based on the 99 stories on this site, in collaboration with claude. youtube video at bottom.
Prologue: The Sleep Debt
You die and you have a sleep debt. There’s an amount of sleep you need and an amount you get. The delta is the debt, and you don’t wake up until you pay it back. When you first awake as a dead person, you can only hang around your grave. This was the story Carolina Washington told Mary Ann one humid evening in Iowa, 80 miles outside Omaha, as cigarette smoke created delicate geometries between them.
“Do you believe that?” Mary Ann asked, her 73-year-old fingers tapping ash onto a chipped saucer.
“I believe we carry debts,” Carolina replied, watching moonlight filter through the pine trees outside her farmhouse. “The kind that outlive us.”
Part I: The Record Keepers
Mary Ann
Mary Ann felt the warmth of sunlight on her skin filter in through the pink home-spun curtains. She blinked her eyes twice and ran her hand through the full of her face. Her hands retreated the sheets. She turned and looked at her husband.
“Hank? You awake?” she said in a whisper.
There was no response from Hank, outside of the low murmur of snoring she had been listening to all night. She stayed studying the lines on his face until it twitched and he turned on his side. She looked at the clock. It read 6:36 a.m.
In the bathroom mirror she studied her face in the trickle of light, ran five fingers through each side of her hair, tore sleep out of each eye. With the light coming in, she could see her irises wider than she had ever imagined them. As she moved closer to her eyes, she saw them narrow. She invented a game there, moving back and forth, looking at the changes in them.
“So much effort, just for light,” she murmured.
When she returned to the kitchen, she noticed the sand in the backseat of her car through the window. It had been there since Michael borrowed it yesterday. He was her neighbor, 19, while she was 73 – her white hair and aching joints reminding her of this disparity daily. The sand brought back memories of herself when she was Leonard’s girl, sneaking away and finding love.
Michael returned later that day with a stack of letters tied with brown twine.
“Found these in the attic,” he said, placing them carefully on her kitchen table. “They’re all addressed to the previous owner from different people around the country.”
Mary Ann untied the twine. The first envelope bore a Chicago postmark. “These aren’t mine to read,” she said, but curiosity won, as it often did these days.
Leonard
In Chicago, Leonard Cohen was humming in the background through old speakers. It was an LP. The hisses and pops competed with him.
“You like Simon?” Alex asked.
“Simon?” Mary Ann replied.
“You know, Paul Simon. On the record?”
Mary Ann smiled, faintly. She got up and walked to the record player. “Not really – it came with the record player.”
They’d been lovers once, years ago, before Hank, before Chicago became a place of business meetings rather than jazz clubs. Before her hair turned white and his turned to memory. The letter she’d sent him last month had been returned undelivered.
The phone rang. It was Mark calling from New York.
“I’ve been traveling,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of too many hotel rooms. “I found the letters. All of them.”
“What letters?” Mary Ann asked, though she already knew.
“The ones written by everyone who ever loved.”
Mark
Mark stood on the balcony of his New York apartment, watching the city unfold beneath him like a living entity. The letters were spread on his desk inside – a hundred stories written by strangers to strangers, collected over decades.
“It’s a pattern,” he told Jack when he called him later that night. “Every letter, every story – they’re all connected.”
“You’re losing it,” Jack replied, the sound of rain drumming against windows in Lake Charles coming through the line.
Mark lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl against the night. “Remember that story Carolina Washington told us about sleep debt? I think these letters are mapping something. The spaces between lives.”
He’d begun transcribing them, noting the recurring names: Mary Ann, Leonard, Michael, Robert, Kate, Gina, Nick, Ted, Martha. Characters living fragmentary lives in different cities, different decades, all somehow sharing the same emotional wavelength.
“I’m going to Budapest tomorrow,” Mark said. “One of the letters mentions a woman there who collects stories.”
“Just come home,” Jack said. “You’ve been gone too long.”
But Mark had already hung up, returning to the letters – to the stories that felt more like life than the life he’d been living.
Part II: The Dancers
Jack
The southern wind doesn’t blow hard – it’s more of a warm embrace. Jack felt this wind walking to Rosie’s diner in Raleigh. He felt silly, instead of prudent, wearing his full-length wool coat.
