The Couch and the Empty Patio

When I moved from Ohio to New Mexico, I thought the desert would cure my restlessness. Instead, it gave me a new form of insomnia. My apartment, a beige box on a dusty street, felt like a holding cell for someone waiting to be processed. The first few weeks, I couldn’t sleep in my bed. It was too big, too quiet. So I took to the living room, where the glow of the TV would lull me into a half-sleep, my body on the cracked leather couch, my mind floating somewhere between here and there.

That night, the clock on the cable box read 2:00 AM. I had put on some nature documentary, something with a soothing narrator and the sound of rain on leaves, but I couldn’t focus. My eyes would drift to the window, where the silhouette of the Sandia Mountains loomed like a dark spine against the stars. I finally closed my eyes, letting the drone of the TV wash over me.

And then I was somewhere else. The air was humid, thick with the smell of beer and fryer oil. I was sitting at a wobbly metal table on a cracked concrete patio, the kind you find behind old Midwestern taverns. The gravel crunched under someone’s boot. In front of me, a man raised a bottle of Budweiser in a toast. He had a grin that could split the sky. It was Jeff. My Jeff. The one who died three years ago when a metal beam from a construction site fell on his car. The one who I laughed with, drank with, and trusted with my deepest fears.

He looked exactly as he always had: a Red Sox cap over his shock of auburn hair, a stubble that never grew into a beard, a permanent glint in his eye that said he knew something you didn’t. He took a drag from his cigarette, the cherry flaring orange, and nodded at me.

‘Son of a bitch, you actually made it,’ he said, his voice exactly as I remembered, gravelly and warm.

I wanted to speak, to ask a thousand questions, but all I could do was stare. My throat was a knot of sawdust. He laughed, a full-bellied sound that seemed out of place in the empty patio.

‘Relax, man. You’re dreaming. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t real.’ He leaned forward, and the table groaned. ‘You’re in a tight spot, aren’t you? That dust bowl of a place, all alone, driving yourself nuts with the same thoughts.’

I managed to choke out, ‘Why are you here?’

He shrugged, tapping ash into a hubcap used as an ashtray. ‘Because you called. Not with your mouth, but with your head. You’ve been thinking about me a lot since you moved. The move, the change, it stirred up the old stuff. I can feel it when you do that.’ He took a long swig of beer, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘But I got to tell you, this ain’t a social call. There’s something you need to know.’

I felt a chill despite the humid air. ‘What?’

He looked down at the table, tracing a pattern in the condensation with his finger. ‘I’m not the only one who visits when you sleep. There are others. Things that have been watching you since you left home. They like that you’re alone now. They think you’re ripe for the picking.’

Before I could ask what he meant, the dream shifted. The patio faded, and I was back on my couch, the TV flickering static. The clock still read 2:00 AM, but the room felt different. The air was colder. And there was a presence in the corner of my eye, a shape that dissolved when I turned to look.

I chalked it up to the dream, but sleep was gone. I spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, Jeff’s words echoing in my head.

For the next week, I tried to ignore it. I went to work, came home, sat on the couch. But I kept feeling watched. At night, I’d wake up to the sensation of a cigarette burning in the dark, or the faint smell of beer and leather. I’d see Jeff’s silhouette in the hallway, only to have it vanish when I blinked.

Then, on the following Saturday, I dozed off during a late-night rerun. The dream came again, but this time it wasn’t the patio. I was in a hallway, a long corridor with no doors, stretching into darkness. Jeff stood at the far end, but his back was to me. He was trembling.

‘Don’t come closer,’ he said, his voice strained. ‘They’re here.’

I didn’t listen. I ran toward him, but the hallway stretched, the walls pulsing like a throat. Jeff turned, and his face was a mask of terror. ‘They’ve latched onto you. You brought them from the desert,’ he said, and then the lights went out. A breath, hot and sour, whispered past my ear, and I woke up screaming.

My couch was drenched in sweat. The TV was off, though I hadn’t turned it off. The clock blinked 3:33 AM. And in the kitchen, I heard a faint noise, like the clink of a beer bottle against a countertop.

I didn’t sleep for days after that. The apartment felt infected. I began to sleep with the lights on, and I would walk from room to room, flinging open closets, checking under the bed, but there was never anything there. Except that feeling, that creeping certainty that I wasn’t alone.

Finally, exhausted and desperate, I called my sister back home. She was the only one who knew about Jeff and me, about the bond we’d had. I told her about the dreams, about what Jeff said. She was quiet for a long moment, then she said, ‘Maybe it’s not Jeff. Maybe it’s something wearing his face.’

That thought chilled me to the bone. But the dreams continued, and each time, Jeff seemed more desperate, more afraid. He started speaking in fragments. ‘The old place… the bar… they’re attached to the things we loved… you have to let go of the past or they’ll use it to keep you.’

On the third dream, I was back on the patio, but the sky was wrong. It was a swirl of bruise-colored clouds, and the tables were rusted, decayed. Jeff sat across from me, but his skin looked gray, and his eyes were sunken.

‘You need to leave that place,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper. ‘But first, you have to do something for me.’

‘What?’ I asked, my heart pounding.

He leaned forward, and for the first time, I saw fear in his eyes. ‘Find the photo. The one we took at the fair. The one where I’m holding that ridiculous stuffed lion. It’s in the box you never unpacked. Take it out, and burn it. That’s the anchor. Burn it, and I’ll be free. And so will you.’

I woke up with a start. The clock said 4:44 AM. I knew exactly which box he meant. It was still in the closet, filled with old memories I hadn’t touched. I stumbled to the closet, pulled out the box, and rifled through it until I found the photo. It was creased and faded, showing Jeff and me at the county fair, him grinning with a stuffed lion under his arm. My hands shook as I took it to the kitchen and lit it with a lighter.

The flame caught the edge, and the photo curled in on itself. As the fire consumed the image, I felt a pulse of energy, like a sonic boom, and then silence. The air in the apartment seemed to clear. The oppressive presence fled.

I haven’t had a dream since. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear a faint clink of a bottle, and I smell cigarette smoke. And I know that Jeff crossed over, but those other things, they’re still out there, waiting for someone else who carries a heavy past.

And I can’t help but wonder: when I finally fall asleep on that couch again, will the dream be mine, or will I be sharing it with something that has been waiting for me all along?