Tower of Sunz

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Everything was spiraling.

The sound of cicadas seeping in through her window, the thoughts in her head, the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling (varying sizes, forming a nearly accurate map of the constellations in the northern hemisphere; she'd used a chart while putting them up).

Her vision blurred, but closing her eyes didn't help any. It just made her feel placeless, weightless, spiraling alone among the floating shapes behind her eyelids. No matter how long she kept floating, she wouldn't fall asleep again.

Sleep was a prize at the top of a spiraling staircase, and the farther she tried to climb it, the taller it got.

Raina groaned and rolled over to bury her face in her pillow. She felt achy, like she'd been laying in bed for days instead of hours. Her back ached, her head ached, a pressure right behind her eyes that throbbed with renewed vigor whenever she turned her head. Three and a half hours until she would have to get up, drag herself into the shower and then through school, and the homework that was due tomorrow (today) was sitting half-finished in her bookbag.

The internet quizzes that she'd clicked through on boring afternoons were useless; she always knew what superpower she'd most want if given the choice. She'd stop time, every night right as she managed to fall asleep so that maybe she could actually get a full eight hours one of these days, or at least not have to worry about how long she'd have to lay there watching the ceiling spin around as morning crept ever closer.

It was almost enough to make her feel sick, but only in the way that you did when things were just slightly off and wrong and you didn't know how. Can't go back down the stairs, because what's even down there? Can't reach the top because it keeps getting farther away.

What she needed was a goddamn elevator.

Space elevator, yeah. She'd be the one to invent it, and when she was being interviewed for TV after accepting her Nobel Prize and they asked what her inspiration was, she'd say, "I just needed some fucking sleep." F-bomb and all, right on live television. That'd show the kids these days that science was cool.

Toss, turn.

Toss, turn.

Toss, turn.

Rinse, repeat, everything sucks.

Everything spiraled away from her, time, sleep, comfort, enthusiasm. All she had was pointless fatigue and an endless flight of stairs.

She wanted to get out of bed, go to the window or even sneak out into the backyard with her telescope, but she was just so tired. Too tired to move, mind too busy spinning to sleep. It was enough to make her dizzy, like that one time at recess in elementary school where a group of kids had spun in circles until they fell down on the grass and you could swear you felt the Earth moving under you and saw the blue of the sky sliding by overhead like you'd thrown yourself loose from gravity and were flipping through space, spinning forever.

Floating, spiraling through space, away from the world and everyone on it, past the Moon, past Venus and Mercury, right into the Sun as it would be sliding up over the horizon through her bedroom window. She'd watched Sunshine when it was on TV one evening, and her exhausted mind took a bizarre pleasure in imagining herself standing on the Icarus II, watching as the ship drifted closer and closer to the Sun and her skin sizzled and then split apart and then her mind was free.

That was a nice thought.

She did her best to hold onto it until it too slipped away with the first rays of actual sunlight through her window.