Josh Czuba

Josh Czuba

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Personal Journals
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Fiction writer helping you take back your mind with creativity.

6d ago

American Insomniac (short story)

I have not slept in three and a half weeks. That’s 25 days and 25 nights. 600 hours, almost. Maybe it’s been longer than that. I don’t know. What I do know is I am well past the current world record. No need to congratulate me. I am approaching the upper limit of sleeplessness the human mind can handle before it expires. Expires, as in: dies. I’ve got just under an hour til the lights flicker off one by one, frontal lobe to brain stem. 59 minutes. Which gives you and I just enough time. Everything I’m about to tell you is true. I am going to tell you things I’ve never shared with anyone. I have nothing to lose. The first step to recovery is honesty. I read that in a self help book. You have to start by telling the truth. You have to accept something is wrong with you. That you can’t figure it out all by yourself. If you want me to say it, I’ll say it. I need help. I am beginning to hallucinate shadowy figures creeping in from the corners of my vision and they’re not making very nice faces at me. I’m sick to my stomach with dread that I deserve what’s coming for me. I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Let’s start with the Facts. That which can be: Measured, Observed, Proven. Fact. I am a twenty seven year old American male living in a country far, far away. I used to be an accountant. Now I’m something else. I stand five foot seven inches tall and weigh one hundred fifty five on a good day. Pounds. I am only a little insecure about my height. Did you know over fifty percent of men in the Western world lie about their height? I never do. That’s one line I won’t cross. Fact. I have not slept a wink since the last US major holiday. At first, I thought it was too much caffeine. Or not enough exercise. Something simple, straightforward, easy to fix. So I cut out the coffee. Picked up jogging. I tried herbal remedies, over the counter medication, under the counter medication, a taser. I can now tell you with confidence my problem is not in any way simple, straightforward, or easy to fix. Please do not offer suggestions. I’ve tried it all. I’ve tried the mantras, the yoga, the glass of warm milk before bed. I know too well all the rhythmic breathing exercises that have ever been invented. Box breathing. Nadi Shodhana. In. Out. In. Out. I’m an expert in visualizing and then counting one by one an endless series of ovine shapes, always white, cloud-like things that go Bah. I’ve authored countless little high-pitched aphorisms you whisper to yourself in the dark to ward off the dread of what yet another night of no sleep will do to you. The first night you say to yourself: It's fine. It’s just one night. It happens to everyone from time to time. You say to yourself: Sure, you might be a little tired during the day, but hey! You’ll sleep like a baby because of it! But then you fail to fall asleep for the second night. And a small, dark voice in your mind begins to entertain the possibility that maybe something is really wrong with you. Like maybe you have some hidden problem, lying in wait, something way deeper and more malignant than you could ever imagine. It’s on the third night you think to yourself: Surely at some point my body will just knock me out, right? Animal instinct will kick in and I’ll just pass out. Basic survival function, right? But when, nope, that doesn’t happen, and you instead plod through another day of debilitating, soul level exhaustion paired evenly with red alert, panicked, cold sweat, wide eyed vigilance, and at this point are petrified of even the thought of attempting to lay down to pretend to sleep, when on that third night you lay there once again, it’s then you begin to wonder how long this might go on before you die. Before you blip out of existence. A halogen light bulb pushed to its limit. The answer, in our case: about 54 minutes. So, you start taking all number of sleep medications in, frankly, irresponsible doses. You take Temazepam and Trazodone and Zolpidem and several popular brands of melatonin gummies. The hours of every night begin to follow a pattern. You lay down. Close your eyes. Breathe. Try to ignore the ticking of the digital clock. Roll left. Roll right. Lay on your belly. Lay on your back. Sit up. Get up. Turn the lamp on. Read. Turn the lamp off. Close your eyes. Count sheep. Count cows. Count whatever you want. Turn on the radio. Turn off the radio. Turn on the white noise machine. Turn on the brown noise machine. M********e. Get up. Take a hot shower. Drink a warm glass of milk. Lay down. Get up. Take a cold shower. Drink a glass of cold milk. M********e. Read. Lay down on the couch. Lay down on the floor. Bang your head against the wall and then the headboard and then your desk and then the floor itself. M********e. This time, leave the tie around your neck when