by Aubrey Parke

Lena let the shower run hot and dropped her clothes to the floor. Beads of steam jeweled the baby hairs on her arms. She touched her fingertips to the bathroom window, feeling at once the heat of the shower and the chill of the outside air, hoping the contrast would exhaust her. Two in the morning, and sleep would not come. She sat on the floor, legs extended, and strained her forehead toward her knees. She recited the words of a song she hated. She counted her breaths. And still, her thoughts sprouted feet and scrambled along the surface of her mind. They shoved each other over and crawled out of her ears and ran down her arms until the back of her hands felt like fire. Across the side yard, a light flickered on in Eli’s house, and in the next house, and the next, until the whole street blinked like a hundred-eyed beast.

Lena turned off the shower. All the soft sounds of night began to gather: rabbit paws on wet grass, insect feet on wood paneling, small gurgling frogs. A smell like an overturned mushroom drifted into the apartment. Lena followed the scent outside, where doors sighed open and neighbors filtered onto the street. They spoke in hushed tones and stood close, letting their hands brush against each other.

—

One year ago, the sounds of the world became unbearable to Eli. A car door slamming became the cock of a shotgun. Footsteps rumbled like the final stampede of a near-extinct species. Worse, human voices seemed to lose all their meaning: people chirped across tables, bellowed from car windows, and barked into invisible earpieces. On the street, everything blurred into one mechanical roar. Noise was a sweaty hand around Eli’s throat.

Tonight, moths drifted toward Eli’s bedroom window, not fluttering but floating, like milk-drunk cherubs. Eli watched halos of light form around their wings, which moved as hands, opening and closing. Wings were the hand of a younger sibling beaconing the older to come and see. An owl! It’s an owl in the tree! It’s an owl in the tree, awake, and the sun’s out!

As a child, Eli hated sleeping in the summer. Nine p.m., bedtime, but orange light still draped like gauze over the wounds of patchy grass and mold stains on the wooden deck.

“He looked at me!” Eli said to the older sister.

“You can’t even see the eyes from here,” the sister scoffed.

Eli fell silent. But those wide, open owl eyes, two moons—Eli could still picture them years later, clear as the spots on the moths’ wings.

Eli cracked their bedroom window. Light spread like water over their knuckles, which clutched at the grimy inset of the window frame. The whole neighborhood seemed awake. Even Lena, who Eli had once expected to befriend, was outside, her hair blown to silk by the lazy breeze.

—

People began to cluster in small groups on curbs and porches. As they spoke, their bodies curved toward each other like tulip petals, heads nearly touching. Lena moved between them and wondered if she was smiling. She touched her hands to her face. It was smooth, untroubled. For the first time in months, she felt unlonely. It had been lonely to fit her life into one small car and even worse to realize that it fit very easily. It had been lonely to drive away from the person she had thought she would be with forever, to pick up her phone one hundred times a day with no one to call. Tonight wrapped around her like the blanket her father used to warm in the dryer before driving to school on winter mornings. Cocooned in her blanket, she would lean against the window to watch droplets of melted snow merge into networks of tiny flowing streams.

Lena looked up to find the stars but stopped at Eli’s bedroom window.

“Hello,” Lena said, her voice chasing away the moths.

“Hey,” Eli said. “Nice night.”

“Yeah.”

When Eli spoke, the triangle of skin at the center of their throat quivered. That piece of skin was almost transparent, like the surface of a drum. It let in so much light. Lena imagined all the light from the street gathering in a fuzzy ball at Eli’s throat.

“I’m realizing I don’t know many of the people who live here,” Eli said.

“I haven’t seen you in a year.”

“Since Jamie moved.”

(There had been a final party for a mutual friend, with champagne served in plastic flutes on top of cardboard boxes.)

“Yeah, since Jamie.”

The air between Lena’s sidewalk square and Eli’s window throbbed like a plucked string.

“Do you want to come down?” Lena asked, and Eli was surprised to not feel afraid.

They sat on the same side of a large tree trunk, angled apart so they could see each other only through peripheral vision: a strand of hair, the tip of a nose, a leg bent at the knee. Eli wore shorts and a white shirt; Lena wore a moth-gray robe that turned her eyes the color of polished slate.

“Crowds have been stressing me out lately,” Eli said.

“But not tonight?”

“Not tonight.”

Their conversation unspooled like a thread so fine it seems never-ending, but still ends. And when the morning came, Eli and Lena moved their feet, which had started to touch. Eli stood and turned to leave when a shrill voice ricocheted from a nearby balcony.

“Mom, mom! It’s an owl!”

(A laugh like summer peaches.)

“Well, he’s either very confused, or he’s coming home to sleep.”

As doors and yawns and squeaking shoes tore at the fabric of morning, Eli’s heart did not begin to race. It beat steadily, like the wings of a moon-drugged moth.

Aubrey Parke is a writer and oral historian from San Antonio, TX, who currently lives in the Bay Area. “The Night That No One Slept” is her first fiction publication, but her poetry has appeared in the West Trade Review and Kitchen Table Quarterly. In her free time, she enjoys sewing, hiking, camping, and listening to live music.