WAKE. LOOK. DREAD.
The monster waits for you on your nightstand | Horror
This halloween I give you a short story about what I think is our society’s greatest monster.
It's a story that WON FIRST PLACE in the Inanimate Objects writing competition put on by TiF Team. I couldn’t believe it when I got the news.
Art by Brett Wagner
You wake to the alarm.
Not the grating breep of an old Timex with its bleeding red digits, but the soft vibration from the smartwatch on your wrist, always attached. Tracking. Analyzing. Deciding.
Your finger’s electric magnetism engages with its scratched diamond glass face and triggers a response. The code built to keep you hooked launches your sleep tracking application. Ready to inform.
You dread the reveal but need to know.
The algorithm forms data into holographic lines, a fat band of red sandwiched between a deep purple blue and a light cerulean.
Three hours awake. You remember none of it.
A knot punches into your belly.
Three hours of sleep. Six nights in a row. Eighteen hours for the week. Your jaw clenches at the thought of going a seventh, so you grab your phone and scroll through every self-help blog you can find. They all say the same shit.
1. Avoid Stimulants
2. Implement a Wind-Down Routine
3. Exercise Regularly, but Not Too Late
4. Manage Stress and Anxiety
5. Forgo Alcohol
You suspect these writers aren’t raising kids, have a predatory job of selling whole life insurance, or a husband who works late, cares too much about fantasy football, and jacks off to AI-generated nudes of Taylor Swift.
But you don’t have any better ideas than these lists of AI-generated slop.
So you skip the cherry Pop-Tarts and drink one cup of coffee instead of two. You make Leah and Alby breakfast of scrambled eggs and step outside to take in some sun filtered through haze and suck in the microscopic particulates of mildly polluted air. You drop them off at school but forget to blow them kisses.
You hate yourself for it.
You don’t have the energy to sell whole life to a lovely old couple who doesn’t need it, so your boss lectures you on meeting quotas and believing in the product.
After work, you use your gym membership for the first time in a year. A light workout, thirty minutes on an elliptical, but you break a sweat and make one roided out bro pinch his nose from your musk.
Your watch congratulates you on moving. Its ecstatic and colorful animation feels like judgment.
You forgo prosecco in the evening to pair with a dinner of dried baked chicken, overcooked rice, and a meager salad. You replace it with a nice hot cup of chamomile tea. Your husband raises his eyebrows and purses his lips. Your kids don’t even notice. They’re too busy gulping down their food so they can get back to their iPads.
You meditate for five minutes using some mindfulness app with a voice that sounds way too content to be from a sane person. You lie down in bed and open up the e-book you’ve been meaning to start: “The Secret of Secrets” by Dan Brown.
Two scrolls in, you’re asleep.
You Wake. You Look. You Dread.
Three hours. No sleep.
AGAIN.
The kids will be up any minute, demanding food, ignoring your pleas to brush their teeth, and dragging their feet via asinine arguments to avoid getting ready for school.
You stay in bed and scroll on TikTok while you wait for the onslaught of demands, whines, and hyperactive energy of young children. You hold back sobs as you flick through emotional quotes set to Max Richter’s “On The Nature of Daylight” until your feed devolves into influencers peddling products and vitamins they swear cured their insomnia in one week. It’s probably bullshit, but the algorithm keeps feeding them to you.
It’s 7:30. You’re going to be late.
You jump out of bed, drag your kids downstairs, give them crackers for breakfast, and skip the shower. You conduct a battle in your PJs, between children, traffic, and overzealous parents who stay in the dropoff spots beyond the allotted five minutes.
Your smartwatch says you’re seven minutes late as you scald your tongue sipping the hot chamomile tea you bought at the coffee shop. Your boss says your work attire is not fitting for a professional establishment. You apologize and explain your kids were sick.
He doesn’t believe you.
You meditate for ten minutes instead of five. The soft and serene voice attempts to convince you that peace is attainable.
You ignore the bag of ranch Doritos staring at you like a desperate orphan from within the vending machine. The minutes tick by like hours. Your mouth waters. Your stomach grumbles. A slow agony.
At the gym, you go all in—total body HIIT. The sweat gushes from you, leaving a puddle on the floor. Your stomach braids itself. You cough, but you don’t puke. The watch congratulates you for hitting 200% of your move goal.
The endorphins hit, and it’s bliss, until the come down five minutes later.
You take the kids to soccer practice. Your husband works late. You expend your final morsel of willpower by not eating the pizza you buy for them at the concession stand.
You eat a salad at home with blueberries, grapes, arugula, romaine, pecans, and almonds. You forget the dressing and munch as you look up ways to get your kids to spend less time on their tablets. Each list starts the same:
1. Be accountable
2. Be realistic
3. Be engaged
You stop after reading the same number three for the fourth time.
