Night Shift

Rae

By the time the thing on my chest asked for my name, I’d already bitten my tongue bloody trying not to answer.

People say nightmares are silent. Mine arrive with a sound: the long, glassy exhale of my bar’s cooler when it gives up and warms to the room. Then weight—needled, exact—pinning ribs, wrists, breath. Only my eyes work, the way a locked door still knows how to listen.

“Say it,” the voice purrs, patient, amused. “We should call each other what we are.”

Its hair brushes my cheek—orange peel, hot rain—and I taste iron, the one honest flavor at 3:12 a.m.

My name is Rae. That is what I do not say.

I count backward from a hundred the way the therapist taught me, back when I could afford therapists. On ninety-six the room holds its breath. On ninety-two the weight deepens. On ninety-one it lifts. On ninety my phone vibrates with a text from an unknown number:

> Do you get the thing too? —J

I do not answer. I am not the kind of woman who texts men with initials at 3:13 a.m., especially when the house still hums with whatever tried to take my name. I shower until the mirror fogs, scrub the citrus from my hair, and open the bar early so the regulars can complain about the Browns. I also go to Night Shift.

We meet in the basement of St. Anthony’s, a church so old the saints in the stained glass look tired of keeping secrets. The coffee is scorched, the fluorescent bulbs are aggressive optimists, and the circle of folding chairs is always crooked, as if the room is trying to correct for whatever is wrong with us.

Maureen runs it—cardigan armor, silver lightning-bolt pin. “You’re not broken,” she says. “You’re awake in the wrong places.”

The new guy is late. The basement window pops on its hinges when he arrives, cold air knifing in. He takes the empty chair beside me—wrinkled suit, good jaw, eyes set to tired blue—and smells faintly of courthouse hallways and mint.

“Welcome,” Maureen says. “First names only. First truths optional.”

“Julian,” he says, not looking at me.

We go around the circle. A woman with a crescent scar hears a lullaby. A man wakes with the taste of dirt. When it’s Julian’s turn, he threads his fingers like he’s cross-examining himself.

“It’s not a dream,” he says. “I know dreams. This is a… visitation.” He winces at his own word. “She sits on my chest. Asks me to say her name. Like we’re at a dark cocktail party and the introductions have to be correct to count.”

He glances up. “The old word is succubus.”

There are murmurs. Maureen’s cardigan tightens. “Sometimes,” she says, “the mind gives horror a name so we have something to argue with.”

“My mind isn’t that good at Latin,” he says. The room laughs, relieved.

“My turn,” I cut in. “I get the other one. Incubus.” I grimace. “Which also sounds like a band your ex drags you to, but no. He sits on me and asks for my name. I don’t give it. I like my doors closed.”

“Name the band, name the monster,” Julian says, soft.

“You first,” I say.

He huffs. “Touché.”

After the meeting dissolves into awkward cookies and resource flyers, he finds me by the urn. “Rae,” he says, testing whether the syllables fit his mouth. “Sorry if I was—”

“—theatrical?” I offer.

“I was going to say weird.”

“Bartender,” I say. “I see weird for a living.”

“Defense attorney,” he says. “I see theatrical.”

We stand there, pretending this is small talk, and compare hauntings like weather.

“You texted me last night,” I say, showing him the message.

He blinks. “That’s my initial, but not my number.” He types his into my phone anyway. His thumbs move like a man used to turning facts into sentences.

“Maybe the monster has a data plan,” I say.

“Unlimited,” he answers, deadpan. It lands, and we let the joke carry us out into an afternoon pretending to be ordinary.

Julian

In court, everything has a reason. It’s a fiction we agree to. Even lies arrange themselves into parade formation and march toward verdict. Night doesn’t care for choreography.

The first time she came—mine, not Rae—I had just lost a case I hated but had to respect. I drank too much water, read half a page about boundaries, and woke to the smell of an orchard I’ve never seen and a woman I’d never met sitting on my chest like gravity had jurisdiction.

“Say mine,” she whispered.

“Say yours,” I whispered back, because apparently my soul survived law school with a libido.

I didn’t. I won’t. There’s a line between flirtation and a blood oath, and the body recognizes it even when the brain is off duty.

After Night Shift, I take the long way home. At 3:12 a.m., my phone buzzes:

> Do you get the thing too? —R

I don’t answer. I write the time on my palm with a Uniball and circle it. The ink bleeds. The circle feels like an omen somebody designed in a meeting.

At the office next morning, I lose twenty minutes. 10:14 becomes 10:34. My coffee doesn’t cool. The Uniball circle doesn’t smudge. Security footage shows the feed go white at 10:24, then return to me in the same chair, tie askew, shirt buttoned wrong, like my body took a lunch break I wasn’t invited to.

I text Rae. Drinks? Not your bar. 9 p.m.

Define drinks.

Anything without an exorcism.

See you.

