Sleep Donation Page 12

  Miniature bears infesting the trees

  Matchstick pronghorns racing over tabletops

  THE DREAM OF THE JELLYFISH ATTACK

  MOST VIRULENT STRAIN

  Meteor Shower of Jellyfish Stingers

  NIGHTMARE CLUSTERS REPORTED IN FL, GA, IL, NC, OH, SC, VA

  LESS COMMON STRAINS

  Wedding tents with writhing white tentacles

  Baseball playoffs canceled for inclement weather; Wrigley Field covered in livid bubbles

  Caribbean cruise-goers watching stingers sizzle onto the Lido Deck

  Screaming children carried off by jellyfish balloons

  ALERT LEVEL 2—

  PRACTICE ENHANCED PRECAUTIONS

  As the etiology and transmission dynamics of these nightmares have yet to be determined, the Slumber Corps recommends a cautious approach to all symptomatic dreamers

  THE DREAM OF NO ESCAPE

  Airport where the departures board and the arrivals board are identical, i.e., Cedar Rapids–Cedar Rapids

  Motorcycle handlebars replaced by snakes

  Gas pumps covered in black hoods

  Boxes of hundreds of rusting doorknobs

  Elevator suspended between worlds

  Scorpions curled around boot soles

  Windows hardening into mirrors

  Nursery furniture adrift on a melting glacier

  THE UNRIPENING DREAM

  Ripe oranges slowly turning green again

  Old-growth forests shrinking into acorns

  Alligators filing backward into their eggs

  Ink leaking out of encyclopedias into clear puddles

  Renaissance portraits devolving into ultrasounds

  THE NIGHTMARE OF THE WATERFALL OF CHILDREN’S TEETH

  Deep woods, red moon

  Hard glint of something that is not water

  Horror, horror, horror

  THE NIGHTMARE OF THE HAUNTED JUKEBOX

  Whiskey glasses sparkling at each empty barstool

  Obituary photos on the album covers

  Voices of your cremated relations drifting through speakers

  Scratchy recording of a herd of extinct mammoths trumpeting

  Blue sparks around the unplugged electrical cord

  THE NIGHTMARE OF THE FINAL EXAM

  Grade-school class holding conch shells to their ears

  No. 2 pencils gripped in pudgy fists, transcribing a roaring

  Substitute teacher in antique diving suit, clapping erasers

  Black water lapping at the school windows

  Ancient dial tone of the primordial ocean

  THE DREAM WHERE YOU ARE THE CONTAMINATED DONOR

  Pandora’s box emptied by pneumatic tubes

  Leprous bats hanging from your shoe tree

  Spiderwebs bridging your eyelids

  Your worst secret exhaled into the dream tanks

  Sick children murmuring your name

  HELP US TO STOP A NIGHTMARE CONTAGION BEFORE IT BEGINS

  PLEASE NOTE ALL RELEVANT SYMPTOMS IN YOUR DREAM JOURNALS AND IMMEDIATELY CALL THE NATIONAL NOTIFIABLE DREAM SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM

  LET YOUR DOCTOR KNOW WITHOUT DELAY—

  1. If you see one or more of the following colors in your dreams:

  Coma white

  Tarantula hair violet

  Rabbit’s eye pink

  Molar yellow

  Buick LeSabre on fire blue

  Smoker’s Lung black

  Corn maze green

  Hyena’s laughter silver

  Preschool fishbowl blue

  Mortician’s lipstick red

  Ghost rainbow

  Stampeding gray

  Wolf’s gumline purple

  Famine brown

  Spat blood maroon

  Venusian orange

  2. If you see these numbers in your dreams: 44, 1.618, 666, 1,492, −13, 4,141,912, 000,000,000,000.

  3. If your dream features one or more of these sensations: wiggling a very loose tooth; tasting red clouds as you plummet earthward; growing a thin, forked tail from your coccyx bone; choking on seawater; kissing your best friend’s long-dead mother.

  4. If you engage in one or more of the following activities in a dream: falling in love with a postage stamp; eating a bucket of sour cherries; opening the small, green vault of a barrel cactus; milking a reptile; gonging a clapperless bell; driving an empty school bus; drawing winged bison on a cave wall; winning a lottery that you do not recall entering; biting down on a stranger’s wedding band; riding a land tortoise; manning a lighthouse; house-sitting for twin witches; instigating an orgy under a Christmas tree; forgiving your murderer; floating up into the early moon.

  5. If you frequent one of these establishments in a dream:

  Red Suds Laundromat

  Lucky Devil Strip Club

  Lady Feathers’ Fried Chick-N

  Uncle Bump’s Go-Karts

  Mount Nowhere

  Samarra

  Daytona

  The Grand Cauldron

  The Bowl-a-Bed Hotel

  6. If you hear one or more of the following sounds in a dream:

  baritone chuckling; a buzz saw biting into a tree; giraffes humping; an infant reciting Dante; choirs of owls; bad guitar solos; the ultrasonic howling of a falling star; a finger bone snapping; a widow spider’s footfalls; the scream of brakes failing; a child blowing out a thousand candles; a music too beautiful for words

  7. If you have a dream, even seemingly benign, that recurs more than twice in a 72-hour period.

  8. If you have any dream in which you observe yourself sleeping, on a bed that is identical to your own, in a world that is indistinguishable from this one, and you watch yourself beginning to wake up.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novella was originally published as a digital-only ebook in 2014 by the now-shuttered Atavist Books. It was a bold experiment and I am honored to have been a part of it. Thank you to the wonderful Frances Coady and the Atavist Books team.

  I’m so happy that Sleep Donation is now available in this gorgeously designed and illustrated edition from Vintage Books. My enormous gratitude to Denise Shannon, Jordan Pavlin, Gail Gaynin, Kayla Overbey, Linda Huang, Christopher Zucker and Debbie Glasserman, Andy Hughes, Barbara Richard, Robin Witkin, Rima Weinberg, Kathy Strickman, Angie Venezia, and Laura Chamberlain.

  Thank you, Anna Kaufman, for giving this book its second life. I’m so grateful for your keen editorial eye and for the serious consideration you gave to even the wildest material.

  Thanks to Stephen King, for his early and continued support.

  Thank you to Ale + Ale, for your nightmarish and hauntingly beautiful artwork.

  Thanks to my children, Oscar and Ada, for the free home lessons in the horrors of sleep deprivation.

  And thank you all for reading it.

  ALSO BY

  KAREN RUSSELL

  ORANGE WORLD AND OTHER STORIES

  Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl,” a young man falls in love with a two-thousand-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the Great Depression strike out for new territory and find themselves fighting for their lives. And in the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial
space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

  Fiction

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

  Swamplandia!

  Vampires in the Lemon Grove

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

  Available wherever books are sold.

  www.vintagebooks.com

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