you’re done and get back in bed and pull on it as hard as you can to try and deprive your brain of oxygen so you can maybe then drift into a hazy, suffocated slumber. None of it works. As every true insomniac knows, the harder you try, the worse it gets. Which of course leads you to the bizarre act of trying to not try to fall asleep. Taoists call this process: Wu Wei. Americans call this process: Impossible. But one way or the other, you must stop trying. You must learn to surrender. I suppose that’s why I’m here. I’m surrendering up control to a higher power. Don’t let that get to your head. Fact. When I first arrived in this city with nothing but the clothes on my back, I had nowhere to stay. No plan. I figured I’d figure it out along the way. Lucky for me, I happened upon a young woman who happened to live alone. She had a lovely little studio apartment all to herself in the center of town and I happened to move in just as she happened to be moving out. The whole thing worked out. The young woman who used to live in my apartment had a flair for interior design. She’d managed to turn this small, dingy hole of a place into something totally livable and nice. I’ve kept it just the way she had it. Haven’t replaced a single piece of furniture, wall hanging, ceramic bowl, or potted plant. I haven’t changed the overhead light bulb. It could go out any moment now. The yogurt lid from the day she left this place is still in the trash. After she left this place, people came by looking for her. They’d knock at the door, ask me, Do I know where she’s gone. They hadn’t heard from her. I told them things like, I wish I could tell them. Friends, coworkers, one time lovers, they all came by to check on the young woman. Did I happen to know where she might have disappeared off to. I wish I could say, I’d say. Then I’d shrug, like this. Then I’d close the door. Visits like these dwindled as the months wore on. Now, no one comes at all. Fact. I don’t have many friends. Correction. I don’t have any friends. That’s the honest truth. I keep to myself. Nothing’s wrong with me. Nothing’s wrong with me. Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m just the kind of guy who can survive on his own. The young woman who used to live in my apartment had these bright green eyes that seemed to me distinctly feline. They lit up when she spoke. Her eyes. When she opened the door, she smiled wide, like really wide, like she was just thrilled to see you, even if you had only met once before, the day prior, at a cafe, in passing, and only briefly at that. She had a rare good nature about her, this young woman. I got the sense from talking to her she was the type of person who would go out of her way to help other human beings. Type of person to notice a cat trapped up in a tree and stop what she was doing to fetch a ladder. Or rush unfazed into a burning building to retrieve a child that wasn’t even her own. Her name was Harriett, I remember. Or Ellen. We’ve spoken only once since she left this place. I’ve made mistakes. I wish I could forget them. I can’t. They follow me. And you might say, Well, hey there, don’t beat yourself up, everyone’s made mistakes. No biggie. Have you considered cutting yourself some slack. But you don’t understand. These mistakes lie well outside the realm of normal or reasonable or “no biggie.” I am a liar. That’s my diagnosis. There. I just did your job. How much do I owe you. Fact. I’ve lied to everyone I’ve ever met. It’s not that I can’t help it. I can help it. I choose not to. I lie about inane, stupid, meaningless things. I have this thing where I introduce myself with a fake name. Every time. I don't know why I do it. Hi, My name is Devin/Carter/Jeremy/Phil. In the moment of first impression, you can be anyone you want. Most people don’t lie about things like this. Most people don’t lie about anything. They’ll say they don’t believe in lying. They’ll say they tell the truth because lying is wrong. But that in itself is a lie. The truth is: they’re afraid. Of bending reality to their will. They can’t stomach it. That’s why they give themselves away. They scratch their face when they lie. Scratch their nose. Avoid eye contact. Shift their stance left to right, back and forth like they have to piss, bad. They stutter. I don’t do any of that. I say what needs to be said in a low voice, without breaking my gaze, and people buy it. Every time. I’m not trying to brag. I’m just giving you the Facts. Fact. I remember every lie I’ve ever told. That’s the only way to get away with it. You have to remember everything. When you lie, you enter into a cosmic deal with the universe. A binding agreement between you and all the powers that be. Sure, you can bend reality to your will, no problem. But you have to keep track of the details. Who else is going to do it? Not God. No. You won’t find him here. Like all good things in life, you have to do it yourself. Fact. Every night, lying in bed, sleepless, instead of counting sheep, I play a little mental VHS tape of every lie I’ve ever

