Round 5 - The Wonder Drug (Ink vs Sensar)

[Kaez]

Write a story based on the following blurb/synopsis:

David had been plagued by insomnia for years. He'd drank more chamomile tea and listened to more soothing guided-sleep podcasts than anyone in history and yet still a good night's rest eluded him. Finally, he went to a doctor and was prescribed a medication, a wonder-drug that was supposed to cure insomnia all but instantaneously. David popped one on a Sunday evening and laid down in his bed, and awoke feeling more refreshed than he had in years. Truly a miracle drug.

He awoke on a pile of damp leaves in the woods. No wallet, no glasses, his clothes muddy and torn. His cellphone was dead, its screen freshly cracked. His prescription bottle lay a few feet away, empty.

[Sensar]

What If You Could Be A Morning Person

The most important thing was not to panic.

Unfortunately, if David was the sort of man who kept calm easily, he might not even been in this mess to begin with.

“Fuck! Holy fuck! What the fuck?”

Truly a man of eloquence, our David. Not that he should be blamed or judged too poorly for his stunned cursing. The best night of sleep of his entire life had not ended exactly as he’d envisioned—with an omelet. No, instead David had woken up … well, he wasn’t entirely sure where he was. Deep in some forest, that was clear. All around him bright sun caressed trunks and caught itself in needles and leaves. And that was about he could make out. His glasses were gone and the world had become a surrealist painting; a thick fuzz glazed his vision.

He sat up from the pile of damp and muddy leaves that surrounded him. His heart was thumping in a somewhat disturbing 7/8 time. He let out a disgusted moan at the cold wetness, brushing at the leaves with half-hearted fingers. They left mud on his checkered shirt. He patted himself down as he slowly pushed himself upward. His wallet was gone, great. His cellphone was still here, but, ah, behold, it’s cracked and dead. And yet, despite it all, he felt fairly refreshed.

There are some men well versed in survival and high-stress situations; they continue to thrive when the comforts of modern life are taken away from them. Indeed, there are some men who dream of the day that they will suddenly be freed from the curse of civilization entirely.

David was no such man. In the face of it all, he began to cry. Tears (and a bit of snot) dribbled quite un-heroically down his face.

Through his watery gaze, his could see the white and orange blob just a few feet away from his right foot.

The bottle. His ticket to the nirvana of regular sleep.

“You,” he hissed at it. It didn’t respond. It’s a bottle. He stumbled towards it a little, really not sure what else to do. Hardly any vision, no sense of location, out in the wilderness, he reached down and fumbled the last vestige of his previous night up towards his face.

Bland pharmaceutical text met his gaze morosely at less of an inch from his eye, sharpening into focus.

Use as directed.

One every night after eating, taken with water, the doctor had told him. About an hour before intending to go off too sleep. Don’t fight the drowsiness too much, enjoy the ability to sleep. He would wake up feeling more refreshed than he had ever known before.

And indeed, when the drowsiness had hit David at 10pm he had hardly been happier. After years of only five to three hours a night driving him wild, he fully intended to get at least eight to ten. Like a teenager, he had joked to Mary.

Not that he was much to judge the time of day by the position of the sun, but it certainly felt like he’d gotten upwards towards twelve. And, through the confusion and the terror, he could feel it. He was experiencing this terror with a wonderful sense of physical vitality.

He had taken one.

The bottle was empty.

David leaned against a trunk of a larger tree, wiping his face on his sleeve and trying to catch his breath, which was still hiccupping with the occasional sad and confused sob. He felt light, airy. Maybe even well rested? That was a feeling that he hadn’t felt for so long he wasn’t even sure what it qualified as anymore. He certainly felt violated. To be at home in bed is to be at one’s most vulnerable. His apartment wasn’t much of a castle, but it was his. How on fucking earth had he ended up here? Was Mary safe?

The thought of Mary made his blood run cold. If he was here, what might have happened to her?

It was a mark of his worth as a person that this was the thought that began to clear his head. David finished scrubbing his face and starting looking around, bending near the leaf-padded dirt. His glasses were his first priority. It would be hard enough to get out here even with them on.

He slowly combed the glade he had woken up in, trying to soothe his continually fraying nerves with the repetitive nature of his task. Scanning, looking for the black frames.

The mindlessness of the task lasted until his shoulders, back, and eyes started to ache. He desperately hadn’t wanted to put his hands on the ground and crawl on all fours, but soon enough he found himself there, sweeping his hands over the ground, expanding his search with the radar of touch.

He found, in order, a snail, several pointed rocks, an interesting tree root, a trail of ants, and a mushroom which he immediately decided not to eat. It wasn’t until ten minutes into his search that he felt a metal frame.

