#author: crystakat

[redditnosleep]

Has Anyone Else Seen This Strange Infomercial?

by crystakat. Warning for child abuse.

February 11th

Let me tell you the secret of the century: being a single parent is hard. Yeah, of course it’s worth it and all, but I’m not sure how anyone does this for eighteen years. Shift at the hospital, hurry home and check on Tommy, four hours of shut-eye tops, then another eight hours working retail, rinse and repeat. It’s awesome.

With a schedule that tight, you think I’d froth at the mouth for the chance to get some extra sleep, but lately my insomnia’s getting real bad. The circles under my eyes are starting to look like a permanent fixture. When Tommy’s crying is ringing in my ears and I feel like I’m about to shatter into little pieces, there’s only one outlet: late-night TV. Infomercials, to be exact. More infomercials than you can count.

Sitting in front of the ghostly blue glow of the screen is just about the only thing that helps distract from a one-year-old’s incessant wailing. Yeah, yeah, before you revoke my “good parenting” card, I’ll have you know Tommy cries over nothing. The kid’s fed and watered, but he’ll scream like it’s the end of the world.

There’s no feeling quite like slipping into a near-fugue state at two in the morning with the words buy now, and we’ll throw in a free pack of refills! ringing around in your head, like ping-pong balls ricocheting in an empty room. At some point, if you’re lucky, you’ll slip into unconsciousness and wake up with your face mashed into the couch.

I’ve pretty much seen them all by now. Catalogued in them head. There’s the blender that promises to make meal prep 5000% more efficient, the hairdryer from heaven, the neck-cushioner that’ll cure your arthritis, the vacuum cleaner that connects to Bluetooth and probably can sleep with your wife. A hundred perky men and women going on about weight loss pills and makeup and kitchen knives and towels that’ll revolutionize your life, no really, we promise or your money back.

Well, all except one. Last night, I saw a new infomercial that I’m still not quite sure if I hallucinated or not. It was maybe 3AM, and my mind was throbbing, pulsing inside my skull. I’d all but given up on sleep. The blonde woman on the screen had just finished her spiel about cubic zirconia jewelry, and then this way-too-catchy jingle was blaring from the TV:

Spleeno! Spleeno all your worries away! Spleeno! Spleeno makes a better today!

It was a chorus of high-pitched voices, I think, something childish like you’d hear in a toy commercial. The lyrics to the jingle flashed across the screen in fat, cartoonish letters.

Next, there was one of those “before” montages. You know, the clips of people cracking eggs onto the floor or groaning about their bad back, before the miracle product swoops in to save them. It was pretty standard: a black-and-white shot of a young woman applying mascara in the mirror, making an exaggerated mess of it by smudging it all over her eyelids. She frowned at the finished result. The camera zoomed in on her clumped-together lashes. The whole time, this glum, almost comically sad tune played in the background.

It transitioned into a full-color scene of the woman beaming into the mirror. The words SPLEENO! hung above her head, and the music was now generically upbeat. Look. I hadn’t slept in around thirty-six hours, and I’d started to feel like my brain was melting out of my ears, so I don’t know what I saw. But it sure as hell looked like this pretty girl brought a pair of tweezers up to her eyelids and began plucking out her lashes, one by one, all with a TV-ready smile splayed across her face. No time lapse or anything. It might have gone on for five minutes or fifteen. When it was finished, she almost looked normal, but if you looked close, you could see her completely bare lids.

The infomercial ended with the SPLEENO! jingle playing again while the woman beamed into the camera. She picked up a tube of mascara, looked at it, then tossed it aside. It was so strange that I figured it had to be a parody, complete with an “after” montage of overacting and smiling. I know this sounds crazy, but afterwards, I felt almost relieved. Like some small weight I didn’t even know was there had been taken off my shoulders.

Then Tommy’s crying started up again, and the feeling was lost.

February 13th

I saw it again last night. Honest to god. I actually did pass out for around an hour before waking up, feeling like absolute crap. I peeled myself off the couch to check on Tommy. He was sleeping for once, and I promptly returned to the living room to tune in to my favorite channel.

I watched the same toaster infomercial twice before it came on again. When the jingle started, my heart sped up: Spleeno! Spleeno all your worries away! Spleeno! Spleeno makes a better today! Whatever this was, it had one hell of a catchy tune. The kind that crops up in your mind at the worst of moments.

Call it morbid curiosity. I wanted to see what was going to play this time. It was too early to be an April Fool’s prank, but maybe it was all a joke by someone with a seriously weird sense of humor, or promo for an upcoming movie.

