eerie feeling about these small scratches. I get up, hobbling over to my bathroom door, sliding it open, hopping up on the counter,…

It was simple, we thought. Take a few chromosomes, slice them up, put them over there, and hey, perfect human being. I’m still not sure what went wrong. Maybe a miscalculation? A misprocedure? Or maybe something beyond our control. Who knows? We (a few of my psychologist colleagues and I) were intrigued by human emotion. Anger, despair, euphoria. Was it possible to lock the mind into one emotion? To lock it into a euphoric state so that no sadness or anger would cloud its thought?…

I don’t feel like I’m a nosy person. No more nosy than the next guy. I just have what my Ma would call an unhealthy amount of curiosity. I was the kid who climbed to the top of the big oak in the back yard, just to see what was in the crows’ nest. I was the kid who dug a hole in the back yard so deep that I hit groundwater because I was convinced there was a cave under our house, and I wanted to see it. To see.

My name is Andrew Erics. I lived, once, in a city called New York. My mother is Terrie Erics. She’s in the phone book. If you know the city, and you read this, find her. Don’t show her this, but tell her I love her, and that I’m trying to come home. Please.

I've decided to kill myself.

“The year is nineteen-ninety-nine.” That sentence brings me back to my senior kindergarten class when I was five years old, where we used to read out the date on the blackboard every single day. The year 1999 exists as a stain in my mind however, as a memory that will not go away no matter how I try to forget it. 1999 marked the year I lost my first tooth, my first time on a plane, and unfortunately the early loss of my childhood innocence.

Doctor Avraham Strauss was confused. In a moment of clarity, he questioned why and how he had come to be walking down this particular corridor, in this castle, at this precise time. Red corridor, Colditz Castle, the middle of winter 1942. How could he, as a Jew, even have considered assisting the Nazis in this horrifying experiment? Yet, he could justify it using the fact that no one else would have given him the support or funding for his research. Yes, to the average person it might seem like…

Twice I saw the face in the window, pressed up against the surface, its icy breath fogging the cold glass. At first it appeared strange to me, the skin beneath its eyes drooping in ripples of flesh, exposing the red sensitive strata underneath.

Sunday I’m not sure why I’m writing this down on paper and not on my computer. I guess I’ve just noticed some odd things. It’s not that I don’t trust the computer… I just… need to organize my thoughts. I need to get down all the details somewhere objective, somewhere I know that what I write can’t be deleted or… changed… not that that’s happened. It’s just… everything blurs together here, and the fog of memory lends a strange cast to things…

Russian researchers in the late 1940s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn’t kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and 5 inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running…

For me, life was a whirlwind of lights and smoke, music and men. I lived in a beaten up shanty close to North Edsa, crammed in a closet-like room with a bunch of other woman. We slept on mats on the dirt floor and shared the space with mange-infested dogs, flea-bitten cats and cockroaches. My wardrobe consisted mostly of skimpy skirts, tank tops and the cheapest high heels you can buy in Quiapo.

Let me start off by saying that Peter Terry was addicted to heroin.

You take the pills to keep them away. That’s what we were told when we were first brought down here--down through the sterile white halls with their flickering fluorescent lights, and our small, Spartan cells. Down into the nightmare. Why would we agree to this?

I was about twelve years old when my parents sent me to that shit hole. They were so determined to get me to camp. Not just that camp but really any camp. I took it as code for “We’ll-be-at-work-all-week-and-we-don’t-trust-you-alone”. My parents showed me the brochure, it actually looked kind of fun! The picture on the front of the brochure had slides, activities, and really anything that a twelve year old kid would want in a camp. It was pretty legit. The kids all seemed to be having fun in…

Long black hair draped down in twisted, wet tendrils, her head cocked to one side as the TV blared in front of her. "HEY!" I shouted again, trying to project my voice over the noise, "HELLO?!" Her head didn't move, not so much as an inch, just stayed utterly stagnant, facing away from me, her body sitting upright on my couch. "HELLO!?" I again cried, slowly setting down my keys in the entryway, yet keeping my shoes on as I began creeping forwards hesitantly. "WHO ARE YOU?!"

I was home alone for the week, as my family had gone on vacation while I had to stay and work. It was around 2 AM, and I’d stayed up to watch a scary movie in the dark in my basement. I was intent on really scaring myself and seeing how far into terror I could really go – while still knowing I was safe in my own home.

English professors have told me that born-writers can sit by a computer and make up a story in an hour, without even having to think. Their stories flow like water from their finger tips. I am most definitely not a born-writer. People like me, people without born artistic talent– we need pain to create. We need horrible tragedies to write our stories. This is how we profit. We take our mothers’ deaths and make the widest selling and most beloved children’s books of all time. We need…

There was a hunter in the woods, who, after a long day hunting, was in the middle of an immense forest. It was getting dark, and having lost his bearings, he decided to head in one direction until he was clear of the increasingly oppressive foliage. After what seemed like hours, he came across a cabin in a small clearing. Realizing how dark it had grown, he decided to see if he could stay there for the night. He approached, and found the door ajar. Nobody was inside. The hunter flopped down on…

Footsteps aren’t an uncommon thing to hear when you’re sitting in a basement, so I think nothing of it when I hear quiet thuds coming from my upstairs hallway. I just assume it’s my brother, and continue doing whatever pointless little thing I was doing at the time. They go on for another couple minutes, and I’m starting to get pissed off. They keep getting louder and louder and I sigh, wondering what the hell my brother’s doing this late at night. I sit there, because it’s impossible to focus…

You just got off a long flight. After spending four hours in a cramped plane with 165 other people, baggage is delayed. After an hour's wait the carousel starts up and your bag is one of the first to come around. You grab it and get out of the airport as fast as you can.

Ever since I can remember I have been able to see things that others cannot. I still remember the days of my infancy when I would, for the first time, sleep in my own bed, in my own room, and how the shadows of unknown beings would haunt my room. Or perhaps my head? All I know is that I saw things, and that, at least to me, these things were as real as the other things that other people were able too see and touch.

My eyes struggle to open. I blink several times, trying to take in my surroundings. A stark white ceiling looms above me. Even from a distance, I can make out the little cracks that scour the surface; hundreds of tiny passages into darkness. Shifting around a bit, I feel the starchy sheets beneath my outstretched hands. They feel stale and unwashed. Unsurprisingly, the rigid mattress beneath me is no more comforting.

There is, in a small national park somewhere in the US, a bike path. This bike path is hardly unusual: it is roughly twelve miles long, and makes a circuit around a small lake. Most of the path is wooded, and it is regarded by the locals as a beautiful little place to take a breather and catch some peace and quiet. Many who jog or bike along the path observe nothing out of the ordinary. But there are those lone bicyclists who happen across the Runner.