We meet at a speakeasy rooftop that calls itself discreet. The cocktails have names like The Uncanny, the bartender wears a fedora with the solemnity of a sacrament. Rae orders soda water with lime—intentional sobriety. I order a whiskey—intentional theater.

We compare notes like detectives and realize our notes are poetry written by a belligerent toddler.

“Here’s a thought,” she says. “What if these things are us? The parts that smell like regret. Bodies our brains build to carry what we won’t name.”

“Then we’re talented sculptors,” I say, “with poor taste.”

“And a sense of humor,” she adds, almost smiling. It looks like a win, and I count it.

“We test it,” I say. “Set a trap for weather.”

“How do you trap a dream?”

“Paperwork,” I say. “Leave something in the dream, see if it shows up in the day.”

“A token,” she says. “A matchbook.”

“A coin,” I answer, and put an Eisenhower dollar on the table. Heavy. Unnecessary. Official.

We make a plan like teenagers planning to outwit curfew.

Rae

My bar’s matchbook is white with a red stripe. I slide one into my pillowcase and sleep on it. At 3:09 a.m., the house goes still, as if the air is holding its breath. At 3:12, the weight arrives.

I can’t move. This is the part I hate. I spend nights making choreography out of wrists and ice and flame, then I come home and get tied to my own body. He leans in. Orange. Rain. “Say it.”

I nudge the matchbook forward with my lip. Absurd, yes. Gravity is absurd when you think about it hard enough.

On the last shove, the matchbook drops out of the pillowcase and rests on my mouth. The thing stills.

“Oh,” it says, delighted. “A gift.”

I wake to the scorch of struck sulfur. The matchbook is gone. My cheek has a serrated red imprint.

At 9:04, a courier brings a padded envelope addressed to me. Inside: my matchbook. Inside the matchbook: a note, in handwriting that is mine and not mine—Thank you for your name. —R The envelope is postmarked 3:13 a.m.

That night at the speakeasy, Julian slides a padded envelope of his own across the table. His Eisenhower dollar clinks onto a napkin with my bar’s logo.

“My mailbox,” he says. “Note said Thank you for the weight. —J”

We watch coincidence like scientists who hate being wrong.

“Maybe the dream is a room that isn’t ours,” I say, “and we’ve been paying rent in someone else’s language.”

“Or we’re the room,” he says.

We are smart enough not to hold hands. We are not smart enough to leave each other alone.

Night Shift, Again

We go back to the basement. Fewer people. Scar Wrist, Dirt Taste. Maureen’s lightning bolt pin. We talk about the weight, not the mail. I feel her watching us like a surgeon assessing whether courage or caution will leave fewer scars.

Afterward she draws us aside. “Sometimes,” she says, “people get better when they get together.”

“You mean love fixes sleep paralysis?” I say, aiming for a joke and hitting prayer.

“I mean patterns collapse under witness,” she says. “Brains love mirrors. Souls, if you believe in them, love echoes.”

“What if the echoes love us back?” Julian asks.

“That’s when it gets tricky,” Maureen says. “Be careful what you rehearse. Confession is food.”

On our way out, the sanctuary door squeals. I look up and think I see movement in the choir loft: a woman, hair like rain, watching. When I blink, she is just dust.

On the sidewalk a boy on a bike drops a photograph. In it, a woman sits on a man’s chest, smiling at the camera as if nothing is wrong. The man’s jaw could be Julian’s. The woman’s mouth could be mine.

We say nothing. We eat diner eggs like the world makes sense. The waitress calls us honey. The sugar packets are the wrong brand.

“Two possibilities,” Julian says. “We’re very sick in the same creative ways, or something outside us is here and polite enough to use the postal service.”

“Or we’re each other’s monsters,” I say.

“That would be efficient storytelling,” he says, flinching anyway.

We make another plan because plans feel like handrails. We’ll stay awake together, document, prove or disprove. He brings equipment like a man who has sued sleep before. We place cameras—bedroom, living room, hallway. We drink coffee until our hands hum. We talk about nothing on purpose—football, grease, reasonable doubt and how unreasonable it is.

At 2:58 the hallway camera glitches. At 3:09 the living room picks up a sound like rain on tile. At 3:12 the bedroom camera stares at us, eyes too wide to belong to mammals, and then the picture strobes and we are asleep.

I wake to weight, breath at my ear. “Say it,” the voice whispers, and it sounds like me making fun of myself from far away.

I turn my head—yes, I can, this time—toward the voice. It’s Julian’s face above mine, eyes open, but the gaze is wearing him like a suit.

“Say your name,” he says, and the laugh that follows is not unkind.

I wake again to silence. We lunge for the laptop. At 3:12 the door opens. Two shapes enter—layered, indecisive, as if the frame is trying to show both versions at once. As they approach the bed, the hallway camera catches a second entrance: another layered figure, slipping through the closed front door like doors are a suggestion.