The jingle ended, and the colors quickly faded to black and white. I watched as a middle-aged man came on screen. He was dressed in his pajamas, his hair tousled in a TV version of a messy bedhead. He stood in front of the mirror and cupped his cheek with a grimace, then opened his mouth to inspect his teeth: they were yellow and crooked, some of them sitting at angles that looked downright painful. I could see black spots of rot on his molars. He poured a cupful of mouthwash and gargled, but his face creased as if he was in agony and he quickly spit it all down the drain.

The scene shifted, and the now-technicolored man was dressed smartly in work clothes, his hair slicked down with gel. SPLEENO! danced across the screen in burning pink letters. The counter was littered with teeth. He looked into his mirror and smiled, revealing a completely toothless mouth with raw, bloody gums. I should have been disgusted, but that reaction never came. Instead I was... fascinated. The man didn’t look to be in pain. He seemed almost elated. And why shouldn’t he be? His pain was gone. I wondered how he felt—light, carefree. I felt a little scared for feeling the way I did, but I couldn’t deny it, either.

Afterwards, I stuck around to watch a mattress commercial, but found that my eyes closed of their own volition, and I finally fell into shallow, dreamless sleep. I woke up feeling unsatisfied, like I’d had some unfinished business in a dream, but couldn’t remember what.

February 17th

I’ve stayed up every night since Tuesday and it hasn’t come on a single time. I know what I saw, but at the same time I’m starting to doubt myself. Maybe I dreamed it all up. Either way, I haven’t slept a minute in three nights.

I almost crashed the car during a milk run for formula and diapers this morning. Tommy is driving me up the wall. I could swear he wakes up and starts sounding off the minute I get home, and shuts up once I’m at work. God, I wish I had the money for a sitter. Just one night of peace and quiet might be enough. Nothing around me seems solid, anymore. It’s like the world is slipping away, and there’s only me, a sack of blood and bones dragging itself to places that feel like hollow imprints. I know I look like shit, but I’m finding it hard to care.

I wonder if this is how people lost in the desert feel, when they see that last mirage of cool water.

February 18th

It came on at 1AM. I can’t explain it, but the moment I heard the first notes to the jingle, I felt a wave of relief crashing down on me. The world felt real again.

I kept my eyes glued to the screen. There was an elderly woman this time, walking down a set of stairs to that same sad tune. With her coiffed gray hair and red sweater, she looked like a character out of a Christmas movie, the sweet old lady about to serve her grandkids chocolate-chip cookies with a smile. She wasn’t smiling now, though. Each time her right foot made contact with the steps, she winced, quickly shifting her weight to her left. Bad knee. Once she got to the bottom, she rested on the banister and caught her breath. The next few clips showed her hobbling around the house—I realized it was the same one the others were shot in—and clutching at her kneecap every few seconds.

Right then, it was as if I could feel the pain shooting up my leg, too. I wanted her to be free of it. I wanted to feel light again. I watched as the TV cut to a close-up shot of the old woman sleeping in bed. Her gray hair was spread out on the pillow like a halo. The camera slowly pulled out, revealing the rest of her nightgown-clad body and the smooth, round stump of her right leg. I noticed it’d been severed just above the knee, and it looked to have healed completely, the skin intact except for a line of white scarring. I examined her face. With her mouth curled into a smile, she was the picture of tranquility. I couldn’t help but smile myself. Her pain was gone now, discarded with the unbearable weight of all that putrid flesh. For the first time in a long time, I felt at ease, perfectly content, even. I kept smiling as the jingle ran again.

Spleeno! Spleeno all your worries away! Spleeno! Spleeno makes a better today!

I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, but I kept grinning anyway, enjoying the way those words rolled off my tongue.

February 20th

Yesterday was the best one yet! I didn’t go to work, just in case I’d miss it while I was gone. Tommy was crying as usual, and he was annoying as ever, but I didn’t let him distract me.

I kept my attention on the TV. The infomercial came on around midnight—earlier than usual. It featured a man and his dog. A golden retriever. Even with the grainy quality, I could see that it was a beautiful specimen, its coat sleek and its eyes bright. Too bad it just wouldn’t shut up. Its barking went on and on, all through the night, and my heart clenched with sympathy as the man groaned and clapped his hands over his ears. The barks seemed to grow in volume until it was unbearable. I shook my head as the man tried a pair of earplugs to block out the noise. I knew all too well those didn’t work. Tommy’s cries could penetrate through anything.

