Written by P.H. Boer
The air in the dark of night is different, fuller somehow, like it’s holding its breath just beyond the walls. It smells of dust and plaster, faint mildew from the corner where the paint bubbled last spring. There’s a trace of the outside too: cut grass long since dried, and the distant smoke of someone else’s fire drifting through the screen. It settles low to the floor, reluctant to rise.
The kind of air that makes you lie still, unsure if you’ve woken or never really slept at all.
The blanket clings to my skin like the final weight of the day.
I lie still. Not comfortably. I’m aware of every fold in the sheet, the uneven pressure against my left shoulder, the cool edge just brushing my ankle. My pillow is damp from a breath I don’t remember exhaling. The room hums with silence, and beneath it is my heartbeat, soft, slow, like the ticking of a clock half-buried in sand.
My eyes are closed.
I count the seconds between breaths until they no longer feel like mine. I try to think of nothing. When that fails, I think through the thoughts, letting them rot and fall away.
The ache in my thigh returns. My fingers twitch.
I almost give up.
And then, it comes…
That gentle pressure beneath the sternum, like a hand resting inside my chest. Present. Aware.
Then the shift.
My bed is gone. No creak, no splash, no falling. One moment, still heat; the next, I’m suspended in something cold, slow, and impossibly quiet.
Water. But not the kind you swim in. This water accepts you. Holds. Possesses.
It wraps my ankles first, slick and numb. My fingertips follow. Then my arms. My chest.
But I’m not shivering. The cold here isn’t cruel. It’s indifferent.
My limbs tread in slow circles, keeping me level. My mind knows I won’t sink, that this isn’t real, but my body doesn’t believe it. The water is deep.
I don’t look down.
I never look down.
Above, the sky is boundless and starless, save for faint lights like holes in a black curtain. Their reflections ripple across the water’s skin.
The air is thin, tasteless, like breathing through silk.
And the feeling in my gut grows.
A slow twist beneath the sternum. Not pain, yet. Just a tightness. An invisible thread pulling down, through me, into whatever lives below. My legs grow heavy, the urge to pull them up mounting. But I resist. I always resist.
Because moving means admitting it’s there.
I focus on the sky, on the water brushing my jaw, on the dull drum of my heart.
The thread tightens.
My lungs ache, not from lack of breath but from holding still. My fingers don’t feel like fingers. My toes are gone, swallowed. My feet keep moving, slow kicks into the cold, but they feel far away.
And now the dread becomes a weight.
It presses up through the water into my spine, behind my ribs. My heart thuds harder now, slow but deliberate. Responding to something. A call.
The knot under my sternum pulses.
The stars blur as my breath trembles…
And then, my feet move. Not the slow tread. Not the resisting kicks.
But the curl.
They draw tight to my chest without permission, my knees rising to my gut as if some buried part of me is trying to vanish.
That is always the moment that breaks it.
The water drains, not audibly, not visibly, but in spirit, as if I’ve broken the rules. The thread snaps. The pressure shifts.
My chest seizes with urgency, and my eyes fly open.
The ceiling is plain, unspectacular. Lila’s snack shelf sits in the dark beside me. My heart is louder now. The blanket clings again. I flex my toes, grounding myself in cotton and gravity.
I have returned.
But the water is never far. It clings to the edges of memory like fog. And beneath me, always… something waits.
I’ve been drifting into that place since I was a boy. Back then, it had no name, no weight. It was just a trick, something I could do on nights when the walls felt too close, too cruel, too full of voices that meant me no good.
Back then, I thought it was escape.
When the shouting grew too loud, when the air filled with a dread no child should know, I would lie still, let my mind fall into the dark. Not dreams, something deeper. Older.
The water welcomed me.
I floated away from everything I couldn’t fix. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t stay longer, why I always returned with a gasp or tears I didn’t remember crying. But I knew even then: that place felt more honest than waking life.
As I grew older, it changed. Or I did.
It stopped being escape and became a question.
What is this place?
Why does it feel more real than the ground?
Why do I never sink or rise?
And what would happen if I looked down?
That question stays.
I’ve never looked. I don’t know if I can. Instinct says if I see what’s beneath me, I won’t come back.
And yet, I keep returning. Not nightly, but often enough to know it isn’t a dream. It’s a ritual. A threshold I brush with open palms and closed eyes, never quite brave, or foolish, enough to cross.
Sometimes I wonder if others know this feeling.
Not sleep. Not dreaming. Not quite awake.
Suspended.
Do they feel the water on their spine, taste the silence, sense the thing far below?
Or is this mine alone?
A pocket of death that opens its hand to me, again and again, asking nothing but time, offering no answers.
I still don’t know what it is.
But I know it’s waiting.
And one night, I may not open my eyes in time.
We all tread something like this.
I just remember the water.
Tales from the Boer’s Head 