Two weights. Two mouths. Two mirrors.

They sit. They lean. They ask.

“Do you think it’s telling us to know each other?” I whisper.

“I think it’s telling us we already do,” he says.

We freeze frame. My face and the woman’s overlap. My tired lives in her eyes. My humor lives in her mouth.

“Either we’re losing our minds in stereo,” I say, “or someone wants us to admit we’re made of the same weather.”

Julian

The next day a witness on the stand says, “It was dark, and then it wasn’t.” The jury nods like that’s an answer. I leave court, and my feet decide to stand inside St. Anthony’s without consulting me.

The sanctuary is open. Maureen is in a front pew without her cardigan; the lightning bolt pin winks on her lapel. She looks like a woman who has forgiven several gods and not all deserved it.

“You ever wonder if the monster is just the part of you that’s tired of being good?” I ask, sitting with distance.

“All the time,” she says. “Then I floss, and I decide to keep pretending I like vegetables.”

“You pulled us aside because you think this has a pattern.”

“I pulled you aside because two people finding each other in a dark room is not a pattern,” she says. “It’s a miracle or a trick.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Who benefits,” she says. Up in the loft, a breath moves the dust. “Don’t come alone,” she adds.

“I’m not,” I say, and realize it’s the truest thing I’ve said all week.

Rae

At 1:45 a.m., a woman I’ve never seen sits at my bar and orders water. Hair like rain. Mouth like a secret with manners. She doesn’t look straight at me.

“You look tired,” she says, almost kind.

“I pour intimacy for a living,” I say. “It’s exhausting.”

She smiles like she recognizes that line from her own mouth. “Do you know the border between the supernatural and the psychological?”

“It’s where true horror lives,” I say, from a book that left teeth marks on my brain.

“Good,” she says. “Names are borders.”

“Not tonight,” I say.

“And yet,” she says.

I set the water in front of her. When I look up, she is gone. The glass sweats like it saw something.

After close, after grease and lemon, after two cameras and consent to be afraid, I text Julian: Come. He replies: Outside.

We watch a bad movie and make good jokes. We do not touch. At 3:09 the living room camera records a sound like breath remembering its job. At 3:12 the bedroom door opens. Two layered shapes enter. They are us and not us. They sit. They lean. They ask.

This time the hallway camera catches another arrival: smaller, definite, carrying a stack of files. Maureen—cardigan restored—steps in and raises her phone like a candle.

She plays audio. Tinny, haunted: our voices from Night Shift describing the first times, the weight, the refusing. The shapes snap their heads up as if called to the front office. The weight lifts. My body floods back. Julian gulps air like he just remembered water.

“They follow confession,” Maureen says, breathing hard. “They learn shape from what you rehearse.”

“Like lawyers,” Julian says, hysterical. I laugh because my body requires it.

“They’re not demons,” she says, gentle and tired. “They’re echoes. Hungry. The more you speak them, the better they stand.”

“They?” I ask.

She nods toward the frozen frame: the layered shape splitting, two bodies, two faces. The woman’s mouth is mine. The man’s eyes are Julian’s.

“They are you,” she says. “And they are not. That’s the only honest sentence I have.”

“How do we stop being buffet?” I ask.

“Stop speaking the menu,” she says. “Keep your names.”

“Does that include each other?” Julian asks, not looking at me.

“Especially,” she says, and leaves, as if she knows what the room will do with her absence.

We face each other, alive in the way you are after almost dying.

“I think you saved my life,” Julian says.

“I need a reason to believe we aren’t the thing,” I say.

He opens his mouth, closes it, leans in. Not a kiss. A proximity. The air presses its ear to our mouths.

On the laptop, paused: two figures at the foot of the bed, hand in hand, watching us with the baffled fondness of parents who don’t recognize their own children.

The apartment door opens.

We both turn. We are brave enough, and stupid enough, to hope it’s Maureen again. It isn’t.

It’s me.

She steps in—my face, my hair, my tired mouth—smiling the way I never let myself in daylight. Behind her, him—Julian’s jaw, Julian’s eyes—tilts his head at precisely my favorite angle. They look at us like we’re late for our own lives.

“Say it,” she says, and her voice isn’t a demand anymore. It’s an invitation.

“What happens if we do?” Julian asks, steady now, eyes on the space between all four of us, where meaning usually happens.

“Then the story knows how to end,” she says.

“And if we don’t?” I ask.

“Then it keeps you,” he says—the other he, layered, apologetic, certain. “We’re hungry,” he adds, not unkind.

Julian takes my hand. It isn’t dramatic. It’s a checkbox on a form we didn’t realize we were filling out. We look at them. Somewhere above us, the choir loft exhales.

The camera light blinks red. On the screen, our mouths begin the same syllable. The two figures mirror us, mouths opening on the same shape, like some strange wedding.

I close my eyes and think: there are two kinds of surrender—how you drown, and how you’re held.

“—”