Insomnia

Flash Fiction

A few nights after April's death, the early hours of the morning dragged on. Her daughter could not sleep even though she was only seven and had always been sleepy at night before. Susan lay in bed and looked at the shadows of tree branches seen dimly in her room because of the streetlight across the street. She wondered if somewhere in the shadows, her mother lived. She was trying to wrap her mind around the fact her mother was not coming back, and the word which described the fact her mother was never coming back, death. But her child's mind did not totally grasp the whole situation, not yet. Susan could not sleep, though she did not know that this was only to be the first of many nights of insomnia.

April seemed to be sleeping peacefully a few blocks away. In reality, she was lying at the funeral home awaiting her funeral the next day. She looked as beautiful as ever, and so young, more like she was in her twenties than her late thirties. Susan had been her only child, although she had never expected to die young and leave her motherless. The dead always seem to sleep peacefully, while the living, troubled by the loss of the dead, sometimes find it's harder, much harder, to sleep. 

Susan held her doll close to her and looked deeper into the shadows of the May night. She thought maybe her mother was there. Don't ghosts like the night she thought? Outside the flowering trees heavy with spring blossoms stirred in the night breeze, and the light of the streetlight fell through the shadows of the branches into Susan's room. The branches blowing made the shadows seem to move to Susan. She thought more than ever that maybe her mother was there. 

Susan looked harder into the shadows. She was not sleepy at all, the insomnia of grief had her wide awake. As Susan looked, she thought she saw her mother, April. Just her face, and nothing more. But to Susan with her child's imagination, her mother was there, as April's eyes looked wistfully at her daughter and her lips said goodbye. Susan wasn't frightened and didn't expect her mother to say anything else. Goodbye was all she wanted to hear as she had never heard this from her mother in real life, before her death.