The Neighbors Who Never Sleep
On the street where the streetlights hum like tired moths, the new family moved in with a silence that couldn't be measured by a watch. Their house across the way wore its blinds as if they were mourning veils, always drawn tight, always listening. I watched from my kitchen window as the first night stretched itself like a shadow of a rumor.
At first, nothing happened. Then something did. A nudge at the edge of sleep: the clock in my hallway shimmered with a pale blue glow, and the room exhaled in a way that felt almost like a warning. The neighbors never opened their front door after dusk; instead, the sound of movement slid along the walls—soft shuffles, a ripple of fabric, tiny creaks that sounded like a whispered conversation between floorboards and plaster.
It became a pattern: at exactly 3:07 a.m., a light flickered behind their blinds, a figure moved in the window with a precision that seemed choreographed, and when the street fell quiet again, the house exhaled as if relieved to have survived another night of vigil.
- Lights that blink out of rhythm, then flare with a conspiratorial glow.
- Doors that don't slam—yet announce themselves with a single, deliberate thud.
- Footsteps that rise from the floorboards in their house and pass through the wall into mine.
- A scent of rain and old copper that appears without rain, just after midnight.
- A figure at the window who never quite looks away, counting the seconds as if counting out a prayer.
I tried to coax a conversation, to name what haunted our block. The old man next door shrugged and spoke in halves: "Some houses keep their sleep inside, where it belongs." The woman across the street merely smiled, teeth bright as winter, and said nothing more. And yet I listened, because listening was all that remained when sleep failed us all.
We sleep when the city stops listening, she whispered into the glass, the night answering with a soft, unyielding rhythm.
Then the pace changed. The neighbors began to drift into my thoughts as if they had always lived there, as if our lives had been designing themselves to fit into the spaces between their breaths. I found myself studying the clock they never wore on their wrists, discovering that their night was not a curse but a contract—to keep something at bay that crawled through the walls if they ever slept too long. And so the street kept turning, night by night, until I realized it was not them who never slept, but the street itself—holding its breath for the next tale to begin, the next knock at the door, the next brief, terrible hour when a neighbor could finally wake and hear what the others already knew: some places sleep so deeply that waking becomes a miracle, and some neighbors never sleep because the darkness has learned their name.