He took his seat in a booth. At Rosie’s, “Please wait to be seated” was simply a joke, meant to alienate the non-locals. He ordered coffee and a pack of cigarettes with a wink – Monica, the waitress, smiled and walked away.
He was half through the coffee when Maria walked in. He stood to give her a hug. They held each other tightly before breaking.
“How the hell are you?” he asked, looking at the brightness of her eyes.
“Good. I’ve been good – how are you?”
“I can’t complain – just getting settled in.”
She was in town interviewing for a nursing position – he had moved here a year ago. There were plenty of smiles and their hands brushed against each other for brief moments as they shared cigarettes.
“I got something in the mail yesterday,” Maria said, reaching into her purse. “A letter, but not addressed to me. The return address is your old apartment, but it’s signed by someone named Carolina.”
Jack’s heart quickened. “I’ve been getting these too. Random letters, all telling pieces of stories.”
“It’s about sleep debt,” Maria said. “And about a woman in Prague who keeps everyone’s memories.”
The bell above the door jingled, and Kate walked in. Jack hadn’t seen her since New Orleans, five years ago.
“I need to talk to you both,” she said, not bothering with hello. “About the letters.”
Kate
Kate and Jack had quit smoking two days ago. Today, they repainted the apartment – trying to get it back into the shape their landlord expected – back into what they projected their lives were when they moved in.
“I’m fucking tired,” she said as she plopped down in the old recliner.
“Yeah, me too honey.”
“Do you think we’ll finish today?”
Jack thought to the bedroom that still needed paint, to the hall. “If we push through, we might. I’m not so sure, though.”
Kate got up and walked to the couch, her body a beautiful symphony coming his way. She rested her ankles on his lap.
“I wish we weren’t painting.”
“You wish we weren’t quitting?”
“Yes and no. I know we should. But I really miss it.”
“I miss it too,” Jack said and caressed her legs.
They’d found the first letter three weeks ago, tucked inside a book Kate had bought from a secondhand store. Now they were finding them everywhere – between pages, in coat pockets they hadn’t worn in years, tucked behind picture frames.
The letter Kate had found today was different. It contained photographs – strangers dancing in gazebos, standing on balconies, sitting in diners. On the back of each, a single name and a date. People they’d never met, yet somehow knew.
“What if they’re not stories?” Kate asked. “What if they’re memories we’re supposed to have?”
Jack kissed her gently. “Then we better start remembering.”
Robert
Robert was grand but Michael was grander, taking Mildee out for a movie and ice cream that tasted like it was coated in the silver from the screen.
After the movie they walked past houses that were immaculate, and he pointed out the ones that could possibly make a home for them in a few years. She kept quiet. She never really did believe Michael, but he was so sure of himself that you couldn’t help but fall a little in love with each word he said so confidently.
“Do you think that one has a fireplace?” he asked while pointing.
She felt horrible. She could tell the chimney was all wrong for a fireplace, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him.
“Maybe? I don’t know Mike.”
“I bet it does. I bet it has the best damn fireplace in a 2-mile radius. And that’s the one I’m going to buy for us.”
Robert remembered this conversation though he’d never been part of it. The memory belonged to Mildee, who’d written it down in one of the letters Mary Ann had forwarded to him. He’d begun collecting them all, these fragments of lives that seemed to float between cities, between people.
When he received the invitation to Prague, he wasn’t surprised. The return address matched one he’d memorized from another letter – from Carolina Washington’s final correspondence before she passed.
Part III: The Gazebo
The Meeting
The night is a freeze frame amplification of the desires, the longings, the hopes you’ve let go into the wind, the loves you still hold close to your heart.
They gathered in Prague, strangers connected only by the letters they’d received – Mary Ann, Mark, Kate, Jack, Robert, Michael, Mildee, Ted, Samantha, Nick, Sal, and others whose names had appeared throughout the stories. The invitation had come from Martha, though none of them had met her.
“I didn’t expect so many,” Martha said as they assembled in the small café overlooking the Old Town Square. She was younger than they expected, perhaps thirty, with auburn hair and eyes that changed color depending on how the light hit them.
“Why did you bring us here?” Mary Ann asked, her voice carrying the authority of her seventy-three years.
Martha gestured to the stacks of letters and notebooks on the table. “Because you’re all living the same stories, just at different times. The sleep debt isn’t just about death – it’s about the memories we carry for each other.”
