sogno

That night, Martha dreamt in the most evocative way she had for some time. Since her diagnosis, Martha’s dreams had fallen out of her head the minute she’d woken up. The same way that rubbish tumbles into a tip. A nightmarish puddle of hopes and fears sat on the pillow every morning, wishing not to be disturbed. However, that night’s vision ceased to leak out of her. Something had blocked its exit on the way out of her skull. Instead, it was pushed centre-stage inside her brain, and there it stayed. Acting the part of a Macbeth who refused to die. 

Before her stood her doctor, engulfed in a clean sea of white. A white so bright, it shared the luminosity of silver. She squinted while her eyelids remained firmly shut. Her doctor’s hair was the shade of dark pepper - not a grain of salt in sight. A thick black mass that curved softly around his sharp face. His jaw jutted out towards Martha, and like a Venetian mask, it threatened her gaze. She followed the edge of his face down to his hands and, shuddering, clocked what Dr. Quinn was holding. His palms presented Martha with a silver platter; lifeless and gleaming. Atop this beacon of death sat two pinkish rounds. Upon first glance, Martha regarded them as jelly, or 1970s-style blancmanges. On closer inspection, however, and with a menacing jumble of teeth spilling out of her doctor’s mouth, she recognised the wobbling masses as her breasts. Frantically, she clutched at her chest, desperate to find them, hoping they were simply lurking somewhere deep within. Perhaps they had headphones on, and couldn’t hear her grasping calls. But sure enough, she found nothing, and they were gone. Detached, torn, taken from her body - now in her doctor’s possession, presented as deliciously as a plum pudding on Christmas Eve. 

The dream morphed into the space of the hospital café, still obtaining the striking brightness of white. In a far away tunnel, Dr. Quinn had replaced the platter with a knife and fork, grimacing harder at Martha as she fought her way out of hell. She tried to scream, but no sound came. A voiceless yell exited the void as fast as it had entered. After a quick devotion of faith that the doctor did not believe in, he inserted his knife into the side of the dead breasts that once belonged to Martha’s torso. The knife cut through the tissue like butter; pink and tender flesh sat inside. Martha couldn’t shake the fact that she looked delicious, surprised at the envy she felt towards her doctor’s lunch. Her mouth watered the same way it did when presented with a steak cooked medium-rare. Quickly, a mixture of salt, metal and blood entered her mouth, her chest twinging at the same time, as if being pinched. 

The doctor cut into a cube of flesh with such fragile precision that Martha couldn’t believe that he wasn’t a surgeon. Lifting the double-pronged fork to his mouth, the meat sat on his tongue, as did Martha. Once inside her doctor’s mouth, absorbing all the claustrophobia of Jonah, she woke up. 

Drenched, white, and shaking, Martha scrambled around under her nightshirt for her breasts. To her relief, she found two. Despite being full of bad things as they were, it was the most alive that Martha had felt since that first day in Dr. Quinn’s office, and the hungriest.