Miles To Go Before I Sleep

SUMMER 2025, SHORT STORY, 3200 WORDS

1.

The third time Zoey meets Death, she is unarmed except for a bag of twenty-seven kazoos.

2.

Zoey shouldn’t be walking in the woods in winter, not when the ground is frozen, the wind pushing against her face like the bright prick of a needle. Pine trees huddle, hushed, under snow. Snow everywhere, reflecting a broken kaleidoscope sun.

As Death sweeps toward her, the woods fall silent, as if Death has caught up all sound. Their face is a blur, their arms and legs like the impression of limbs, like an afterimage burned across an eyelid. As always, Death’s age never settles, or perhaps Death manages to be all ages at once.

Zoey clutches the bag of kazoos. She didn’t expect to meet Death today. Not like this, with the chill of snow cutting into her ankles, with a satchel full of Entomology 201 test papers that she needs to grade, with the reek of cinnamon still clinging to her clothes.

Death holds out a hand, as if inviting her to join them. They ask if she finds the woods lovely, dark and deep, quoting her grandmother’s favorite poem. Their voice is only an impression in her mind, like the memory of someone speaking.

She fumbles in the bag, pulling out a green kazoo with the picture of a beetle etched in the plastic. She doesn’t know the rules of this engagement, this strange meeting, only that she will not lie down in the snow and freeze.

She places the kazoo in Death’s hand, where it melts, green overflowing onto white snow.

3.

The first time Zoey met Death, she was falling from the red maple behind her grandparents’ house, which she’d climbed to retrieve her bumblebee kazoo.

Her grandparents’ house was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. “It’s so far north,” she’d tell her friends, sticking out her hand like a miniature Michigan map and pointing to her fingers.

She’d found the bumblebee kazoo folded into one of Grandma’s huge tomes of poetry. The plastic had a bee etched on the side and stripes all along the body, with a circular membrane that looked like a stinger. She loved how the kazoo could change her voice into something it was not, an amplified buzzing, like laughter.

When her brother lobbed the kazoo into the huge red maple, Zoey shimmied up the tree without looking down. At the top, she stretched out, the tips of her fingers touching the kazoo. The motion of grabbing the kazoo was like the unbalancing of a board on a fulcrum.

For a moment, she hovered in the air. Death appeared, floating indistinctly in the sunlight. Zoey twisted her body as she fell, looking up at Death, whose body kept morphing.

She fractured her left wrist, broke her leg, and bruised a rib, but she did not die.

The kazoo was cracked down the side. Although Grandma glued it back together, it never made quite the same sound.

Whenever Zoey was near the red maple, she felt like she couldn’t breathe, her heart a drum.

She’d felt that way about other things, too. She didn’t know how to name the beast that sat on her chest. She didn’t know what to call her anxiety.

4.

When Zoey was a child, she could not stand to be around chemicals. An intense anxiety would overtake her body whenever her mother used bleach, whenever the exterminator sprayed around the house, whenever bread turned moldy.

But no one else seemed to mind. As a child, she could not put into words her sense of urgency, the sense of falling away, falling forever.

As she got older, it only got worse.

5.

In the woods, Zoey reaches into the bag of kazoos.

A magical flute would be more appropriate. There’s a precedent. A flute carries a certain dignified weight.

Instead, Zoey has kazoos: one black as night, one shaped like a star, seven with insects etched on the sides, one filled with rain, one gossamer kazoo that’s hardly there at all, and many others besides. Twenty-seven kazoos.

This is what the universe has given her to face Death. A paper bag, sitting on a stump, filled with kazoos. Isn’t that just what life is like? Unpredictable and unfair and so uncannily ridiculous?

Death waits, inclining their blurred head, absently working time between their fingers like a silk scarf.

The insects that normally rustle in the woods have disappeared. Zoey has done research on so many of them—wasps, coccinellids, cicadas. Their absence frightens her more than anything else.

Death’s mouth never moves, but the words echo in Zoey’s head. These are the rules. She is getting another chance to live, which is more than most people, but it is not because she is special. She is another human, and like all humans, full of desires and flaws and contradictions.

But she has seen Death twice before, that blurred phantom, and so there will be a game.

Twenty-seven kazoos rustle in her hands, marked with their meanings. If she can choose the correct one, she’ll be able to leave.

She has three tries to get it right.

The woods keep silent, like the space between breaths. Trees uproot themselves and rumble over, roots scraping across the snow. They enclose Zoey and Death, stopping the wind, but somehow, it grows colder.

“Choose,” says Death, with a voice that is not a voice.

6.

