As I lay there hoping for someone to save me, knowing that no one was, the man in the red shirt and blue apron lifted his hand to show me the scalpel and then draw my eye to the kink in the otherwise sharp edge as if to say "this… this is what will hurt the most" I couldn't see his mouth through the mask but his eyes gleamed with a smile... a smile like a man who just got his every dream come true and was now going to finally have the exquisite release of years of holding back the desires like a man in his final moments of restrained orgasm, when he can wait no longer... the eyes told me that he was not insane in the “I don't know what I am doing” way, but that he had waited all his life for the chance to do this one thing and that he loved me for the opportunity as though I allowed him... with one last look at me he turned to my exposed chest, which was out of my sight and I only know it was bare from the cool breath of air and the hot lamps glaring down on it,... he pulled the bottom of the blue rubber glove in his right hand and lowered the tool of my unstoppable fear to my body and began to cut... the blade ran along my rib not deep but cutting a groove into my bone with that kink ripping flesh as the edge poured into me... the sound was like dragging a metal wire on concrete and pulling watermelon from the rind with your fingers and the pain... the pain wasn’t their... nothing... I knew what he was doing but suddenly realized I couldn't feel any of it... I began to panic as though I did feel it... not as a clever ruse but out of shock... he was ripping my chest open in strips cutting bone with reckless abandon and none of it was hurting... I know it should be killing me… should be more pain than anything else in the world could be but nothing... I began to cry... then for the first time... I realized... I hadn't made a sound... I couldn't scream... I couldn't really even breathe right... my mind raced what is happening... then I could see in his eyes the type of wild-eyed pleasure that comes with the actions of a little child finally big enough to climb the cabinets and get both the cookie jar and the only lighter in the whole house.... I could suddenly see through his eyes... see myself scream,... see my tears,... see my pain,... and still hear nothing… not even the blade in my body or the bone being carved like a wooden sculpture... I saw I was not tied down I was not even restrained in the slightest... then I was suddenly jumping to my feet grabbing the scalpel and reaching for the throat of the horrible creature of a man to see nothing... nothing but a field of blue marigolds... the weed of a flower that I grew below the window of the home I lived in Oklahoma with the help of my grandmother… the flowers that grew to three times their size when I had planted them and always had a fondness of, especially due to the fact that my grandma had helped me to plant them in the first place... I had the scalpel still... but everything else was gone… the man… the lamp… the table… I looked down in a quick panic and saw that my chest was healed but that there was a hideous scar as though it had all happened years ago and that I had survived somehow... then it started to reopen... as though it was healing in reverse slowly peeling back and exposing the bloody bone and muscle and pouring streams of steaming blood down my body and onto the blue flowers.... as I looked down, the flowers closest to me began to turn a beautiful purple as the blood seeped into them... and before my eyes the whole field began to pulse with the vibrant purple as though all the flowers were connected and infected by my blood in the same way as the first... as I stared scared and convulsed at the field it faded away and I opened my eyes calmly and with no problems or fears as to where I am… I awoke in my room looking at the basement walls… I was in my bed… asleep next to me was my lover… and even more calmly still, I rolled over and when back to sleep... it was just another of a million dreams that have plagued me throughout the night and have caused themselves to just be a bad dream, and not the "wake up screaming" thing that most would never forget.... in two days I wouldn’t even know it happened if not for the written memory I send to you now...
