Dark Bloom

Mara Voss has been awake since approximately 1994. This is not literally true. She sleeps, in the technical sense. Her body performs the maintenance functions, the cellular repair, the temperature regulation, the minimum viable unconsciousness required to sustain a functioning adult human. But sleep, as most people understand it, the surrender, the going-somewhere-else, the trust fall into the dark is foreign. That version has been unavailable to her for eighteen months at the start of this story, and for significant stretches before that, and for reasons that will become clear and that are not, as she has been telling herself, simply a matter of too much coffee and an overactive professional conscience. She lives in a walkup apartment in Toronto's east end. She runs a true crime blog called Cold Static with four hundred and twelve thousand subscribers, which she will tell you she finds both validating and faintly alarming. She has a brother named Theo who is a pediatrician and expresses concern through golden retriever GIFs. She has a sleep specialist named Dr. Fehr who has excellent shoes and significant patience. She has a cat she has named Sergeant, who is not her cat, Sergeant, belongs to the unit above and is audible through the ceiling, pacing her perimeter at 4 a.m. with the steady territorial purpose of a security guard doing rounds. She is thirty years old and very good at finding things. She is about to find something she wasn't looking for.