21 min
Jun 17

The Boy Who Lives In The Basement

When I was a kid in school there was a boy I knew who disappeared off the face of the earth and to this day no one knows where he went. He was the only child of the Leavitt family. They used to live in this town. Before you moved here. The kid’s name was Eric. We weren’t good friends but we’d said hello a couple times. He didn’t disappear the way you think of people disappearing. He wasn’t kidnapped or stolen or killed. He didn’t run away in the middle of the night. What happened to Eric was stranger than that. It started when he was a boy. His grandmother came to live with the family in their little house. She had grown ill and could no longer care for herself. Her lungs were all wrong. She had to wear tubes in her nose and lug around a big clanking machine that made horrible noises to keep her alive. She meant well. But she was worrying woman. She worried about everything. About things that had happened in the past, and things that could happen in the future. She’d worry that a car might fly off the road and crash through the kitchen wall right now, this instant. She’d worry little Eric hadn’t eaten enough for dinner. Here, have some more honey. He needs to eat. He’s a growing boy. More than anything, she worried about her things. Grandmother Leavitt had so many things. Hundreds of old dolls, faded black and white photographs in rusted metal frames, ceramic statues whose eyes followed you, every birthday card she’d ever received. She kept all of it. She kept things no one would ever in their right mind think to keep. She brought all her things with her into the house until there was hardly any room to walk through the hallways. When you visited, you had to be careful to watch your step or you’d trip over an ancient rocking chair, a mildewy pile of decades-old newspapers, maybe a wood crate full of baby dolls, some of them missing eyes. Every inch of space in the Leavitt home was swallowed by Grandma’s things. But even that that didn’t stop her worrying. The very day she set foot in there, she found something new to worry about. Little Eric Leavitt. The only child of Mr. and Mrs. Leavitt, he became the focal point of his Grandmother’s worry. She couldn’t bear the thought of anything ever happening to her grandson. He had become one of her precious things, one of her dolls, something she had to keep out of the light, out of reach of anything that could leave a scratch. She didn’t let him play outside. She never let him off on his own. Even seeing him get on the bus to school drove her crazy. Think of all the horrid things that could happen to Eric at school, she’d say. She tried everything to keep Eric at home. If the boy let out as little as a sniffle, his Grandmother insisted he needed to spend the day at home, or the week, to get back on his feet. When he stayed home from school, his grandmother fed him cookies and salt water taffy and fried eggs and anything and everything Eric wanted. She’d stuff it down his face like that would keep him safe from the dangers of the outside world. They’d sit together on the sofa and watch old black and white television programs til Eric’s parents returned home from work. And still, Grandmother Leavitt worried. Her worrying grew worse with age. So did her breathing. She let out these long, rattling breaths that sounded like some wild animal, close, circling. Her voice was old and strained, always getting in the way of things. Her smell preceded her by at least two rooms. But what can you do? You can’t kick out family. Where else would she go? But then one day, they woke up, the Leavitt’s, to find her body stiff and dead in her old wood bed. There was a look of disbelief frozen on her wrinkled, bloodless face. Her oxygen tubes must have fallen out of her nose during the night. Her eyes were wide open when it happened. They buried her that very week and carried on. Shortly after the funeral, when she was underground, Eric moved into his grandmother’s old room. In the basement. His parents found him in there before dinner. He told them this was going to be his new room, and they said it would be too cold for him, but Eric didn’t leave. The dark room was stuffed with all of Grandma’s things. And after Eric moved in, he did not leave. A week later, he got a little under the weather himself. He developed a sniffle. A real sniffle. The sniffle became a stuffy nose and the stuffy nose became a sore throat and not long after he was at home in Grandma’s old, wood bed with tubes in his nose. With every breath came a rasping growl. It started soft and grew to a loud, rattling thing by the end of it. He wore the tubes in his nose day and night. It was a good thing they had kept the oxygen machine after Grandmother died. Eric ate cookies in bed. He watched black and white programs on her old television. He did not go out to see his friends. Pretty soon, his friends stopped checking on him. All Eric did was stay in his room. In his bed. Not