Awaken

A mother had awoken in the middle of the night in her modern home somewhere in a small town in America. She felt around her nightstand for her phone. She picked it up and the bright light emitting from the device illuminated the room with a soft glow.

The time on her cell phone read “2:20” She sighed. She had awoken as early as 1 AM the past few nights, the cause was likely to be the strange dreams she had been having. Although, tonight, she had no such dreams, and she thought this a little strange. She shifted in her bed uncomfortably, something didn’t feel right in the room. As if the walls and windows were watching her move, as if they were silently judging her harshly, giving her a verdict that she did not deserve.

She eventually drifted back off to sleep, and had a pleasant rest… That is, until she awoke to the sound of screaming. It appeared to be coming from the alarm clock next to her. (She doesn’t even know why she has it. It doesn’t display the time because it was broken, and its only other function is a radio.)

She groaned. Sometimes the alarm clock would pick up strange radio stations, and sometimes it would turn on by itself. She flipped the switch on the alarm clock, and the screaming ceased. She checked the time on her phone again. “3:20” “Dammit…” She whispered. She had to get up early to go to a job interview she had just scored from the local paper, and she couldn’t afford to be late the first day.

She fell asleep again almost immediately. She awoke at 5:00 as she had set the alarm on her phone, (Again, she only uses the radio function on the actual alarm clock.) she quickly got up, and started buttoning up a shirt she had chosen for the interview. She turned around, looking at the bed that she had just gotten out of, when she realized something that made her eyes widen and her hands shake in horror.

The alarm clock was on the floor, before she went to bed she knocked it off and forgot to pick it back up.

The thing she had heard in the middle of the night, and had flipped the switch on, was in fact an intercom she used to communicate with her teenage son.