I was on the edge of my seat waiting for what came next. The black-and-white gave way to color, and the man went from tired and groggy to well-rested. He got up from bed and stretched, then went to the kitchen to fix himself a cup of coffee, humming the whole time. As a stream of coffee poured into his mug, I noticed a large yellowish mass lying on the kitchen floor. The dog’s body looked broken, and its head was stained with a bloom of red, but the man’s newfound happiness was so infectious that I hardly paid it any attention. The now-familiar SPLEENO! hung above the pair. I realized my face was wet with tears of joy. The man had gotten what he wanted: silence. The tears kept coming even after the screen went black.

Spleeno. It’s a wonderful sound. A wonderful word. It takes all your worries away. It makes you realize you have to hold on, and if something’s standing in the way, then you have to get rid of it.

That night, I slept like a baby.

[redditnosleep]

There Was A Series Of Unexplained Deaths In My Town In 1988

by crystakat

In the winter of 1988, bodies began appearing on the border between my town and the surrounding woods. A group of campers had stumbled upon a man in his early thirties, completely nude and almost perfectly preserved by the cold weather. By the end of the day, two more had been found within a quarter-mile radius. All three were naked, found lying on open ground as if there’d been no attempt to hide them. One woman and two men. None bore any visible wounds.

The news exploded. It was a little backwoods town where not much happened, so when three strangers turned up dead hardly a mile off of Revell Street, it became all anyone could talk about. I was just a kid then, a few months into sixth grade, and the rumors that spread around school were ridiculous.

Family breakfast that morning was quieter than usual. Mom was horrified, poring over the newspaper as she wondered aloud if it was safe to send my eight-year-old sister and me to school by ourselves.

“Jesus,” she said, gesturing at the paper. “Look at this, Michael. They put their photos in. That’s just not decent.”

Dad glanced over. “I’ll bet you it’s drugs, and this whole fuss is for nothing.”

“Can I see?” I asked, reaching out to take the paper from mom.

She pursed her lips. “Fine, but don’t show Mandy.” I grabbed it and looked it over: three grainy pictures of nondescript faces. It was kind of disappointing, though I didn’t dare say that out loud. While mom was washing the dishes, I let my sister have a peek.

Mandy stuck her tongue out as she looked them over. “That one looks like William,” she giggled, pointing at the leftmost photo, a man with dark hair and a rasp of stubble. “He’s a boy in my class.” It was so innocently morbid that I couldn’t help but laugh. I got up to help mom with the dishes, though even as I occupied myself with chores, I couldn’t help but linger on the strange deaths.

My dad insisted there was a logical explanation for it all. Three young people, drunk and stumbling lost in the woods on a below-zero night… well, he said, you can imagine what happens next.

In the following week, he was proven wrong. The autopsy was published: no trace of drugs, medicinal or otherwise, in their blood. No alcohol either. The cause of death couldn’t be ascertained; there had been no physical trauma, no blood loss, no pre-existing medical conditions. The article in the newspaper declared it most closely resembled death by shock: a sudden, massive rush of adrenaline essentially stunning the heart into inaction. That only seemed to open up more questions. One person might have been explainable, but three? What’s enough to shock three people like that?

A chunk of the woods had already been put under police patrol when a new body turned up, nude yet unharmed like the others. It’d been snowing pretty heavily that winter, blanketing the woods in a thick white layer, and at night I’d lay awake and think of how awful it was to die like that, freezing and alone with only the shadows of trees stretching over you.

Before the week was over, there was a fifth body, sprawled in almost the exact same spot. Somehow, nobody had seen where it’d come from. One police officer interviewed by the press said he’d been passing through the area just minutes prior, and in the time that he was gone, it was like it'd just “blinked into existence”.

A fresh wave of rumors emerged at school, though now they were less nervously excited, more tinged with fear. Though the evidence was frustratingly nonexistent, the unspoken consensus was that they had to be murders.

When a sixth body popped up, a 10 pm curfew was imposed on adults and children alike. If I remember correctly, that was around the time the FBI caught wind of the case. The whole stretch of forest had already been cordoned off with police tape, the perimeter constantly surveilled by a flock of solemn-looking officers who made sure no one got in or out. I’d used to play in that forest all the time with my friends, and seeing it suddenly made into the site of six bloodless deaths was surreal, to say the least. That was what the media started calling it: the Bloodless Murders. Sometimes the bodies came in pairs, sometimes alone. By the tenth or eleventh, there was a definite pattern: while they varied in ethnicity and sex, they were all relatively young, twenties to forties, and all found nude. Some even looked as if they’d had clothes on minutes before, with the indentation of a watch or waistband still etched into their skin at the time of discovery.

