A Precautionary Tale of Late Night Studies

by Amelia Weissman

It was no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence when I first noticed it. I thought it was just a stray pencil mark, an impression of graphite left from one of the countless incidents in which I had chucked my writing utensil across the room in frustration. Studying for any amount of college final exams leaves most students in such a frazzled state that there should be an Olympic event for whomever accomplishes the most amount of physical damage to property thanks to the sadistic whims of their professors.

I most certainly would have been a finalist on that podium, so the mark on my wall wasn’t exactly remarkable - until it started to grow. Amid the constellation of other javelin-thrown pen and pencil spots, that one was the only one that changed.

Distracted from the microbiology text I was supposed to be reviewing but didn’t feel particularly inclined to at the moment, I licked the tip of my finger and scrubbed at the dingy wall to take the spot out. But it wouldn’t budge.

The smudge reminded me of mold, and I began to wonder if maybe this decrepit old building finally was falling apart at the seams. Then I witnessed an impossibility that made me start to question the wisdom of too many late nights mixed with copious amounts of coffee. The blemish, as big as my pinky nail, pulsed.

Like a gruesome heartbeat or the labored breathing of an undead creature, it was blatantly apparent that the spot on my wall was animated.

I turned away from the blasted thing to refresh my sight with something not quite so alien, but an insane physical itch commenced in my brain. Not a psychological manifestation, I could actually feel the gray matter in my cerebellum twitch in irritation as if a mosquito had injected its bothersome venom straight through my bony skullcap.

I whipped around to stare accusatorily at the damned black mark on my wall because I knew it had done this to me. The size of my fist now, the inky depths of its hateful pulsations seemed to laugh at my ire.

For as much as the thing repulsed me to the point of nausea, invisible tendrils of magnetic attraction pulled me closer to it. My legs walked robotically toward the wall until my toes were kissing the baseboard.

Being in such proximity to the thing, now the approximate size of an open textbook, I saw that it was not real but it was also more real than the dorm room trappings around me and the impending misery of tomorrow’s microbiology final. An insane urge to embrace the blackness while simultaneously feeling the chemical overload of cortisol and adrenaline screaming at my body to run trapped me at this infinite threshold.

The spot was not patient, however, and yawned open wide like a massive set of jaws until – well, let’s just say I didn’t have to worry about that test anymore.

While my disappearance left many baffled, eventually the novelty of the case died away.

Now it is a new semester though and there is a new inhabitant of my old room. She seems very studious, and I haven’t noticed too many of her friends coming over to visit. By the looks of her textbooks, she’s most likely a chemistry major which means a lot of late-night studying and paper writing which is good because I’m getting more than a little hungry.

I can’t wait until finals.

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Amelia Weissman is a mom of six with her Master's in marine biology. She has been published as a scientific writer in research journals and as a fiction writer in Starward Shadows Quarterly ezine, Black Hare Press Anthology Year Four, and SpecPoVerse.