Flash Fiction: Midnight Reveries
In the weeks leading up to this moment, Allen figured he’d be a nervous wreck. Instead, an unexpected calm had settled over him.
He lay silently in a room that reeked of a typical government facility—a mix of bleach, floor buffing solution, and stale air.
The place was silent except for the faint buzz of the fluorescent tubes overhead. Their soulless, yellow glow doused the room in a jaundiced haze.
A steel-caged clock ticked rhythmically on the wall.
How fitting, he thought. As the idea tugged at the corner of Allen’s mouth, a voice in the background asked a muffled question.
Then, the grin faded when he noticed the clock’s second hand dutifully marching to midnight.
A silent film unspooled in his mind: memories of times he’d anxiously waited for the stroke of 12.
The production began on Christmas Eve when he was a kid. In the dark bedroom of his childhood home, moonlight reflected off the snow outside, casting faint patterns on the walls. A young Allen squinted at his Mickey Mouse watch, waiting for the oversized white-gloved hands to point straight up, hoping to see Santa. His mother’s silhouette appeared in the doorway, her lips moving soundlessly:
Go to sleep, honey.
The reel flickered, jumping to Allen’s teenage years. The winter silence was replaced with the sound of his rumbling ’69 Mustang parked outside a Houston Texaco with two other delinquent “friends.” At midnight, Allen could finally buy beer for the first time. Legally, anyway. Although Metallica wasn’t audible in his memory, he could read the lyrics from Ride The Lightning on his buddies’ faces:
Wait for the sign to flick the switch of death. It’s the beginning of the end!
Blaming those from his past was easy, but Allen owned his choices. Each was a brick in the wall that now surrounded him.
Then Allen’s memory shifted again. The Mustang’s engine faded to the silence of the prison where he did a ten-year bit for robbing a liquor store a few years later. The mint-green cinder block walls that had been Allen’s only companions for so long were unmistakable. Midnight was release time, and a guard would set him free. As the gate slammed shut, he caught three words on the officers’ lips:
You’ll be back.
Allen wished he’d been wrong. He wished a lot of things.
The prison walls blurred, and flickering images of a New Year’s Eve party and a Phil Collins song filled his head. Cameras flashed, and glitter drifted through a smoke-filled barroom. What year was that? ’90? Allen wondered as if it mattered. Swaying couples clung to each other as the ball dropped on the tube TV behind the bar. The partygoers chanted the countdown loudly, along with what seemed the rest of the world.
In the present moment, Allen’s face, saturated in yellow, recoiled as the voices grew louder and louder.
8…7…6…5…
Take a Look at Me Now, and the cadenced voices faded as the buzzing lights overtook the room once again.
Then Allen’s eyes fixed on the clock’s spinning needle, watching it take its final lap as a drop of sweat ran down the side of his head.
The needle, Allen thought, as he blinked at the fluorescents, then glanced back at the clock. They were both indifferent to it all.
“Well?” A low and authoritative voice from the corner pierced the room, mercifully silencing the madness in his head.
“No, warden, I reckon I ain’t got nothin’ to say,” Allen replied after looking back at the caged clock one last time.
The man nodded at a figure in a white lab coat in an adjoining room.
Soon after, an IV tube protruding from the wall filled with sedative and crossed the room, snaking down into the needle in Allen’s arm.
Always the needle, Allen thought, then winced as the cold liquid entered his vein. His body became heavy, consumed by numbness.
His eyes closed, hoping his memory would offer one last comforting thought before crossing over.
A half-smile appeared on Allen’s face, and a tear spawned in his right eye as his mother whispered soundlessly one last time:
Go to sleep, honey.