even dressed. He produced the strangest noises from behind the closed door. Don’t even ask about the smell. His parents brought him breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a tin tray. They’d leave the tray at the base of the door and take a few steps back from it, holding their breath. They’d hear him coming from several feet away. The door would open a crack and a pair of pale hands, hands that hadn’t seen sun in who knows how long, would snatch the tray and yank it into the darkness of that room. Then the door would close again. His parents could hear him from the dining room table which sat squarely on the patch of floor above Eric’s chamber in the basement. Ghastly noises. Growling, sniffling, the shuffling of furniture. Heavy things being moved across the floor. What was he doing down there? And always that rasping cough they could not get away from. He kept the lights off in that room so neither of them knew when he was awake or asleep. Months and years of sickness changed his voice. Anyone’s guess how or where he was going to the bathroom. In the mornings, Mr. and Mrs. Leavitt woke to find the refrigerator raided, empty sometimes, nothing but scraps left behind by whatever beast could have done this. Every night, the noises. The Leavitts couldn’t sleep. The sound traveled up and always seemed to find them. They tried a white noise machine. Ear plugs. Piling pillows over the sides of their heads. But they could not get away from the coughing, hacking, rasping. The floorboards of the basement room bumping up and down. Nails being hammered. Loud, deep creaking from the bowels of the house, their home itself beginning to cough. It was all they could do to hold each other tight til the sun came up. One night, Mr. Leavitt got out of bed and said Enough, and he went downstairs to the basement with his tool bag. He carried down heavy wooden clapboards and nailed them over the door. As if that might conceal the noise. They didn’t care about the things they’d left inside the room. They just wanted to try and forget about it. Carry on. But at night they heard it still. There was no escaping the noise. The Leavitts themselves stopped showing their faces at neighborhood parties. They stayed at home. They ate dinner, the two of them, and tried to ignore the sounds from below. They cleared the table. One day on his way home from work, Mr. Leavitt missed a turn and drove his car clean off the edge of a sheer cliff face. He died in the resulting crash. Mrs. Leavitt mourned privately. After the funeral, she left everything in the house exactly as it was. She left the clapboards nailed to the basement room door. Mrs. Leavitt was left alone with the noise. Not just coughing now. Other things. The distant whine of old television programs. The shattering of plates. The deep, intestinal groan of a capsized ship. Was the house sinking into the earth? There were also smells. Every night she could sense the odors of food she hadn’t cooked in years. Mrs. Leavitt learned to ignore these things. She learned to live like this. Time went on. She grew to be an old woman herself. And it was many more years later, you see, before Mrs. Leavitt finally ventured down into the depths of her own home to face what she’d chosen to forget. It was her son’s birthday. The day she went down there. He would have been how old now. She was a very old woman and not so steady on her feet. She did not know why she was doing this. But she brought a treat with her. A cupcake with a candle in it. Something special. She used her late husband’s hammer to pry off the nails of the clapboards on the door. In that room, that long dark room, everything lay exactly as it was. Nothing had changed. Except for all the things. Grandma’s things. They were all gone. Where had they gone? From the doorway, Mrs. Leavitt could see a square of pitch black beneath the old wooden bed. She crept up to it and pushed the bed aside to look at what it was. A big gaping hole that went way, way down into the earth. A spiral staircase winding down into the black. Each step made of mud and twigs and twisted hair. It went down so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. Mrs. Leavitt took a breath. She put her slippered foot on the first step, and then the next, and down she went into that hole in the floor, into the place she had left behind. How long she had to climb down into the depths no one knows. But long after she could no longer see her own two hands in front of her, Mrs. Leavitt saw a light at the bottom. A spark, something. It was the faint yellow light from one of Grandmother Leavitt’s old lamps. She descended the mud steps faster now to get closer to that light. There were sounds. Sounds that got louder as she stepped into the faint light.Scurrying feet, the frantic scratching of bare skin on wet earth. Hushed noises of some creature she could not yet see. It was when she reached the bottom that she saw what had been waiting for her all this

