Note: This short short story was inspired by an exercise in the book “3AM Epiphany.”

The instructions of the exercise were to combine an original poem of my own with a poem previously written by a professional poet, and use them to create a new 700 word short story.

For the professional poem, I chose one called Sleepless Night written by Tiziano Thomas Dossena and made a few tense changes for the sake of consistency in my story. This is what I came up with…

Another Sleepless Night:

A sleepless night spent struggling through the meanders of my mind in endless explorations, I laid there staring at the ceiling wondering and worrying about nothing important while waiting for the Sandman to come.

Instead of counting sheep, an exercise that never made much sense to me, I counted nonessential items I’d lost and random things I’d forgotten to do. In fact, it wasn’t…