Safer Somehow
Domestic Horror
I woke, screaming, the viscous tack of blood and reek of offal more vivid than the cling of sweat drenched sheets or the frantic rapping on my bedroom door.
I fought my way upward, gasping, to reality’s glimmering surface. “Just another nightmare,” I reassured my sister. “I’m okay.” I heard her wooden footsteps retreat down the hall of our family’s rent-controlled apartment.
But that was a lie. It wasn’t just another nightmare. It was the same nightmare. And, like so many times before, its cinematic imagery refused to fade to black in the depths of my subconscious, its violent juggernaut urgent and unyielding.
When the dream first appeared about a month before, I put it down to work related stress. Ever since I joined the NYPD, I’d had the occasional nightmare. As a coroner, I see my share of gruesome. Though I do my best to keep a clinical distance, it’s hard to shake the inhumanity revealed on my table.
But, the truth was this dream felt different. It felt like a vision. Of what, I wasn’t sure. I just knew I didn’t want to find out. And now it was coming every night, tunneling into my waking world with the insistence of a runaway subway train.
I suspected my sister was becoming concerned. She had never approved of my giving up pediatrics for forensic pathology. She thought it ghoulish. I was beginning to think she had a point. The last thing I wanted was for her to start insisting I “see someone.”
Sure, the department had therapists. If I’d been involved in a fatal shooting, I would have spoken to one. No shame. But for this? Word would get out, and I’d be labeled weak, the lily-livered lady doctor. This hard-boiled gal wasn’t about to admit to cracks in her shell.
My strategies were still working, barely. If I kept myself busy, focused on what was in front of me, I could crowd out the terror. It was getting more difficult with each replay.
When I couldn’t fight it anymore, I took the analytical approach, reviewing my case files for similarities, hunting the culprit amidst photographic evidence. Nothing popped out. It wasn’t surprising. The nightmare was a montage of images: a table; a blade; a woman’s hand; a burly body and blood, so much blood.
Upon awaking, I’d taken up the practice of staring back into the dream, straining to see more: the room, the woman, the victim’s features. Nothing. The images would slip away like the hand of a drowning man.
Was I the woman? Would I be? The idea horrified me.
I stripped my bed and stepped into the shower, letting the pounding pressure of Catskill water through a prewar shower head strip away the night.
Emerging from the bath in a cloud of steam and damp curls, a sickening stench assaulted me. What the hell? I cinched my robe and followed my nose to the kitchen. My sister stood, back to me, working her spatula across the crusting well of an iron skillet.
Liver and onions. The ferrous, pungent scent bored into my memory. I buckled, gripping the padded oil-cloth back of a dinette chair for support, overwhelmed by nausea.
That’s when I saw him, splayed belly-up over the pearled gray Formica like a gutted fish, lower calves and feet suspended awkwardly beyond the table extension’s reach, blood dripping a damp tattoo through the crevices onto the yellowed linoleum floor. Or should I say I saw his image, a nightmare superimposed on reality.
I must have fainted.
When I came to, my pregnant mother was peering down at me, holding what looked like piece of steak over a swollen eye. The scent of seared liver still filled the air.
“Oh, Sweetie,” she said, “I’m so sorry I woke you. I didn’t mean for you to see this.” She scooped me up in arms painted with lividities, burying my face in her apron.
“He was never going to let us go, you know,” she murmured, as much to herself as to me.
Straightening, she grasped me by the shoulder, then bent, face serious but kind, to look into my eyes. “Now we have to get rid of him. I thought we’d start with the liver. Organs always spoil first.”
When I came to, my little sister was staring down at me, spatula in hand, the liver, forgotten, smoking behind her.
“Jeez, Jess. Are you okay?” She looked terribly alarmed. “Did you hit your head? Do you think you have the flu?” Then she cocked her head. “Is it the nightmares? Are you getting enough sleep?”
I was too stupefied to respond.
“I’ve been so worried about you. That’s why I made you a special breakfast. I don’t know why, but a nice dish of liver and onions always makes me feel safer somehow.”
Inspired by Kathy Jacobs tantalizing Write or Die prompt, Death Dreams. Happy Halloween.
Ré Harris, Jack Preston King and Stephen M. Tomic you have been entered to the Hell of the Dead by me. To escape to the Living Hall, you will have to recreate this piece in your own words or extend it as part of the Write or Die collaboration. Failure to comply will leave your name and soul in the Hell of the Dead.