12 min
Jun 14

Confessions of a Pyromaniac

It started when I was a kid. I stole matches from the kitchen junk drawer. Birthday candles. Anything with a fuse. I gathered bundles of dry twigs from the yard and kept them in a locked toy chest under my bed. I stood on my tippy toes to take the kitchen lighter from its place in the world. Just to hold it in my hands for a minute. My parents told me cut it out, quit it, and I did for a while. I used to hate getting in trouble. But you can adapt to anything. Every fire is made from three elements. One: fuel. Things you can burn. Scrap wood, dry leaves, a three story bungalow in the suburbs. Anything and everything you’d ever want to remove from this earth forever. Two: oxygen. Air to feed the flames. Fire is a living thing, like you and me. It needs to breathe. Nothing catches in a vacuum. And three: combustion. The spark to light it up. If you build the fire right, you never need much. Just a tiny nip of heat in the right place and you can burn the biggest building in the world down to a thin black sheen of ash that drifts away to nowhere in the first slight wind. Everything good I’ve ever done in this life has been the product of these three things, combined in the right amounts in the proper order. Here is the trifecta my entire world rests upon. Fuel, Oxygen, Combustion. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Adam Eleanor lives at 1337 Pinnacle Park Lane. It’s a three story bungalow made of wood, and drywall, and three other types of insulation. The wood of the house is very dry. It will catch quickly. If I had to guess, the whole thing could be engulfed in ten minutes, start to finish. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. It’s a warm night in late May and the breeze across town is strong. Adam Eleanor is throwing the last party of high school tonight. Everyone’s invited to the last party of high school. Even me. Unfortunately I can’t make it to the party. I have plans. In the first grade, I’d get home from school, dash up to my room, and set fire to my homework. I’d tear it up into tiny jagged triangles and light them off one by one with the matches I’d stolen at breakfast, while Mom wasn’t looking. The next day, I’d tell my teachers the dog ate it. But we didn’t have pets. One afternoon I accidentally set off the overhead smoke alarm and my parents rushed in to find me in the act. I still remember their faces. How they froze in place in the doorway when they saw me there with that burning teepee of multiplication tables and charred matches between my legs. The moment they registered once and for all this was going to be a whole thing. The cold recognition of what was now the capital P Problem they’d have to deal with for years to come. I remember before there was anger, scolding, punishment, before I feigned shame and contrition and endured the long time-out and first visit to a clinical specialist, before all of that, there was something else in my parents’ eyes. Something no Mommy or Daddy should ever feel toward their firstborn son. When they looked down at me in my room that day… for no longer than a fleeting moment… They were afraid of me. On the walk to Adam Eleanor’s house I already know This Is A Very Bad Idea. I know this because I’m saying to myself again and again, This Is A Bad Idea, This Is A Bad Idea. But whenever I say to myself This Is A Bad Idea, I always end up doing it. It’s like a fundamental law of the universe. I’m dressed all in black and have my hood up. No one would ever think to stop me. I’m in the suburbs. I think about if maybe I can still stop myself from doing what I’m about to do, but the little click’s taken place in my mind. The switch has been flipped. You can always feel when the decision’s made. I was nine years old and it was February and I turned the gas stove on and held my left hand over the fire for eleven seconds without moving. I could feel my skin melt and curl in on itself like a marshmallow you leave to die on the stick. I was tall enough now I didn’t have to stand on my tippy toes. I could just reach right over the electric blue flame. Most human beings have a built-in animal instinct to pull away from the heat. But I guess I’ve always been a little different. I have a patchy tattoo of mottled pink flesh right here to prove it. It’s not that I didn’t feel the pain. Those were real tears in my eyes. I just didn’t pull away from it. I could stay inside of it. Transmute it, kind of. It didn’t get me off though. I had to get my kicks from lighting other stuff on fire. Everyone’s got their thing. Most kids do things like: go to soccer practice or choir or chess club. I did things like: set off homemade fireworks in lidless public trash receptacles after dark. Sneak out way past my bedtime with my pockets full of lint from the dryer machine. Collect trash from the streets of my town and burn it all down to ash. Burn anything I could get my hands on. Even my own clothes if that’s what it took. Tell myself each and every time I lit up that this was the very last time I would ever light up. Shame, guilt, self loathing, these gifts came early. They come with the territory. I’d tell myself, This has to stop. This is very bad. This is not a good habit I’m