Elaine woke up suddenly and quietly, ensuring her muted departure from the realms of sleep didn't startle to wakefulness her love beside her. Elaine's nightmare wasn't something she particularly remembered in the moment, the feeling of fear, the sensation of suspense lingered in her heart but everything beyond that escaped her attempts to survey her mood.
Across the room, stained midnight-blue by the full moon hanging quietly in the window, a mirror on a dresser showed her what she looked like in that moment. The white sheets waved, furled, flowed, and spilled out over the side of the bed, the ocean of cotton and silk splayed out over the milk-white mattress which supported her up away from the dark chocolate-black floor. Something crawled there.
Despite the moon's best efforts to illuminate the scene, the dark thing slinking across the hardwood attracted no highlights of silver that every other textured thing in the room had adorned on it, like millions of tiny crescents spangling across the scattered jewelry on the nightstand, the harsh geometries of the crystalline light fixture above her, the streaks in the hair of Elaine's love, they all caught and held onto light like a gentle caress. The thing did not. Its darkness and formlessness betrayed itself against the detail of everything around it. Its silence betrayed itself against the gentle rustling of the sheets as Elaine's love rolled over in her sleep. Elaine tensed and heard the bed frame creak beneath her to accommodate the new load. The trees outside shimmered in the wind. The thing did not make a sound of any kind as it sprawled out across the inky black floor.
Elaine tried to suppress a scream, it emerged a whimper. As far as she was concerned, she may as well have demonstrated to the thing exactly what to do to make her a prey. The crocodilian nature of the thing made itself clear, rising up to eye-level with her. She was shaking in bed, hardly moving a muscle but the fear that lived in her bones and in her eyes leaked out as juttering and jittering. It stared at her and she stared at it for a while before soon enough, Elaine woke up suddenly and loudly. The sun burst orange through the curtains, crystalline lighting fixture overhead scattering yellow-white beams across the walls. The grain of the chocolate-brown wood floor spiraled and swayed below the bed of Elaine and her love. Out in the kitchen, Elaine heard a clattering in the kitchen.
"El? Are you alright?"
Elaine didn't answer. She didn't know how to answer. She didn't know if she was alright.