The kids argue with you about going to bed, and they’re still up when your husband gets home. He blames you. You can read it in the slight roll of his eyes. Of course, they go right to sleep for him. Of course, it’s all your fault when you can’t get a six and four-year-old to bed. Forget about your sleeping problems.
You ask ChatGPT if men are better at putting kids to sleep than women. It wasn’t helpful.
You stretch. Practice breathing exercises and mindfulness. You feel relaxed as you lie in bed and put on a podcast that plays nothing but water sounds because someone on TikTok recommended it.
You like it.
You try to read the paperback edition of “Watch Me Disappear” by Janelle Brown. You don’t make it past page one. Your husband turns the light off for you.
You wake. You look. You rip the watch off your wrist and whip it across the room.
The clang wakes your husband. You shove a pillow into your face and scream. Leah and Alby echo it. Your husband takes them downstairs and lets them watch TV. When he returns, you tell him you don’t remember being up for three hours. He says you were on your phone.
The two of you argue about it until he storms downstairs and joins the kid. It is his turn to take them to school anyway.
He hallucinated it. There is no doubt. A scene constructed by his half-sleeping brain as he stumbled to the bathroom for his ritual middle-of-the-night pee.
You open the Settings app on your phone, scroll down to Screen Time, and press. 75 minutes on TikTok. 53 minutes on YouTube. 49 minutes on X. The graphical columns show the time at which these social binges started at 2:55 am.
You pray to feel the reprieve of rest, remember the pleasure of a dream, and not be the rotten banana peel in the beating sun, baking on the pavement with responsibilities.
You call off work. Spend the first two hours on Reddit’s r/sleep looking for answers.
u/Bananagirlie4765 says it’s sleep scrolling
u/Kingtut9839 compares it to sleepwalking.
You suck down two hot Chamomile teas and have to piss. You waste ten minutes on the toilet, absorbed in TikTok with some health guru promoting ashwagandha gummies. You wipe as he implores you to take time to help yourself.
The morning sun filters through the fading green of the sugar maple’s leaves as you meditate for fifteen minutes outside. A tremor rolls up into your stomach. Now your chest. It eviscerates your attempt at peace. You quiver. Stand up. Look in every possible direction and then glance at your watch. It’s been five minutes.
A fire bomb of terror erupts in your brain matter.
You grab your car keys. Don’t bother to put on a bra and lock yourself into the metal death machine. You drive too fast to the Walgreens and pick up several bottles of ashwaganda gummies. You take two and drive recklessly back.
Thirty minutes later, it hits you in the shower.
Your extremities feel like water-sodden logs. Your mind runs like a sloth. You crawl deep into your couch, phone in hand, and let YouTube burn videos into your retinas.
Three hours later, your eyes are bloodshot.. You haven’t eaten. Your watch nudges you to move, so you walk around the neighborhood for an hour.
You don’t feel better.
Your kids and husband arrive home expecting food. You find an expired box of Hamburger Helper in the pantry and freezer-burnt beef in the freezer. You throw it together in thirty minutes. They don’t even say thank you.
You take two more gummies and stretch.
You’re in bed by 8:30 pm. You’re asleep by 9:00. You wake at 11:30. Your bladder is exploding. The pee shoots out of you like the water jets in an automatic car wash.
You settle into bed. Close your eyes and fall asleep.
You wake. It’s 3:33.
You know because you are staring at your watch. The white, piercing digits are unavoidable as it hangs above your face on your wrist. Your arm, anchored perfectly out in front and tilted.
You tell your brain to move your limbs, but they remain inert. Your eyes dart around the room, everything in shadow—the glare from your watch, which now reads 3:34, a blaring beacon demanding attention.
A dull pressure builds in your skull. Your heart rate increases as your mouth dries. A ding alerts you to an unusually elevated heart rate. Another ding asks if you would like to turn off your morning alarm.
You force air out in a great burst through your nostrils and clench every muscle you have. You want to push your consciousness through your skull and skin, leave this mortal plane, and escape.
But you remain.
3:35.
3:36.
3:37.
You stare at it.
Into it.
Attempt to burn it from your visual cortex. Banish it from existence. Find a way to…
…You wake on the living room couch. Phone in hand. An instagram reel of a white poodle jumping through hula hoops on loop. You jolt up and move with ease. You feel your wrist, watchless. You find it on the kitchen counter, charging.
You don’t touch it.
You get a shower, force your kids to get properly ready for school, leave your watch, and arrive at work on time.
You’re gassed, but convince a single mom to buy the shitty whole life. You listen to your boss yarn about his family’s planned ski vacation to the Alps this winter, only to turn the conversation on you.
Your performance hasn’t been a full send the last week. You know it. He knows it. Don’t make it a trend.
You buy the Cool Ranch Doritos from the vending machine. Sniff them, then throw them into the trash. You’re upset you almost gave in.
You work out. Take a walk. Look at your progress for the week. You’ve earned a seven-day streak and it feels good.
