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A record failure!
Last year, I tried to write a thriller novel about a girl who has predictive dreams. This is how far I got before I laughed myself out of the idea of continuing:
He raped her and choked her to death every night. Sofia twitched, letting out a barely audible moan as her subconscious struggled to fight off a relentless bastard from the shadows. He pinned her down and hit her again and again, and Sofia could hear the blaring horn from a freight truck each time his fist smashed against her jaws. His force was relentless. Impossible to move, let alone fight back. She felt a horrible cracking sensation as her head hit the pavement of the parking lot.
Then the man ripped open Sofia’s blouse with one hand, and held her neck tight with the other, squeezing harder at every instance she pleaded for her life and dignity. She could see the numbers on her studio apartment door becoming harder to read as they faded farther and farther away. It was just a thirty-second walk from her car to the door – a walk she had done hundreds of times without incident. And this time she was going to die.
His hand moved from her neck, down to unbutton her jeans, and Sofia tried to scream. No sound. A midnight jogger passed without as much as a second glance, and a car drove by and gave a friendly honk. No one helped her. She saw more people walking their dogs, taking out the trash, and heading out for an early day at the office. Then the sun was out, and the apartment complex was lively again. But no one even noticed Sofia being raped and beaten in the middle of the busy street. As the daylight grew brighter, she tried to look into the face of her attacker, but all she could see were fists pummeling her face. Blood from her nose ran back around her eyelids, and her tears mixed in with the blood. She was blind. Sofia did not see he man pull a rope from his pocket, but she felt it wrap tightly around her throat.
A dream. Sofia knew it all too well, waking up night after night with the same sickening horror that only comes with lucid night terrors. She clutched her pillow and cried until her head couldn’t take it anymore. That was the thing about crying every night – it did a number on her head, where she would have to take a double dose of aspirin and put a cold rag on her forehead for at least an hour.
Then she would finally doze off at around four in the morning with the sad and forever-sinking feeling of waking up for some sort of obligation two or three hours later. And why couldn’t there be a magic pill that just stopped the dreams altogether? But no; she had to settle on doing whatever she could to remedy the terror almost every night. When she cried herself back to sleep, holding the wet cloth to her head, the dreams would sometimes be over for the night. But most of the time, they weren’t.
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