Have you ever been in a room where everyone’s holding their breath? Every person just waiting for the ball to drop, the silence so bad that you could almost drown in it? Now imagine a whole town.

You want to know the strangest part about all this? Weeks dragged on, and none of the bodies were ever identified. Their fingerprints were intact, but there were no known matches. DNA testing came up empty. A public campaign to find the identities of the Bloodless victims turned up nothing. It was like these people had emerged from nowhere. Deprived of their names and backstories, the victims went unmourned, blurred into one murky entity.

Shit really hit the fan about a month into the case. Some up-and-coming journalist—a guy by the name of Walton, I think—claimed to have uncovered the truth behind it all, and wrote a tell-all article divulging the details that hadn’t been released by police or FBI. Apparently, the Bloodless Murders weren’t so bloodless after all. It was true that most were found untouched, but four of the dead practically had had bites taken out of them, whole sections of their bodies just gone. One guy was missing almost half his right side, and one of the women was short an arm. “Bites” might be a little misleading, though. The missing pieces had been removed cleanly—almost too cleanly. In Walton’s words, they looked as if they’d been “scooped” out, or simply magicked away.

Walton claimed he had the records to prove the area was under even more intense surveillance than most would’ve guessed. Besides hundreds of cameras that had been covertly installed in trees and rocks throughout the forest, there were also loads of temperature data loggers and state-of-the-art recording equipment, along with a whole host of other devices that I couldn’t even wrap my head around. Stuff that measured radiation and minute changes in the composition of the air. If he was right, it must’ve cost a ton. Supposedly the data showed “climatological deviations”—basically weird spikes and dips in temperature corresponding to the times that the bodies were found.

If Walton was right, there was a good chance that the FBI was in possession of video and audio recordings showing the origin of the bodies. It sounded like a crazy conspiracy, even though Walton hadn’t been able to come up with a solid theory for the reason behind the cover-ups. That was the part that drove me crazy. I must’ve re-read that article a hundred times.

What happened next was total lockdown. The newspaper was pulled from publication in the blink of an eye. Walton publicly apologized for having made fabricated claims and trying to make a spectacle out of the deaths. Not much was heard from him after that. The case was under the full jurisdiction of the FBI, according to my parents, and local police were all but shut out of it. I don’t know what happened, exactly, but suddenly the media coverage dropped to zero.

At school, the teachers gave a talk about it, how we were all safe and there was to be no further spreading of rumors. I remember thinking about the weirdness of that whole day. While Mr. Russell was going on and on about the importance of following the curfew, there’d been a team of adults who quietly escorted kid after kid out of the room, ushering each one back in about ten minutes later. One of them was my friend, Sophia. After the assembly, I quizzed her about what had happened over a lunch of stale pizza.

“It was really weird,” she said, picking halfheartedly at her food. “They took a sample of my spit, and some of my hair and nails too. You think they’re checking for diseases?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. The whole thing left a sour taste in mouth, and I felt helpless and scared. The parents must’ve been encouraged not to talk about it either, because whenever I brought it up to my mom and dad after the whole Walton fiasco had gone down, they shut me down fast.

In hindsight, I probably never should have attempted the plan. On a Friday night, I snuck out after curfew, armed with only a handful of granola bars and a flashlight. I biked down to the woods. It didn’t take long; it was one of those childhood routes that you know by heart. I wasn’t even sure about what I was hoping to find. Chalk it up to mix of curiosity and senselessness.

There were patrols standing around, but I managed to make my way to a dense copse of trees and snuck in from there, feeling my heart racing a hundred miles an hour as I ducked under the yellow police tape. The sheer stupidity of my idea hadn’t quite settled in yet. If what Walton had written about the surveillance had been true, there wasn’t a chance in hell that I wasn’t going to get spotted, but being a kid and all, I hoped I’d get off with a slap on the wrist. I turned my flashlight on to the dimmest setting and began my trek, praying that I knew the path through the woods as well as I thought.

Time passed differently that night. Maybe I was walking around for thirty minutes; maybe it was three hours. The sky was inky black, and in the darkness, the trees distorted themselves into more and more monstrous forms with each step I took. All I know is, when I stumbled across the body, the world came to a shuddering halt.

Under the cone of artificial light, the body looked fresh, the skin still pink. I remembered thinking if I’d touched him, he might still have been warm. His eyes were wide open, glassy as a river, face set in an expression of determination. There was a tattoo on his bare chest, a sentence written in a shaky scrawl:

IT COMES ON 07.11.2036