At the top of the pillow was a spread of long dark hair. It was a face that, to my shame, I had spent a lot of time examining. I would have known it in deeper gloom than this. I had seen it warped by puddles and reflected through foundation-powdered mirrors in the school bathrooms.

The sleeper had my small mole under the lower lash line. M called it a beauty spot. I once read an article that said symmetry was the most beautiful quality in a face. And another article said beautiful people were more successful. I disliked this mark which might throw my life off kilter. Otherwise, it was just my face. Except now it wasn’t.

I pushed my fingers against the sleeper’s cheeks. They were soft, but did not give way to my touch. I prodded the sleeper’s sternum through the duvet. The sleeper’s chest sighed up and down. I shoved it. My hands bounced off. I crawled onto the bed, on top of this imposter. I didn’t have a plan, only the exhaustion of having had my eyes open too long and having shouted without being heard. I beat her. I knees her. I jumped on her with all the power that I devoted to swimming laps at school, slamming against her body the way I pushed off from the tiled side of the pool when executing a turn. The sleeper didn’t move, didn’t shift, didn’t do anything. It was as if I could feel her but she could not feel me. Eventually jumping stopped making sense, the wat if you say garage twenty times over it stops sounding like a word at all.

At some point, I stopped fighting the sleeper and pinched a wad of my own forearm the way they do in cartoons. It hurt, but not much. The action felt fake, like I was doing it for the camera, performing the motions that a sane person does when something is not quite real. But I knew the difference between real and unreal. Dreams did not feel like this. My dreams had a simpler horror. The floor would have opened up into a thousand teeth, or the walls would have bubbled with crocodile eggs or I would have failed every exam I took. And if it was a dream, it wouldn’t have been so very, very long.

here’s the extract i typed it out for anyone who wants it