INSOMNIA REPORT #226:
NO SLEEPING AT THE WAFFLE GARDEN

Lister Pew came to in the corner booth at the Waffle Garden for the third time in two months. That’s the kind of repetition that stops being funny and starts being physics. It was early evening on the first Saturday in May, and this time, at least, he had the decency to be fully dressed.

He hadn’t walked in. He knew that much. Guys like Pew kept track of their entrances and exits. This wasn’t a blackout. It was a gap, clean and surgical. One minute he was somewhere else, and the next he was face down in a vinyl booth, surrounded by the sounds of the living and the smell of bad coffee, with a headache that felt like it was two days past its expiration date.

He’d woken up in worse places. That train station in Berlin. Dentist chairs. The back of a police cruiser. Amnesia and insomnia had always made life interesting. But they didn’t move you across town without so much as a bus transfer. Something else was doing the driving.

And for reasons he couldn’t comprehend, it kept dropping him off at Waffle Garden.

That was insult on top of injury. Pew was a pancake man. Always had been. Waffles, he liked to say, were just toast with delusions of grandeur. Acceptable in motion, but not worth a destination. Yet here he was again, delivered like a package he never ordered.

And across Highland Boulevard, trouble was waiting for him in matching shirts and bad shoes.

His partners at Anomaly Investigations, Inc.–the paranormal detective agency he’d started with his high school friends when they were both foolish and fearless enough to act on bad ideas without thinking them through–were holed up at the Schmeeckle Family Fun Center, posing as a bowling team. This was the same outfit that started as Anomaly Report, a punk band born just in time to miss the point, now chasing a thousand-dollar prize in the 2026 Point Pleasant Bowl-a-thon. The annual event was less a sport than a controlled collapse. The score was counted in frames not pins. Twenty-four hours of bowling. Last team standing wins.

But they were one man short of a team, and Pew, for all his defects, could bowl.

It was physics. The man understood friction the way gamblers understand odds. The way priests understand guilt. The laws of physics were among the few that he’d obey without question. Momentum, torque, angular velocity–he didn’t calculate them so much as feel them. But his real edge was simpler: he didn’t sleep. Twenty-four hours pacing back and forth on a hard maple floor wasn’t a burden. It was a baseline.

Back at lane 16, the rest of them–the Electrician, Enigma, Enthusiast, Professional, and, inexplicably, Polezny–sat stewing on the orange plastic benches, fidgeting with ill-fitting velcro straps and regretting worse food. The “bottomless” bucket of hush puppies–a favorite in their youth–had turned on them. Time was unkind to everyone. The clock read 5:45. Fifteen minutes to game time.

Pew was never late. Something was very wrong.

Pew was a man of systems. Physicist by training, mathematician by trade, neurotic by nature. He made lists, then made lists of those lists. He cataloged breakfasts the way others catalog mistakes–hundreds of them, mostly at IHOPs scattered across the country like breadcrumbs he could follow back to himself. If he’d gone somewhere, he knew how, where, and when.

Except right now.

Ashley–the assistant manager, newly promoted and already exhausted–stood over him with the look of someone enforcing rules she didn’t write. Buy something or leave. No sleeping at the Waffle Garden.

Pew was halfway through explaining that he hadn’t so much arrived as occurred when the TV in the corner lit up. No sound, just color. A blast that looked lifted from a Rambo movie, a flash of gold and red, and then, amid a flurry of flying pins, the Bowl-a-thon logo.

Boom. It snapped the timeline back into place.

He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes.

Across the street, the crosswalk lights dragged their feet. Inside, there were shoes to rent, a ball to choose, and muscle tissue to wake up from stupor. He ran the numbers. Tight, but possible.

The mechanics of how he’d gotten here–the missing interval, the repeated destination, the quiet suggestion that space itself had developed a sense of humor–would have to wait.

Right now, there was only one question that mattered:

Did he have time for pancakes to go?