The Last Dawn

Transcript of a Night Terror

You stir through a haze of infinite blankness, rising out of some temporary non-existence which you come to recognise as sleep. You can feel dizzying thrusts of blood running up through your neck, into the base of your skull, seeping out through your brain in tingling trickles as you stretch your spirit out from that warm womb of nothingness. Your eyes are still closed but you can sense an inkling of your body, supine on a cold, solid surface. There is some harsh weight pressing down upon your eyes through the lids which conceal them, a weight pressing the back of your head against the uncomfortable floor. With a great deal of effort, you squint your eyes open, just a slither. 

Your punishment for this is swift and forceful, senses slapped by the sterile glare pouring from the long fluorescent bulb hanging above you. Your body aches and groans as you lift yourself into a seated position, your pronounced brow defending you from the offensive overhead light. Your neck cracks and a faint echo replies, as you swivel your gaze upon the room surrounding you. You find yourself in a large underground parking lot, harshly lit by fluorescent sticks of light, draped in dust congested cobwebs. Pinprick sparkles dance off dark puddles collecting on the concrete floor. Crusted mineral deposits shimmer from the shadows lining the containing walls. The cavernous space cradling you is a perfectly constructed square, your sightline from one end to the other only interrupted by the occasional concrete support beam and the large ascending car ramp in the centre of the room. Suddenly some smell or distinct level of humidity or the way the floor seems to sap heat from the air preceding it, floods your head with a gooey, comforting nostalgia.

You remember coming here as a child, the bottom floor of the local shopping centre. Your mother would drive you here after school and you would riffle through racks of dinosaur toys as she, a few aisles away but still in sight, would pick out socks or underwear or t-shirts which you took no interest in but would inevitably wear. She always insisted on the bottom floor of the parking lot, it always had the most free spaces. Swaddled in the relief of this familiarity, you look toward the wall where the pedestrian ramp, up to the shops, sits… but it is not there. Your memory and this space as it is now, grate against one another in your mind as you stare toward the grey wall, naked in the absence of its automatic sliding doors and garish neon signage. An old map of this space spirals up through your mind as you rise, in a long exhale, to your feet. Upright, the space feels smaller than you recall, but then again you haven’t been here in some 10 years, everything seemed a lot larger as a child. 

You stagger forward, toward the blank wall, muscle memory retracing that joyous pilgrimage from the car to the shops. The light tracing your shadow upon the floor oscillates in strength as you pass under the succession of white-hot bulbs, buzzing against the ceiling. Your pass through this monotone space is cut, sliced by a thunderous dazzle of colour and thick slapping sound which send a sting of anxiety racing through your limbs. You freeze up, fists clenched, and your face contorts into a discomfort that you can feel in your cheeks. Straining to make sense of this unknown stimuli, you stare toward the rim of a puddle, languishing 10 paces ahead of you. Another wet slap echoes through the cavern. You reflexively take a half-step back before this mirage of motion and shades of bright green reveals itself to you with glee. 

Sitting in a pool of excess water, dripping off of its body, or perhaps slime you think, sits a large, abnormally large, green tree frog. The anxiety drains from your joints in a twirl of absolute wonder. It’s a frog, a great big frog! You have always loved frogs though a rare encounter in your metropolitan neighbourhood. You recall once again, being a child, haggling with your mother to take you to the park on the hill where you were convinced the chirp of crickets was in fact the call of small frogs which you were so determined to unearth from the long, dewy grass of evening. Yet here it is, proof that there is and perhaps were frogs calling out from that undergrowth. 

Your head swells and swoons in the memory of hunting for amphibians before the frog leaps and lets out another loud slap as its body smacks against the concrete floor. A wide grin stretches across your face, loosening the grimace which your cheeks carried just moments prior. You giggle a little bit, a weird giggle, childish in its timbre but dredged in your adult baritone. The frog leaps once more, up onto the inclined ramp, up again absconding toward the ground floor of the car park. You can hardly contain your excitement in this unfolding encounter, with all its colour and life which so transforms the dullness of the space surrounding you. You let out a short snort of humour, your eyes rolling to the side in delight of the absurdity you find yourself confronted with, before staggering after the frog, your body's tiresome aches quelled by your childish glee. As you follow the slapping leaps of the large frog up the wide car ramp, you are more and more endeared to it, it’s stupid and playful biology. Like some sticky toy you would throw against the ceiling of your bedroom in the hope it would get stuck up there, making your mother laugh in a mixture of annoyance and amusement. 

The joyous flash of green escapes your sight for a moment as it leaps left, around the corner at the top of the car ramp. You follow it up onto the ground floor of the parking lot, taking only a careless notice of the lack of entries and exits on this floor also. The emerald green of the amphibian’s skin, slick with slime or water or whatever, lets off a faint glow as its legs extend in repetition, flying its fat body across the universal grey of the concrete room. It leaps and flops itself toward the fire escape stairs, which lead to the third, rooftop floor of the parking complex. Gooey nostalgia swishes inside of you, mixing with the giddy joy of this encounter and dissolving within it, any weightiness of residual sleep which had previously subdued your senses. Your body is invigorated as you climb the fire escape stairs, dotted with imprints of the frog’s fleshy landings. 

