Catastrophe Jones

Adrenaline seething, heartbeat racing, breath caught from the moment I wake up, a stifled scream on my lips. Shaking, shaking — eyes stinging with tears not even yet welling. Ominous dread in the pit of my stomach, curling a fist through my insides, cold and slick and heavy.

Something is coming.

Shiver.

Words lost to a haze of memory and confused wonder; what was it that wanted me torn to pieces? Not a bloody violence, not a gory splash of what I used to be but something more insidious and whispering undelicately of annhilation.

The tang of fear on the back of my tongue tastes like I name I can’t bring myself to say.

In the grey light of the morning, fear refuses to be banished, leaving me trembling and exhausted.

Am I still dreaming?

Please, somebody, wake me up.

When I was a little girl, maybe no more than five or six, I woke up in the morning with a spiderbite on one hip. Red and angry and wild, it flared to the size of my palm, disturbed by a youngster’s ill-fated attempts to obey the mandate of “Don’t touch it.”

Afraid I’d give myself some sort of skin-eating infection, my mother tried everything to get me to stop. She used calamine, benadryl, bandages, mittens, lotions, potions, punishments, bribes. No matter the admonishment, the reward for being good, the attempts at soothing, I would be found curled up, half-mad with itching, bitten fingernails scrabbling at once-pink skin turning a fierce red.

Finally, in frustration, she told me that the spider had probably lain eggs under my skin, and if I didn’t stop, they’d break open and spill hundreds of thousands of spiders, all over me, in me, through me.

You shouldn’t ever say things like that to an impressionable, overimaginative child.

It’s thirty years later and I can feel them squirming.

Thirty years, and I’ve got an itch to scratch.

There’s a kind of perfection in the strain on the body when its tied to the bedposts, fucked mercilessly until wrists are raw and breaths are ragged. There’s a stinging bliss in the red lines licked across pale skin by a thin strip of leather. You’d untied one ankle so I could wrap my leg around your hips — I could feel you come inside me as your teeth closed on my shoulder, as your nails clawed into my skin. Growling like some animal, you spent yourself on me, in me, listening to me wail, caught on one high note like the force of your orgasm would make me shatter glass with my cries.

Afterward, you took me down and cradled me like I was some trapped, feral animal, petting my skin and whispering to me as I lay shaking in your arms, eyes wide and wondering what next.

We drew blood. We laughed. We hurt. I loved you for it.

And now there’s some new thing, small and fragile like I could never be — these hips are wide and these legs are strong and these hands, these arms held you with a strength that dared to try and rival yours. There’s something small and fragile like I thought you never wanted, the way you spoke to me — we wrestled and bit and screamed and lay tangled for hours, and where will you find that, now?

I woke up in a bed that smelled nothing like you, this morning, with neckties still draped over the bedposts.

And the streetlight visible outside my window is flickering. On again off again. A blinking eye. Noises from the world have invaded my unconsciousness. I have heard rain for seven days and seven nights, now, always washing down from the sky. Now there are new sounds.

Doors opening.

Whispers.

Footsteps.

In the glow of the words on my screen I see patterns when I turn my head, eyes and faces. A man looks back at me, turned on his side, dead and with his hands bound behind his back. Pale and with dark circles under his eyes. Something squeaks and squeals; heavy bars clang and echo — the sound of things locked away, down dark hallways, struggling to come loose, come up, get free.

I am bathed in a glow of pale blue. The monitor is vast and without teeth, a mouth open wide, receiving me. My pretty little whore, sucking up the words out of my mind, my tongue, my fingertips. Committing it to memory.

Blinking green light on the answering machine. Sweet voices that love me. There’s that door again, and a low, steady pulse, a whirring like machinery that breathes. I have come alive within the dreams; I haven’t slept in a thousand days. The world doesn’t move around me anymore — it moves through me.

What was your last nightmare?

The streetlight outside just went out again. Slowly but surely, all the light outside my window is going out. One by one by one by one, until not even the strange haze of orange arc sodium is left.

Something’s crawling near my foot; I can hear it whispering. Conspiring with the thing that’s been breathing cold against my neck.

The opening doors and all the whispers are the things that dream of me; I’m having a hard time telling what’s mine anymore.

The dark would like to swallow me.

And the streetlight visible outside my window is flickering. On again off again. A blinking eye. Noises from the world have invaded my unconsciousness. I have heard rain for seven days and seven nights, now, always washing down from the sky. Now there are new sounds.

Doors opening.

Whispers.

Footsteps.

In the glow of the words on my screen I see patterns when I turn my head, eyes and faces. A man looks back at me, turned on his side, dead and with his hands bound behind his back. Pale and with dark circles under his eyes. Something squeaks and squeals; heavy bars clang and echo — the sound of things locked away, down dark hallways, struggling to come loose, come up, get free.

I am bathed in a glow of pale blue. The monitor is vast and without teeth, a mouth open wide, receiving me. My pretty little whore, sucking up the words out of my mind, my tongue, my fingertips. Committing it to memory.

Blinking green light on the answering machine. Sweet voices that love me. There’s that door again, and a low, steady pulse, a whirring like machinery that breathes. I have come alive within the dreams; I haven’t slept in a thousand days. The world doesn’t move around me anymore — it moves through me.

What was your last nightmare?

The streetlight outside just went out again. Slowly but surely, all the light outside my window is going out. One by one by one by one, until not even the strange haze of orange arc sodium is left.

Something’s crawling near my foot; I can hear it whispering. Conspiring with the thing that’s been breathing cold against my neck.

The opening doors and all the whispers are the things that dream of me; I’m having a hard time telling what’s mine anymore.

The dark would like to swallow me.