Assailants

I was on solid ground, but still tumbling down, as though intoxicated. The ceiling spun from my near comatose position on the bed. I held my tiny hands up, my skin was softer, my vision sharpened. Held down only by my own forty pounds of weight. I had been here before. I had had this nightmare several times as a child and knew what horrors were to come. 

I braced myself against my bed, clutching the cold, white metal bars of the frame.

Just then, processing this reverse aging, the wind blew the dead trees outside, and two shadows moved in the dark. They crossed the room, and emerged two faceless men in suits. Step by step they came closer to me. I closed my eyes as tightly as I could with my face hidden halfway under the perceived security of my tattered pink quilt.

I did not feel a thing, as fear paralyzed my other senses, but I watched as they approached my small body

and the quilt flew away like a dove of hope

and the serrated blue-silver blade glimmered in the moonlight

its edge pierced the milky whiteness where the thigh meets the groin

the ersatz surgeons worked to saw through the bone

Screaming on the inside,Too confused to speak a word

But voiceless so even if I wanted to, I could not

They lowered the rest of my body into a bath of steaming water. The hot water enveloping me like a scalding metal ring as each millimeter of skin descended through it. And then my severed legs went in. And they floated there, dead and plasticine, like a doll’s. I felt nothing on my skin. The light above me in the bathroom was so blindingly bright reflecting on the water, it was only then that I saw the bright red blooms emanating slowly underwater like tea flowers blossoming in a glass teapot.