The Dent in the Grass

I can’t sleep.

The heat sits on you like a second body. It presses into the mattress, into your hairline, into the hollow behind your knees, and when you turn your pillow, the other side is already warm with the memory of your head. The fan above turns, pushing the same air around in slow, lazy arcs. It hums like a patient too far gone to complain.

The red digits on the clock read 2:11. Outside, the street has the hushed, suspended quality of a photograph—no cars, no voices, only the long, metallic rattle of insects in the plane trees. Somewhere in the building, a pipe knocks, a hollow, distant sound, like someone rapping politely to be let in. Your tongue tastes of copper, your skin of salt. You’ve tried the water, the damp cloth on your neck, the barefoot walk to the kitchen, where the fridge gave you a square of cool air as thin and miraculous as paper. None of it held.

All day, the city felt boiling. Pavements breathed up tar; bus stops smelled of hot plastic and impatience. You lingered in the supermarket’s chilled aisle, staring at butter and cheese, stealing cold by standing still. The cashier moved like a swimmer through heavy light. A radio muttered about heat records and warnings, then promised thunderstorms “perhaps by the weekend!” as if weather were a prize to be delivered.

When you got home, the light through the window was a dense gold. You touched the glass and pulled your fingers back. Your neighbour, watering her balcony geraniums, called down to someone: “It sends people a bit strange, all this. The dog days, eh?” She laughed, and for a while the phrase lay in your head like a coin: the dog days. Sirius, the star-dog, is dragging heat behind it. Days when sleeping was a kind of injury.

You can’t tell if you left the curtain open or closed. Now it hangs in an imperfect fold, not enough to cover the window entirely—a sliver of night like a blade. And beyond that: a shape. Not a person exactly, but a thickness in the dark. The way a tree can be a person until you settle your eyes.

You tell yourself you won’t look again. You face the wall and count backwards from three hundred by sevens, a rope to climb out of nights like this. At two hundred and fifty-one, the thought of the window sours your concentration, and you glance back.

The shape is there. It’s always there. You feel it the way you feel your tongue. The fan ticks. An itch finds the place between your shoulder blades you can’t reach.

When you were a child, your mother sat on your bed during a summer blackout, the walls breathing warmth. Somewhere, a bottle broke in the street. She stroked your hair, her hand a kind of cool you haven’t found since.

The heat does things, she said. People see what isn’t there. They hear what isn’t said. Like fever, but without the excuse of being ill. She smiled. Remember Mrs Albright at number eleven? She swore there was a man in her garden three nights in a row. Police came, nothing to be done. In the morning, there were marks in the grass. A dent. That was the end of it.

“What did she see?” you asked.

Nothing, your mother said. Or the heat. Same thing, on certain nights.

The glass on the nightstand sweats a ring of water. You drink; it’s already risen to room temperature. No relief. You turn the pillow like a gambler feeding a slot machine.

2:19 becomes 2:31. You lie on your back, then your side, face-down, and still you turn back toward the window. The curtain’s fold has changed slightly, a sharper point. You decide this means nothing. You decide it means too much.

“I can’t sleep,” you say, as if the room were listening. The sound makes you real in a way you regret.

2:42. Another knock in the pipes, closer this time. You tell yourself it’s metal expanding with temperature. Physics. You breathe in fours, out in sixes, think of the supermarket aisle, your neighbour’s voice, the star-dog hauling summer up by its chain.

The shape shifts—or you do. Sometimes it’s pressed against the glass, convex, as if the night were bulging into the room; sometimes it’s a step back, the depth of the street between you. The less you look, the more it becomes itself.

2:57. You give up on the bed and pad into the kitchen. The floor is warm. The fridge hums like a sleeping animal. You open the door, lean in—not to take anything, just to stand in the light and cool. The digital clock on the cooker blinks after a power flicker: 12:00, 12:00. All the time, a beginning.

You think of calling someone, but there’s no one you want to know you in this shape—peeled, sticky, reduced to a complaint against the air. You make a cloth cold under the tap, hold it to your throat, then your elbows. By the time you’re back in bed, it’s blood-warm again.

3:11. The curtain hasn’t moved. The shape has. You feel it the way you feel a thought move. Your heart pats at your chest with neat, professional hands. You think of Mrs Albright’s lawn, the dent in it, the way your mother shrugged. You imagine knocking on your neighbour’s door just to see another face. The thought makes you tired.

“I can’t sleep,” you say again.

The air changes. A seam of cool runs across your forearm as if a body brushed past. The window is shut; the fan is warm. Goosebumps rise anyway.

