But when I dent you, I end up bruised

[sovay]

I have been sleeping so little for so long that I haven't dreamt or remembered my dreams in months and last night's sleep was particularly delayed and broken, but the dream I had after falling back to sleep for the last time this morning was clear as transcription when I woke and has been doing its best to drain out of my head since, probably because it revolved entirely around the kind of images that terrified me awake or asleep for years. Like so many of my dreams, it must have had a cinematic frame because I remember the character by his actor's name, though nothing else of the production—Paul Barres, to rhyme with star, his face that was chiseled enough to be handsome if it hadn't been so harried. I can remember the girl's head conversing from its jelly of salts and wires, the motionless torso submerged and shining like bog iron in a claw-footed tub of preservatives and herbs. The success of the latter was dubious, but important to the woman who managed the theater in whose attics he experimented and slept; despite the fin-de-siècle setting, his mad science was not even faintly steampunk-flavored but something more alchemical and mesmeric, half mistaken for magic even by its practitioner. "It makes us fragile, living," he was trying to explain. "We're so easily destroyed. We squash, we spill, we shatter. We're ridiculous," and then with a quick, dodging smile, more bitter than self-deprecating, "At least, I am." The impatience in the other man's voice sounded like an old argument, trying seriously to get an answer out of someone who couldn't be trusted to admit anything but his own failures: "What is it that you think you do?" to no avail yet again, since the thin night-stubbled man in his dressing gown with theatrical posters papering the cracks in his walls replied even more dismissively, "Play with dead bodies?" He would never mention himself that he had as much of a reputation for doctoring the living and doing it well, too. Awake, I think he came out of a too medically focused month, but asleep, I noticed how much he didn't treat the decapitated girl like a test or a pet or a lover, how casually he read to her in the evenings while she described the day from her window and how conscientiously he checked in with her before each treatment—if she had said, like Petronius' Sibyl, ἀποθανεῖν θέλω, he would have helped her without hesitation, but there was no sense that she was particularly expected to. He was waiting to see if he had saved anything at all of the man in the tub. I can't remember if I woke before they found out.

Comments

[sovay]

I'd read it, if you wrote it.

Thank you. I might have to be in a less medical month first!