With the first sense of triumph in nearly half-an-hour, he lifted his glasses to his face. Hard work pays off, they say, and though it may have been through sheer luck, David was able to enjoy the fruits of a platitude.

His eyesight sharpened back into the world of detail he had missed so much. The textures of the back of his hand, the grooves of bark on the nearby trees, the highlighted veins in the sun-struck leaves rustling above him.

A thought occurred to him. Since he had no clue of where to go, the location of his glasses might provide him one. He had found it at the edge of the glade between two trees. Maybe they had slipped off of him when he had made his way in here, however that might be.

He stared off between the two sentinels. Even with his newly restored sight he could only see more of the forest, trees speckling the uneven ground, reaching upwards for the sun.

He set off. It was time for a morning walk. He briefly considered climbing a tree but thought better of it. He wasn’t exactly much of a climber, and he hardly felt that his sneakers would give him any sort of solid enough purchase to make it up to the branches high above.

As he wound through the trees he strained his memory for clues. He had taken his pill and read until sleep claimed him. Nothing to be said for that. The day before he had done some grocery shopping after work. Nothing there either. He had never been a sleep walker or talker, and certainly he couldn’t have gotten this far unconscious by himself. Could he? David was fairly certain he had never heard anything this extreme. Or, at least, this was the sort of thing you read as an interesting article a friend posts and briefly mention over lunch. That odd, one-off case that’s never happened since but proved the exception to the standard rule of life.

David hadn’t ever particularly desired the need to be unique, and this certainly wasn’t the case he would have preferred.

This train of thought wasn’t going anywhere. Was there something suspicious about the doctor, perhaps? The pharmacy where he’d gotten his prescription, maybe?

But they felt fairly standard, as he can tell. The doctor had recommended it. He had turned in the form and gotten the bottle. There was mention, now that he remembered, that it was fairly new on the market. David briefly wondered if maybe he had a case to sue.

No that his mind was working at all these different problems, where was he that he could go walking several minutes through trees uninterrupted by civilization? Surely the nearest place to home that could provide that sort of terrain was at least a thirty minute to forty minute drive. Even then, nature is so perversely scattered with the tatters of civilization that he must be about to stumble across something soon.
And that’s when the fence caught his eye.

It was a good fence. Sturdy, thick, dark. Easily at chest height, you could daintily place your nipples right on top of it if you were feeling so inclined. It cut through the trees with typical human straightness and right angles. It was clearly old, however. From some out of use farm, maybe? Patches of wood looked unusually dark and splintered where rot had begun to set up.

To David this fence signified hope at the sight of people. It meant that he had somehow managed to make his way to some sort of contact. All he needed was another human face and he could talk his way back into his home and into Mary’s arms.

With a heave and a huff, David gingerly clambered over the fence and thudded down on the other side. He looked off into the distance. The trees were definitely growing thinner, and green and brown grass was stubbornly beginning to litter the forest floor.

David emerged in a sloping, open field. The trees gave way onto a large expanse of brown and green grass. Off in the distance to his left, he could see about three cows morosely bumbling around a hillside. It was some sort of ranch or farm then.

David resigned himself to the fact that there was more walking to be done. His feet were beginning to ache and his lower back and shoulders were beginning to whine like siblings in the back seat of the car. As he left the tree cover the sun began to beat down on him. He grew lightly aware of a growing need for water, a curling of hunger in his belly. But, still, he felt ready to keep moving. The attitude of being a newly turned morning person gave him a sense of dread almost as much as his situation.

David rolled the empty prescription bottle in his right hand.

Empty, huh?

He looked at it again.

Use as directed.

David wondered if he had downed it somehow while he was out. The thought of not having control of his physical actions almost drove him to swear off drinking entirely. But that would’ve been a fairly extreme declaration to make with so little to go on.

A new thought sparked itself in David’s mind. Maybe, he mused, someone stole the pills for themselves? But he shot down the thought immediately. That made no sense. Why wouldn’t they just take the bottle? Why would they bother bringing him out here? We have to forgive poor David for such a frankly pointless thought; he was in quite a bit of a pickle, after all.

Lots of other pointless thoughts floated through David’s mind as he trudged through the field. Fantasies. The pills gave him super-powers, or that he was a Soviet plant. His long-lost evil twin had decided to take over his life and dumped him while he was sound asleep. The doctor had been paid off by his archenemy (whoever he was) to collude with the pharmacy and drug him. Mary had finally gotten sick of him snoring and went a little overboard.