Reasons Zoey is in the woods:

• Professor Tupper sat in his ratty orange armchair, looking uncomfortable. His office smelled like cinnamon from the cookies he always baked for Christmas, miniature circles bathed in spice. “I have some bad news,” he said.
• No tenure means no stability, no more teaching Entomology 201 with hikes through fields in the chill of morning, no more coffee by the library with her boyfriend, no more walks in the woods, not after she moves, as she has had to do for work again and again.
• Escape. She is the queen of stupid decisions. It was easier to walk into the woods than to call her boyfriend, who she knows will not move with her. Easier to dip into the trees than to begin the cycle of application after application.
• Whenever she finds mold, or bleach, or fertilizer, she feels her chest tighten so hard that she thinks she’s dying. She cannot stand to be anywhere chemicals have been. In her mind, she can’t stop thinking that anyone, everyone, could have walked through pesticide. She starts avoiding everything that feels dangerous, which means never taking the path by her house, which means not inviting her friends over (with their shoes that have stepped in mysteries), which means her life shrinks in just a little bit tighter, until it squeezes the breath from her. She doesn’t understand why she is this way and other people aren’t.
• The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

7.

The second time Zoey saw Death, she was sixteen. Grandma was in the garden digging up potatoes for stew.

The house in the Upper Peninsula was set away from the rest of the world. A refuge from gossip and homework and other high school troubles. In the morning, Grandma had made her oatmeal with goat’s milk and read to her from a collection of poetry about autumn. Each poem fell softly, like a leaf. Two of the pages stuck together. Careful not to tear the paper, Grandma pried the pages apart with the antique letter opener she kept on the mantel. In the middle, she found the bumblebee kazoo.

In the garden, Death hovered above Grandma. Zoey searched for the trowel, anything to fight off Death, but she’d left the trowel down by the turnips. What use would it have been? Zoey pulled the kazoo from her pocket and hurled it at Death. Like a buzzing bee, the kazoo embedded itself in Death’s head, in the folds of their ear.

Death enveloped Grandma until she blurred. Grandma dropped her basket, raining potatoes everywhere.

They were miles from the nearest hospital, and the old pickup truck couldn’t go over fifty.

It didn’t matter. There was nothing anyone could have done.

8.

In the woods, in the prison of trees, Zoey rummages through the kazoo bag. She is running out of time. If she doesn’t act, she will freeze, here in the woods, in the darkness that is creeping toward her.

She selects a kazoo as bright as the sun. It warms her hands. Light spills from between her fingers, until her cage of branches grows impossibly bright.

Light overwhelms her. She cannot find the mouthpiece of the kazoo, so instead of blowing through it, she flings the kazoo at the space where Death stands.

Death laughs, a persistent buzzing. Or perhaps it is a sob. She once took a research trip to Canada to see the metallic green buzzing beetles, and Death sounds like this, like a swarm of beetles circling her head.

Through the glow, Zoey can see the outline of Death’s form. Death’s hand closes over the kazoo, extinguishing it like a candle. The kazoo drops to the snow—a cold, dead star.

She’s fallen into a fallacy of opposites. Death is not darkness, not the other side of light. Death is something much more complex.

In the bottom of the bag, a kazoo shifts, hiding itself. It is the absence of space. It is nothingness. She wants to touch it, but it scares her.

“Two more choices,” says Death.

9.

Anxiety has been with Zoey for as long as she can remember. Anxiety is the airtight chamber, the heart squeezed too tight, fire’s fervid heat.

It is the mind-killer, the wave, the ellipsis.

Anxiety is her own mind folded in on itself, endless, forever, forever.

She doesn’t understand why her thoughts get stuck, why she has an intense fear of chemicals, why she is becoming afraid to even leave her house.

It is years before she is diagnosed with OCD.

10.

At Grandma’s funeral, Aunt Silvia stopped to straighten Zoey’s hat, as if Zoey cared about how she looked.

“Your grandmother was quite a woman. Got her pilot’s license at twenty-two.” Aunt Silvia pulled a pin out of her own hair and stuck it in Zoey’s.

One of Grandma’s poetry anthologies was tucked in Zoey’s bag. Grandma never kept a diary, but she took notes in the margins of her poetry books, dated by entry, creating a patchwork of her life.

“She lived a full life,” said Aunt Silvia, as if that mattered at all, as if that made Grandma any less gone.

11.

The woods are growing darker, tree branches curled over her like laced hands.

Death waits for her second choice.

She runs her hands through the bag of kazoos, choosing one that is universe-dark. It is a rich, deep ebony, an inkwell bleeding with unwritten words. It is the opposite of nothingness, full and dense.

Zoey opens her hands, letting the jet-black poison of the kazoo spill out.

Death absorbs it all, for they have seen millennia. They contain each life, each breath, every possible sorrow, every moment of discovery.

In the bottom of the bag, the kazoo that embodies absence waits. It calls out to her with its nothing voice.

In a voice that is not a voice, Death tells her she has one choice left.

12.

This is how Zoey experiences OCD:

The thought.

Again and again.

Again again again.

The thought, overwhelming her.

The thought. Again again.

The waterfall crashing over her.

Again again again again.

It is falling into forever.

It is the loop that becomes an infinity symbol.

13.

Zoey rummages through the bag of kazoos. Colorful hard plastics fly through her hands like cards in a magician’s deck. One kazoo keeps slipping away, into the corners of the bag. Its outlines are unclear. All its physical attributes fade—color, size, shape—but she knows, with the certainty that comes when one’s life is draining away, that it’s what she’s looking for.

The kazoo made of nothingness.

Death stretches up, until she cannot tell their arms from the branches. A cool wind rushes through.

