Whats Under the Sheet

What’s under the sheet?

The thought played slowly through her head. It was a fuzzy thought, one of a woman still mostly asleep.

Don’t wake up, she told herself. Her eyes cracked open anyway, squinting at the window.

The glow in the room was no glow at all. The room was shadow on shadow on shadow.

Still dark. Still time to be asleep.

Why was she awake?

Lying comfortably, her barely open eyes watching her bedroom curtain dance in the window from her open window, she remembered her first fuzzy thought on waking.

I must have had a nightmare, she thought.

Sure, that must have been it. She had nightmares a lot. Just because she didn’t remember it, didn’t mean it hadn’t been.

People dreamed every night, but hardly ever remembered their dreams.

Satisfied, she closed her eyes and sunk swiftly towards sleep again.

Teetering on the edge of nothingness, she felt something brush against her leg. The skin of her leg.

If it was touching the skin of her leg, that meant it was under the sheet with her.

She opened her eyes, sat up in bed and saw the lump under the sheet, beside her legs, as it moved against her legs, on top of her legs. It rushed foward, a lump with no real definition, no way of her knowing what it was unless she uncovered it.

What’s under the sheet, she thought again. This time it was a clear thought. A crisp thought. A though by a woman fully awake and scared half to death.

She threw back the sheet, as the lump continued to rush forward, setting it free just in time for it, whatever it was, to launch itself at her face.

It forced her back, smacking her head against the headboard of her bed, knocking her unconscious as the thing that had been under her sheet slipped off of her bed and back out of the window it had come into, leaving the mystery of what was under the sheet unsolved.