“That’s impossible,” Ted said, though his hand instinctively reached for Samantha’s, a woman he’d just met but somehow recognized.
“Is it?” Martha opened one of the notebooks. “Mary Ann, do you remember standing on a balcony in New York, watching stars with a man named Leonard?”
Mary Ann’s expression changed. “That wasn’t me. I’ve never lived in New York.”
“But you remember it,” Martha pressed.
“I… I’ve dreamed it.”
Mark stepped forward. “The gazebo. Everyone mentions a gazebo in their letters. Dancing there.”
Martha nodded. “It’s the center. Where all the stories converge.”
The Dance
Every dance is filled with memories and I feel your hand on my back smiling into the back of my tuxedo so perfect and so longing for perfection. I know this doesn’t rhyme, that this isn’t a proper song swan or otherwise to our near perfect song. But I take the steps you expect and your feet move back in time, perfect, to the rhythm we’ve fabricated.
They found the gazebo at midnight, guided by Martha through the winding streets of Prague. It stood in a small park, illuminated only by moonlight, yet familiar to all of them – as if they’d danced there before, in memories not quite their own.
“How is this possible?” Michael asked, his youthful face clouded with confusion.
“Carolina believed we share more than blood and history,” Martha explained. “That stories are living things that move between us. That every time we remember, we’re remembering for someone else too.”
One by one, they began to dance. Mary Ann with Robert. Kate with Jack. Mark with Maria. Strangers becoming familiar with each step, recognizing movements they’d never made, words they’d never spoken.
“Dance me to the end of love,” someone whispered, and Leonard Cohen’s voice seemed to materialize from the night itself, a soundtrack to their collective memory.
For Mary Ann, it was like being young again – feeling Leonard’s hands on her waist, though the man holding her was Robert. For Jack, it was reuniting with Kate in New Orleans, though they’d never been there together.
“The sleep debt,” Martha said, watching them. “It’s being paid right now. With every memory reclaimed, every story acknowledged.”
Part IV: The Letters
The Writer
Through the window Mary Ann saw her two children safe on the bus – she finished the dishes and wiped down the breakfast table. Drying her hands she decided against phoning Michael – his measured conversation at work was never much fun. Or interesting. With this thought the telephone rang.
“Hellow?” She used a horrible imitation of an English accent for unknown callers.
“Mrs. Smith? Great news here!”
Mary Ann was not Mrs. Smith. She thought about life as a traditional yet so anonymous ‘Mrs. Smith’.
“News?”
“The vacation. You’re a winner!”
Vacation images flashed in her mind. Beaches, there were always beaches, but also dimly lit Spanish bars with individual wafts of smoke entwining towards the ceiling.
“Where – Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Roy – name’s Roy. Forgot to mention it”
“Roy, Where am I going?”
“Why beautiful Denver, of course! Perfect slopes this season!”
“Well, Roy, Thanks. Thanks a lot. But I’m afraid I’m not Mrs. Smith.”
Back in Prague, decades later, Mary Ann recounted this memory to the others gathered in Martha’s apartment. But Nick interrupted.
“That happened to me,” he said. “The call about Denver. About winning a vacation.”
“That’s not possible,” Mary Ann insisted. “It was my phone that rang.”
Martha spread more letters across the table. “You’re both right. The stories move between you. They always have. That’s what Carolina discovered – why she started collecting them.”
“But why us?” Mildee asked. “Why these particular stories?”
“Because you’re all connected to the first writer,” Martha said. “The one who began recording everything.”
The Collector
Winter falls suddenly in the midwest, snow drenching leaves before they have a chance to settle in for rest. There were plenty of leaves on Carolina Washington’s land. Carolina lived in a farmhouse 80 miles outside of Omaha, on the Iowa side.
Since the Washingtons had stopped farming, and then she had stopped leasing out the farm, more and more trees had encroached on the farmland. At present, 75 percent of the farm was forest. Hence the leaves. Blown hard against the farmhouse, their sheer mass started making it difficult to open the door.
When she reached 74, ten years a widow, she decided to stop bothering. Every mid-fall, Carolina would avoid risking a nasty fall and stock up on supplies for the winter. She would purchase months of supplies of food, medicine, a little hooch, and read in her library while energetic, watch TV while catatonic.