No, Death is saying, over and over again, in a voice like the wind.

The nothingness kazoo brushes against her fingers.

Zoey upends the bag of kazoos, laying them out stark on the snow. Whenever her hand nears the nothingness kazoo, Death motions, and the wind sweeps it out of her grasp.

What does she care for the rules of this game, when Death has already broken the most important one? It was supposed to be her choice.

She picks out one kazoo after another.

The rough, green kazoo branches out like a tree, a seed grown from the soil of her hands. Death points, and the tree withers.

Next, three black kazoos fly like birds. Death swallows them, like a magician vanishing a coin.

The paper kazoo is as soft as a sigh. As she holds it, words flow, telling the story that is her life until this moment.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” says Death. It is like an incantation. The paper burns until the kazoo is ash.

The kazoo blue as twilight makes a space of light around them, then drifts up to the sky to outline the stars.

She’s used three choices and more, but none of them matter.

Zoey faces Death, her heart beating wild. “I’ll use them all until I find it.”

“Not yet,” says Death, in that voice which is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

14.

During her worst moments, her thoughts go:

It is everywhere it is in the house it is in on my hands I can’t I can’t I’m going to die please it’s in my hair I can’t breathe let me let me please I need it to stop I need it to stop I need it to I can’t breathe it’s everywhere it’s on my clothes please let me please I can’t I can’t stop

why can’t I stop?

15.

Zoey’s greatest secret is this: she does not fear death.

Death is only an absence, an unmaking.

How many times has she longed for that great blanket of nothingness to fall over her, like new snow?

16.

Is it possible to grieve one’s own life? Zoey has wasted so much time ruminating. So much time trapped by her OCD.

Her grief is a shallow bowl, spilling over. A long path into twilight.

Is there a way forward after so much suffering? She asks herself this again and again, and still cannot find an answer.

17.

Zoey grabs the nothingness kazoo, cupping her hands over it.

It is the last choice she has to make.

The kazoo yawns wide. Instead of throwing this kazoo at Death, she sticks a finger in, then her whole hand, and then she is tumbling down and through. The world becomes filtered and silent. A grey tide pulls at her.

She knows this isn’t what she wants, but it feels like the only choice she has left.

Zoey waits, her breath still, and it feels to her like she is not alive or dead. It feels to her like she is nothing at all.

She thinks of her life as a path that’s narrowed, a twisting stairway she has always been walking down. She remembers her grandmother telling her that the things that feel inevitable are not always so, that gentle moments have power.

She sees her life as an ocean, beating like an inverted heart. Everything that’s happened to her is only one more wave crashing against the shore. This vastness swallows her, and she pushes back, because if she stays here she will never see the snow again, the lovely, dark woods. Maybe the desire to feel the coldness on her skin again is enough.

She thrusts her hand out of the opening of the kazoo, pushing her fingers into the snow. Her hope is a fragile thing, an uncertain thing.

Death grabs her hand. Their touch feels like one million beetles crawling.

Limb by limb, Zoey is pulled back. Death folds their hands over the hole in the world, then subsumes the nothingness kazoo.

Color returns to the hollow, even though it is only the white of snow and branches leached of pigment in the twilight.

The remaining kazoos melt into the snow, a rainbow of colors.

Death fades, and Zoey is left only with her breath.

In her hand, she is clutching the bumblebee kazoo.

18.

In her research, Zoey becomes fascinated with the Pharaoh cicada. Magicicada septendecim spend most of their lives dormant in the ground, emerging to see the sun after seventeen years of waiting.

Maybe it is possible to be buried for so long, only to emerge, to rise up, ready to live.

19.

Zoey starts a type of therapy called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), in which she must face her greatest fears. All her life, she has avoided chemicals, but now she sprays herself with insect repellent and cleans with bleach. She carries moldy food around her house, spreading spores. For her, it is like drowning, her brain convincing her with each breath that she is going to die.

But she doesn’t die. Instead, slowly, her world opens up.

Zoey goes outside more often. She invites her friends over, not even checking their shoes for toxins when they come into the house. She spends less time lost in her particular fears.

ERP doesn’t erase her worries, her repetitive thoughts. It simply creates a space around the fear, and in this gap, she is able to make a choice.

She keeps the bumblebee kazoo in her satchel. Every day, she cleans it with bleach, despite her fear of chemicals. Every day she touches the bleach-covered kazoo and feels the fear well up inside of her.

Zoey develops a different relationship to anxiety. Instead of running from anxiety, she runs towards it. It isn’t easy. Some days are worse than others. Sometimes she imagines her thoughts as a waterfall, rushing past her but not touching her.

Zoey embraces uncertainty as much as she can.

20.

Zoey will always have a complicated relationship with Death. Once in a while, she sees Death in the most unlikely places—at the grocery store by the bananas; in the shape of a cloud; at the back of her lectures, really paying attention.

Each time, she thinks to herself, “I have miles to go before I sleep.”

In summer, she watches the cicadas, their lacy wings stretching for the first time, and she marvels at how they emerge ready to live their glorious lifespans, with all of their uncertainty, with all of their freedom.

Return to Issue #39 | Support the Deadlands