You tell your husband to make dinner. Don’t let him protest. You walk out of the back door, plop down on the grass, and bask in the blue glow of your phone as you dive deeper and deeper into Reddit r/sleep and watch TikTok.
You take two Ashwagandha gummies, have a cup of tea, stretch, meditate, and avoid the watch on the counter. Its face lights up every time you walk by.
You read your paperback for an hour. You fall asleep.
It’s 3:33.
You’re on your side. Under the covers. Staring at your phone.
You didn’t grab it. You can’t move a muscle. Your body is locked in position. Your eyes skitter. Left. Right. Up. Down. Never enough to not see the phone.
A soft, high-pitched ring in your ears grows to an amplified, deafening shriek.
It calls for your attention. Seduces it.
The light from the screen. The elegant pixels. The content custom-fed to you by the all-knowing algorithms to keep you locked in. Praise to the masters who’ve created such a divine system. One that pulls your consciousness toward, seizes, and then owns—a holy, unbreakable communion.
Cold tears stream in rivulets down the high cheekbones that so many suitors swooned over and complimented on until you gained weight and let the sun weather your skin.
You press your corneas against the phone’s glass.
YOU SCREAM.
A pale blue light encompasses your vision. Your skin itches with an electric zeal. You scratch and dig into powder-painted aluminum. You taste copper and cadmium. You think in binary.
Disembodied like electric drops of data dripping into a cloud of endless dopamine. You merge with every data point and trend. You connect with bots and weird, over-opinionated strangers. Ones and Zeros are your DNA. Your synapses fire with meaningless memes, peddled quick fixes, and mindless mounds of brain rot.
You no longer thirst. You no longer suffer.
You’re a product.
You wake in a hospital bed twelve hours later. Your husband discovered you in the basement, eyes rolled into the back of your head, bashing your skull against your phone.
The doctor drones on and on and on as he prescribes you a medication to take once daily. Twice, if you have an episode. Your husband holds your hand. You sense his fear.
His dark pupils are devoid of empathy. They now see a stranger.
Back home, you heat some water and make a cup of Chamomile tea. Your kids sit on their iPads and watch YouTube in the living room. Your husband scrolls on his phone at the dining room table.
You stand in the kitchen, empty-handed, forced to absorb the insanity of reality.
Four walls. An old wooden table. Toys collecting dust. Tangible things that have lost all meaning. An open window lets you taste the smell of fall on the wisps of wind, but it doesn’t stir anything within you. You don’t feel like you’re living.
You pick up the ceramic mug and throw it against the wall—jagged ceramic scatters. Hot tea marks the grey paint and spills onto the old wooden floors.
You get everyone’s attention. Demand they be off their devices. Your husband demands that you take another pill.
He needs to work, and the kids whine and grovel like hyenas. You plead with them and compromise. You’ll take the pill, but they must sit with you sans iPads and iPhones.
The house is silent as the four of you sit around the dining room table—the kids fidget and bicker. Your husband looks off into the dark corner of your living room, thinking about his lineup for the weekend.
They’re scared.
You see the table between you as a rectangular reference of distance. Distance from connection. Distance from understanding. Distance from solace.
Your in-laws break the silence by Facetiming your husband. The kids are overjoyed to speak with their grandparents and be free from the device ban. They gather happily around his phone in the living room.
You shuffle upstairs, embracing the grogginess of the second dosage. Your watch and phone greet you on the nightstand in your bedroom. Their screens glow blue. Begging for attention.
A high-pitched hum infects your ear.
You toss them into the hallway, bury yourself under the covers of your bed, and let your mattress eat you. Devour every ache and disquieting thought. You feel like a boulder sinking into sand, but your mind runs like an earworm you can’t shake.
You dwell on the repetitive nature of your existence. Think about the meaningless purpose your job gives. Grapple with the permanence of infinity. It’s all so strange to you.
Heavy.
Death is only ever a single nanosecond away.
Your ceiling lowers. The four walls close in. The soft comfort of your blankets begins to constrict. Suffocate. Torture.
What are you?
Why are you?
An hour passes. You leave your bed. Anxiety sweat running down your back.
You grab your watch and slap it on your wrist. You pick up your phone and turn off Do Not Disturb. You slither back into bed and let TikTok lull you to sleep.
The watch will tell you how it went.
If you liked this story be sure to check out the other participants in the competition. There were some real gems. Also in the link you can see what the Judges thought about my story. Thanks for reading!
Congratulations Nick!!!! You won!!!!
Ironically I initially thought of AI as my inanimate object but didn't go with it in the end. Whatever I'd done wouldn't have been anything like this though. This was a brilliant and maddening satire and the scary thing is how true to life it must in fact be for so many stupid people. That's what really scary about it - the fact that so many people do get algorithm-fucked so easily.
Mother's little helper for the 21st century. But I will take Valium any day over this...