Another flash of a dream...

This is an image from a dream I had a few months ago. I woke when the pain started, rolled over and grabbed a notebook to start scribbling.

The rough hands grasped mine with painful force. Words that I couldn’t understand, growling in a voice I knew I would never hear again, and the man was pulling a blade. It was sharp. So sharp. I wondered if I would feel it, piercing my flesh.

I didn’t.

The blade slipped through the soft flesh of my wrist with beautiful grace. I stared, transfixed, as it buried itself deeper, opening the skin, slicing through muscle with a painless release. My insides recoiled, knowing the pain would come but not knowing when. How it would hit? With what force? Would it slide into my consciousness like the tide at sunset, slowly overwhelming the beach with its irresistible strength? Or would it bowl me over all at once; a wall of water roaring down a valley, released from the dam that had restrained it and sweeping away everything in its path? How long does it take, I wondered, for your nerves to recover from the shock of a steel violation and begin screaming in agony?

The hand released me, my arm falling away limply as if it were a separate creature, not the part of me from which my life would soon drain, one drop at a time. My wrist slipped open and I stared dumbly, watching as my blood found itself freed and spilled across my skin like slow kisses.

“Too slow.” The words may have been spoken, or I may have just known. It was too slow. Would leave me time to stem the tide. Time to survive.

The second cut was longer, the blade drawn slowly, as if savoring the feeling of my skin. It drew out reluctantly, twisting away and leaving a curving red line in the space where my wrist met my hand.

Deeper, blood was flowing from the wound before the blade was clear, and suddenly I was alone. People still poured around me, the cacophony that is war still sounded, but I was alone. Me, and my blood, and the pain which was just beginning to flow.