All of this and more padding was halted when David finally saw the shack and dirt road. A dark red pick-up sat in the driveway. The place stank rurally, wooden slats and a brick chimney. There were barrels, a stack of planks, and a chair all lopsidedly stacked by the door. David had never been happier to see a piece of shit in his life. He hurried toward the place as fast as he could, crisp grass crunching beneath his feet.

“Hello!” David called as he approached the door. “Hello! I’m so sorry to disturb you, I’m not sure if this is private property. I’m lost and could use a phone. Is anyone home?” Rather redundantly, he knocked.

There was a stirring inside. Chair legs scrapped at the floor and clothes rustled. Heavy boots stumped over the door, which was wrenched open by a weedy looking man with one of the most pathetic beards David had ever seen. It was certainly sizeable, but in no way impressive. It was far too scraggly and twisted to achieve proper beard-glory. His stank of alcohol.

Beady blue eyes squinted at David’s repulsed browns. “This is private property, didn’t you see the sign? Get the hell out.”

David raised his open palms. “Hey man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to trespass. I got lost in the woods nearby and my phone is dead. I could really use a quick chance to call someone, or if you could point me in the right direction to a gas station, or just tell me where I am?”

The door was slammed shut with a disgusted grunt.

David stood there aghast at his confrontation with humanity. “Uh, hello? Hello! Dude, seriously, I’m in some real fucking trouble! Just five minutes with a working phone! Or where the hell I am!”

“Get the hell out of here, you drugged up piece of shit!” came the drunken response. “Don’t make me get my shotgun!”

Overwhelmed by the stereotype come so starkly to life, David wandered off down the road. He was still okay. Still thirsty and hungry, sure, but the human body could handle a morning of roughing it. He was on the right track now, surely. The dirt road had to lead to some sort of highway or street, something with signage that could give him a clue to where he was. David palmed the prescription bottle again.

Use as directed.

That was all the bottle said. Its foggy orange plastic stared mockingly at him.

Use as directed.

What had David been directed to do? Take a single pill. Where had the rest gone? David certainly ought not to be feeling so chipper. It was like his chemistry wasn’t allowing him to stay too scared or sad for long. Every time his mind or body veered themselves towards a full grasp of his situation he was corrected back to this pleasantly calm state. Indeed, why was David making so stupid a decision to walk away from the only human being he knew for certain was in his vicinity, just because he was a little irate? Something in him just couldn't bring himself to the forefront of the confrontation.

David was certainly returning to the bottle for a reason. Something tickled at him every time he looked at it. It was important. Well, yes, obviously, it was important. There was almost no chance that this drug wasn’t somehow directly responsible for his current predicament.

So it was that our David passed out in the middle of the road, the hot sun beating down on his back, overheated and slowly dehydrating.

All the while, feeling quite refreshed.

He was a rare case, our David.

[Kaez]

Sensar

The most important thing was not to panic.

Unfortunately, if David was the sort of man who kept calm easily, he might not even been in this mess to begin with.

“Fuck! Holy fuck! What the fuck?”

What a brilliant start to the story. A great, dry humor you've got going from the very beginning. Very Douglas Adams. And you keep that going! His heart in 7/8. The bottle didn't respond. "It's a bottle." That's stupid and hilarious. 'Use as directed' in its signature, Prescription Serif font. "A mushroom which he immediately decided not to eat," I could go on. I could spend the better part of this review just praising some of your sentences here. I think this is -beautifully- written, Sensar. I know you to be a very creative and eloquent and thoughtful person, and I don't think your writing always reflects that for whatever reason, but this time it does. Even the non-comedic stuff like, "It was the mark of his worth as a person..." is great writing.

No, I lied. I'm going to mention the nipple-fence line. Because that is a good line. Thank you for writing such a preposterous thing. You do a great job with questions, too. Questions in narrative are often bad - I critiqued Jason for them just now - but you put them there in exactly the right way. They make sense to be questions. I also thoroughly enjoy the way the narrator refers to David, talking about forgiving him for being so stupid and such. That gives the story this very lighthearted, fantastical feel. We're not worried about David. The comedy doesn't have to compete with any dramatic narrative. We're at a nice distance and just get to enjoy watching this happen to him.

And the ending. -Haha-. Hahaha. You know, I was so very much wanting to see how the story ended. To resolve this whole thing. What had happened? Use as directed. What did it mean? How did this all come to pass? And yet the fact that you deprived me of that is, really, the perfect ending. David is an unusual man having a very unusual day for very unusual reasons. God knows how or why, but he's feeling alright, passed out on the road.

Hilarious and beautiful story. This is no "free win" for you. You earned that point.