3:18. You fix on the clock’s numbers as if they can bless you with progress. The floorboard by the wardrobe—usually the first to complain when stepped on—gives a small cry.

You wait. Nothing.

The watcher is a word you try not to use. You test it silently in your mouth; it fits. You decide: if the shape moves again, you’ll cross the room, put your hands on the glass, and let whatever is outside be outside, and whatever is inside be you.

It moves.

You sit up. Your skin peels off the sheet with a sound you hate. You walk to the window, lay your palms against the pane—it’s cooler than your hands, but not by much. Your reflection: a pale, damp animal with hair stuck to its forehead. Beyond it: the streetlamp pooling yellow on the corner. You look until your eyes water.

You draw the curtain fully closed. The feeling of the shape remains, stubborn, a pressure without an object.

3:26, 3:33, 3:41. The room seems to shrink and expand with your breathing. You think about the day—a trader hosing the pavement, a child crying over a melted ice lolly, the council van telling you to check on neighbours, drink water, and avoid the sun. You think of your mother’s hand. She would have said sleep is an act, like closing a window. She would have said, Do it. You can’t.

You drift, not into sleep, but into a cul-de-sac of thought. The fan, the pipe knocks, the perspiration trickling from your temple—each takes a turn, demands witness. Somewhere, a siren. Somewhere else, a laugh that isn’t quite a laugh.

“I can’t sleep.” Quiet, because the room is an ear.

3:52. Breathing that isn’t yours. A soft intake, a soft release, like a page turning. You match it to your own breath—until you can’t. The far side of the bed is warmer, as if leaned on.

The wardrobe’s floorboard speaks again. Then another, closer to the bed. The sliver of streetlight at the doorframe darkens briefly, as if something passed between.

You sit up. The wood under your feet is warmer than your skin. Three steps, and your toe knocks the glass on the floor. Panic grips you, larger than the noise deserves. You steady it, crouch, head heavy between your knees.

There’s the seam of cool again, along the inside of your wrist, like someone exhaled into the cupped place there. You tell yourself the fan is doing something strange at this angle.

When you lie down, the mattress dips on your left, as if a book had been placed there. You don’t move. You don’t look.

4:07. You wake. One minute later on the clock, and the taste of having been away. The curtain—closed—has a thin arrow of light at its edge.

On breath nine, the bed creaks. At the foot of the bed: the outline of a person. Not definite, more tilt than presence. A shoulder crossing the light, then not, then crossing again, like a shadow when a car passes outside.

You shut your eyes. You open them. The outline is gone.

A whisper, not speech but something finding its place. Your pillow sighs. You realise you have only one. Your hand searches the floor, the narrow space by the wall. Nothing. The mattress bears a long, shallow mark where something heavier than a book might have rested. You picture Mrs Albright’s grass, laid down only where it had to.

You think: turn on the light. Make it ordinary. Your body waits, like a nervous audience.

4:13, 4:16. Time becomes a drip you resent. You wish for thunder. Sleeping is the easiest thing in the world—until it isn’t.

A breath moves across your temple, cool as the inside of an elbow. Too precise to be a draft, too tender to be a threat. That makes it worse.

“I can’t sleep,” you whisper.

When morning comes, the light on the curtain thickens, then thins. You must have slept; you surfaced like a swimmer who didn’t know they’d gone under. The clock reads 7:02.

The curtain is drawn, but the top hook has slipped. You fix it. The glass bears your handprints. Outside, a man on a balcony nods at you—the sign for we survived the night again, I see you.

On the floor: no second pillow. Not under the bed, not in the wardrobe. The mattress dip remains. You press your palm into it; your hand doesn’t fill it. You laugh once, sharp and strange.

In the kitchen, the cooker clock blinks 12:00 again. You drink water that tastes of its container.

On the balcony, your neighbour’s geraniums look defiant and exhausted. “Slept?” she asks.

“Not really. It was… hot.”

She nods. “I dreamt people were standing in my flat. My husband used to say the heat is a haunted house we agree to live in for a few weeks.” She laughs. “They say storms by Friday.”

“Good,” you say.

You go back inside. The bed waits. You pick up the single pillow, fluff it—it seems to resist. You hold it a moment longer than you meant to, the way you might hold someone’s hand before saying something important.

The day will want things of you. You will return to this room tonight, perform the same small rites, and hope for a different result.

You lie down, testing whether the bed still understands you. Somewhere in the building, a pipe knocks. Somewhere in the street, a bottle skitters. The fan ticks. A cool thread of air finds your temple.

Your mouth shapes the words without meaning to.

“I can’t sleep.”