You arrive at the landing of the rooftop parking level, a small doorway opening onto a flat plain of concrete under a starless night sky. A chilly wind washes through your nondescript clothing, flashing goosebumps across your skin, nipples hardening just a little. The frog leaps into the centre of a marked car space, jutting out from the barrier railing of the rooftop, just before the flat grey construct gives way to the infinity of the sky. Between these two, white painted lines, on the windswept rooftop, the frog ceases its leaping. It shudders a little bit, in a strange animal way, as the inky open sky sends undulations of frigid air upon both your skins. You sit down, cross legged on the floor much colder than the subterranean drive that you woke up on. You breathe deeply, in that sharp twilight air. The frog just sits there, unmoving in front of you. You await its next funny motion with a patient anticipation. The wind caresses your back, gently rustling your hair. 

The frog doesn’t move, it just sits there, still, a silent gem of green under the barely lit sky. You begin to find it odd that it has, apart from the slapping of its body, remained silent since the very beginning of your encounter. No anxious vocalisations or mating calls indifferent to your presence, sounds so characteristic of your previous encounters with such amphibians. You roll these thoughts around, as you gaze at its green hide, hardened in its stillness. Slowly and then quickening, the excitement of your proximity to this elusive joy seeps from you, like a sweat. In this new stillness, the real coldness of this rooftop begins to make itself known. You shiver, deflated and with some indiscernible anxiety rising up from your abdomen. You try to shake this wave of discomfort, examining the form of the frog before you, its peg-like legs folding into its fleshy hind, its eyes unblinking, facing the night sky. The shimmer of its wet skin seems to be dulling, as the wind carries moisture from its spongy body in what you can only imagine as invisible, microscopic vapours, flying up and up into the open air. Your nose has begun to drip a little, you wipe it on your sleeve, eyes fixed upon the frog. Your focus drifts back into your body, to that hot, soupy bile rising through your chest, tightening your lungs. You take a deep breath, and it dizzies you, the chill of the air stiffening your insides. A thought flashes through you, one that should have preceded all other thoughts but didn’t and then you begin to cry. Not a sobbing but a gentle weep, without sound. Just tears rolling down your cheeks, and like the wet of the frog, evaporating into the immensity of the sky. 

Through your tear distorted vision, you watch the body of the frog. Its skin now dry. Tiny freckles of stillness break into microscopic movement. The frog's skin begins to flake and fall into its hardened shell. A slow, disintegrating cascade, like a picture puzzle in reverse, the form of the frog just falling away, into itself, revealing tiny brittle bones along its back and at the jut of its legs. You can hardly bear to watch it, but you cannot look away. You clench your face, tightening it into a fist as tears begin to trickle from your chin, your nose. Waves of tingling heat meet the icy wind across your cheeks. The tremendous sky above you yawns through your tears as the carcass reveals its insides to you, flesh scattering like sand off a dune. The pain in your chest is an excruciating, red, hot, bloody, compression. You feel nauseous but also slighted by a tiny relief rolling out with your silent cry. 

You blink the wetness from your eyes and the frog is all but gone, nothing but a shrivelled little husk remains. The bountiful greens and bulbous boba tea eyes, the thick waterlogged weight of it, evaporated, whisked away by the night. You're sobbing now, mouth agape and dribble stretching between lips, dripping down toward your crossed legs. You're sobbing but there isn’t any sound to it, just that droning tone of wind curling around the concrete rooftop. 

You look up to the sky and know, you don’t know how but you just know, the sun should be rising by now. The dark, void of the sky filling in with shades of violet or crimson or just straight to the heady blue of daylight, but it isn’t there, it isn’t coming, it’s just so, so still and endlessly so. The starless black hanging above you just stares back, it can see you are crying, you are struck with such shattering agony, but it just stares back, silently. It doesn’t drop down from the cosmos, swallowing you whole, whisking you away from wherever or whatever you are, it just stares back in complete apathy, giving you, leaving you nothing. Just a complete nothingness, heavy against your hot, wet face. The dawn isn’t coming, it is gone, it is gone, and it will never rise again and that is that. It is gone. A terror has consumed you. You don’t know how you know but you know that it, whatever it is, is over and you are stuck, unmoving, silent, braced against the silence of this sky, your body emptying itself through tears and tears alone. You lurch forward, stifling a silent scream, hot tears flooding from your face. You try to scream again but it catches in your throat. You clench your entire body, focusing every part of your being on letting out one small, controlled noise and finally, a sound, guttural, vibrating up painfully through your throat and trembling from your mouth. 

“Mum…

Help me…

Help me…”

And then you wake up. Tears running down your face. The echo of those words bouncing back to you from the walls of your bedroom. Your partner, warm, pressed against you, softly sleeping under the thick blanket you share. You are here now, in your room, safe with the person that you love so dearly but for some indiscernible reason, you are scared. You peer up through the window at the head of your bed and see that same starless sky. You are so, so scared.