developing here. But then again, nobody got hurt. Not yet, at least. These were the early days. There’s a narrow window of time where Adam and his goons are out buying surplus liquor for the party and the house is empty. I have fifteen minutes to get inside the house through the back door, prepare the building for its dramatic conclusion, and bounce. I don’t have to worry about cameras on the door or anywhere else because Adam’s already taken care of that. The windows are draped and there’s no visibility from the front. I slip around the side, unlatch the gate to the backyard, and stroll through to the sliding door. Yes, it is always this easy to break and enter a home in the suburbs. Except can you really call it “breaking” when everything’s unlocked? Valentine’s Day of third grade is when I really knew I had a problem. Picture it. All the kids milling about depositing b******t Hallmark offerings into brown paper bags. Stickers, lollipops, little candy hearts made of colored chalk. You remember. There’s not much sentimental value to the ritual when you keep in mind every child is required to give one to everyone. No discrimination. Everyone gets a trophy. We’re 10 minutes into the festivities when Emily McBride yells out to the whole room, Who left a match in my bag? And everyone stops what they’re doing. God forbid someone exercise a little originality. Teacher looks inside Emily’s bag and frowns. Then she checks Arthur Dennison’s bag. Her forehead creases cut deeper into her face. She checks the next bag. The next. The downward slant of Teacher’s eyebrows becomes parabolic. She marches up to the front of the class and says Alright, who wants to speak up? Who put all these matches and fuses and homemade pocket explosives in everyone’s paper bags? No one says anything. So Teacher pulls the age old, Come forward now and you won’t be punished. Which, for the record: that promise has been kept exactly zero times in the history of elementary school. No one? she says. Alright then. She instructs the class to empty their bags. The perp will obviously be the only one who hasn’t deposited a match/fuse/pocket explosive into their own stash. Surely. Everyone groans and empties their bags. And sure enough, it’s in my brown paper bag they find something unexpected. Two things, actually. First, no one in the class has left me even one chalky pink heart or Hallmark card or offering of cheap candy. What happened to “No one gets left out on Valentine’s Day?” What they do find is: a small translucent bag of, what is that, gunpowder?, a juice box full of pure grain ethanol, two individual sets of flint and steel, and a tangled mess of unidentified multi-colored wires. Both my parents pick me up from the office. They say things like: Haven’t we talked about this, and We thought you were feeling better, and We’re not angry, honey, we’re just disappointed. There’s nothing I can say to get out of this one. I have to face the music. I have to go back to the listening experts that very afternoon. Later that night I hear my father break down into tears from the other side of the wall. Him and Mom are in their bedroom. I hear him collapse into these low, racking sobs, muffled by Mom’s arms wrapped around him. I can tell he’s been holding it in. No matter how well he hides it, my father’s cries have a way of echoing through the thin capillaries of our house. I grit my teeth and force myself to hear it all. I deserve this. There is something very, very wrong with me. This is the night I hold my arm over the stove. The first time. I’m dousing the floors, walls, and ceiling of the Eleanor estate in odorless combustible fluid. It’s a kerosene base with a number of other compounds mixed in to hide the scent. I’m not going to walk you through the whole process right now. I have a fifteen minute window, remember. But if you really want to hear about it, I prepare it at home in my room in small batch micro brews. It’s fast drying so I can cover every corner of the house and the kids won’t notice they’re standing and breathing in potent flammable aerosol spray until it’s ignited. I’m dousing the family photos hanging in the hallway. The marble countertops. Even though marble doesn’t burn. I don’t care. Douse it all. My nose drips a single tear of blood. I sniff it back up into my face. By the time I was 10, I’d learned how to keep my habit under wraps. How to lie to therapists, psychiatrists. Listening professionals. The trick is: you can’t ever be cheerful. When they ask you how you’re doing, how you’re feeling, you can never tell them just ‘good.’ They won’t buy it. You have to be a little unhappy. N

24 min
Apr 11

The Vicious Cycle of Self Improvement and Self Destruction

The cycle of self improvement and self destruction has kept me trapped for years. I'm only now learning to let go of the strict, black and white duality of "locking in," and "falling off," in pursuit of a more sustainable personal narrative that keeps me connected to meaningful activities consistently. I hope you find this helpful.

12 min

4 Episodes

Fiction writer helping you take back your mind with creativity.

Creator

Josh Czuba
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

4
Rating

Explicit
Show Website

Josh Czuba