The city - The Great Awake

"The Great Awake" takes place in an unnamed city that has been cursed with the proliferation of "Sleeps"—the physical manifestation of a person's ability to sleep, which has separated itself from the body. The narrator, Janey, notes that she and her brother always longed to move to the city from the rural town in which they grew up, and that their mother warned them against it, claiming the city was filled with ghosts. She claimed there would be "ghosts in office chairs and office bathrooms, hot and cold running ghosts on tap" (24). Nevertheless, the siblings moved to the city, where Janey worked in an office as a temp and her brother tried out for the theater. Janey narrates the many oddities of this setting—morning show hosts broadcasting with their Sleeps alongside them, a woman falling in love with her Sleep, and...