For fifty years, Carolina had collected stories – overheard conversations in diners, snatches of lovers’ quarrels through hotel walls, whispered confessions on train platforms. She transcribed them all, sending copies to the people whose lives they might touch – a vast network of interconnected narratives spanning decades and continents.
“She was the first to understand what was happening,” Martha explained, herself Carolina’s granddaughter. “How memories could become untethered from their owners, how stories could be shared across lives.”
“But why collect them?” Jack asked. “Why not just let them float free?”
“Because without someone to record them, they’d be lost. And so would the connections between all of you.”
Martha revealed that Carolina’s final project had been bringing them all together – the people whose lives had become intertwined through shared stories, shared memories.
“She called it ‘the sleep debt,'” Martha said. “The memories we owe each other.”
Part V: The Return
The Homecoming
The moon bows, and we watch it set, thinking it’s for us that it does its dance. But we’re fools, lost in the romance, of a tide that widens with each breath.
They parted in Prague with new understanding – Mary Ann to Iowa, Jack to Raleigh, Mark to New York, Kate to New Orleans. Each carrying notebooks filled with stories – their own and others’ – the burden of memory now consciously shared.
Mary Ann returned to her home, to Hank still snoring softly each morning, to the sand still in the backseat of her car. But now she understood why Michael’s presence had always seemed so familiar – he carried fragments of Leonard within him, stories passed through time.
She began writing letters of her own, recording everyday moments – the way light filtered through curtains, the taste of coffee at dawn, the whisper of her husband’s breathing. Sending them out into the world to be caught, held, remembered by strangers who would recognize them as their own.
In Chicago, Mark reconnected with a woman named Gina who remembered dancing with him in a gazebo she’d never visited. In Lake Charles, Jack taught Maria Leonard Cohen songs she somehow already knew. In New York, Mildee stood on a balcony with Robert, watching stars they’d charted in another life.
The sleep debt was being repaid – each memory reclaimed, each story acknowledged.
The Final Letter
There’s a champaign flute in her hand, shimmering, glittering – a perfect accent to the room, but it’s powerless in its attempts to draw attention away from her eyes. She’s standing, talking to some people in casual conversation, but who she’s simultaneously miles away from. She sees him and the ends of her mouth quickly betray a smile then return back to the task, the chat, at hand.
Mary Ann found Carolina’s final letter tucked inside an old Leonard Cohen record sleeve – written decades ago but somehow arriving precisely when needed. It described a New Year’s Eve party none of them had attended but all somehow remembered – where strangers became lovers, where time folded back on itself, where the barriers between individual lives dissolved.
“We think our stories belong to us,” Carolina had written, “but they belong to everyone who carries them forward. The debt we owe is to remember for each other, to keep each other’s stories alive when memory fails, when time separates, when death divides.”
Mary Ann added this letter to the collection she’d compiled – the chronicle of intersecting lives that Martha now maintained in Prague, that Jack referenced in his songs in Raleigh, that Mark taught in his literature classes in New York, that Kate painted in her New Orleans studio.
The final line of Carolina’s letter read: “The spaces between heartbeats – that’s where we meet. That’s where the stories live. That’s where we’re all dancing, always, in the gazebo, to music only we can hear.”
Epilogue: The Awakening
Time passes like a train barreling down a straightaway in some circumstances, and in others, it passes like molasses down a dispenser. This is the latter.
Carolina Washington opened her eyes. One hundred years had passed since her death, just as she’d predicted in the story she’d told Mary Ann so long ago. She stood beside her grave, watching descendants she’d never met place fresh flowers against the weathered stone.
She looked down at her hands – no longer wrinkled, no longer tired. The sleep debt had been paid, one shared memory at a time. One story at a time.
She could leave now, move beyond the boundary of her grave. She could explore the world that had continued without her.
Instead, she walked to the gazebo at the edge of what had once been her property. It was weathered now, the wood gray with age, but still standing. Still waiting.
And they were all there – Mary Ann, Leonard, Mark, Kate, Jack, Robert, Michael, Mildee, Martha – dancing to music only they could hear, their stories continuing in the spaces between heartbeats, in the memories they’d shared across time.
Carolina stepped onto the gazebo floor, and the dance went on.