Free Insomnia by Stephen King

single-handed. It sometimes seemed to Ralph that there was an unspoken rule among local TV broadcasters which stated that movies telecast in the small hours of the morning could only star Audie Murphy or James Brolin.
    After the last Japanese pillbox had been blown up, Channel 2 signed off. Ralph dialed around, looking for another movie, and found nothing but snow. He supposed he could have watched movies all night if he had the cable, like Bill downstairs or Lois down the street; he remembered having put that on his list of things to do in the new year. But then Carolyn had died and cable TV – with or without Home Box Office – had no longer seemed very important.
    He found a copy of Sports Illustrated and began to slog through an article on women’s tennis he’d missed the first time through, glancing up at the clock every now and then as the hands began to close in on 3:00 a.m. He had become all but convinced that this was going to work. His eyelids were so heavy they felt as if they had been dipped in concrete, and although he was reading the tennis article carefully, word for word, he had no idea of what the writer was driving at. Whole sentences zipped across his brain without sticking, like cosmic rays.
    I’m going to sleep tonight – I really think I am. For the first time in months the sun is going to have to come up without my help, and that isn’t just good, friends and neighbors; that is great.
    Then, shortly after three o’clock, that pleasant drowsiness began to disappear. It did not go with a champagne-cork pop but rather seemed to ooze away, like sand through a fine sieve or water down a partially clogged drain. When Ralph realized what was happening, it wasn’t panic he felt, but sick dismay. It was a feeling he had come to recognize as the true opposite of hope, and when he slipper-scuffed his way into the bedroom at quarter past three, he couldn’t remember a depression as deep as the one which now enveloped him. He felt as if he were suffocating in it.
    ‘Please, God, just forty winks,’ he muttered as he turned off the light, but he strongly suspected that this was one prayer which was not going to be answered.
    It wasn’t. Although he had been awake for twenty-four hours by then, every trace of sleepiness had left his mind and body by quarter of four. He was tired, yes – more deeply and fundamentally tired than he had ever been in his life – but being tired and being sleepy, he had discovered, were sometimes poles apart. Sleep, that undiscriminating friend, humankind’s best and most reliable nurse since the dawn of time, had abandoned him again.
    By four o’clock Ralph’s bed had become hateful to him, as it always did when he realized he could put it to no good use. He swung his feet back onto the floor, scratching the mat of hair – almost entirely gray now – which curled through his mostly unbuttoned pajama top. He slid on his slippers again and scuffed back to the living room, where he dropped into the wing-back chair and looked down at Harris Avenue. It was laid out like a stage set where the only actor currently on view wasn’t even human: it was a stray dog moving slowly down Harris Avenue in the direction of Strawford Park and Up-Mile Hill. It held its right rear leg up as much as possible, limping along as best it could on the other three.
    ‘Hi there, Rosalie,’ Ralph muttered, and rubbed a hand across his eyes.
    It was a Thursday morning, garbage-pickup day on Harris Avenue, so he wasn’t surprised to see Rosalie, who’d been a wandering, here-and-there fixture in the neighborhood for the last year or so. She made her way down the street in leisurely fashion, investigating the rows and clusters of cans with the discrimination of a jaded flea-market shopper.
    Now Rosalie – who was limping worse than ever this morning, and looked as tired as Ralph felt – found what looked like a good-sized beef bone and trotted away with it in her mouth. Ralph watched her out of