black-eye
He's sitting across the table from me, one leg conspicuously absent. No, it isn't that it's gone- it's that it keeps fading in and out of view, smouldering with smoke that's oddly thick, congealing in a jelly like storm of wisps that try to sneak away and filter off into the dark of the cafe, kept mostly in place with the jeans he's wearing. He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy to wear jeans. I think it's his dark wool coat, that comes to mind- the deep natural earthy tones of his closet, pointedly kept clear of logos and 'free advertisement,' not jeans- the default pair of lightwash, worn rough at the knee, thready holes and cotton worn soft. He keeps touching his leg.
He's rubbing the palm of his hand over his kneecap, cradling it in place. I can see red puncture marks of where metal had bored down, pinching to the point of breaking. His hands are distracting. A cup of coffee sits in front of him- one of those corrugated to go cups that I despise so much: I always burn my hands. He blows over the opening. It's a pointless gesture. I know that he won't drink it. The people in my dreams never do- they don't have faces, only pressing objects against the dark hollow in mimicry of babies playing pretend, making quiet eating sounds to fill the pantomime's silence.
It should disturb me more, I think. It doesn't. I know that it's him, as well as I know the back of my hands- down to the tiny, near invisible scarline ruptured by wood, scab picked at and peeled away with the clear eyed knowledge that 'this will leave a scar,' a perverse pleasure in marking up my own body, in leaving traces of my own boring fingers. I know it's him in the way I know all of the people in my dreams- recognition through some sixth sense, some instinctual knowledge: even as their faces are always wiped clear away.
Sometimes the cropping is just at the base of their throat, hollow thudding with the heartbeat hidden behind skin. Sometimes they insist on adamantly facing away from me- get angry, get violent, when you try to turn them around. Sometimes they cover their faces with their hands and weep, shoulders hunched as they crunch up into a little ball, and scream if you try to pull their palms away, the wet, gluey give of disintegrating flesh all too familiar from leading a hemophiliac's existence. The less frightening ones are like him: cloaked deeply in shadow, with lamplight eyes and flickering motes from where the light sheds, the subtle implication of a mouth and nose through deeper shadow, still- but obscured in a dark smog where a head ought to rest.
"It's a black eye, but then, you knew that," he says. His voice is warm, and quieter than you would imagine: young, he always has people assuming he's half of his age on the phone, soft spoken in a way he can't help- so very small town Midwestern, he explained. It's his voice, and that satisfies me, even if I know that it isn't his face. It's him, or the approximation of him that lives in my dreams- a shade with my older brother's voice, his mannerisms: the distinct sense of safety and security that has so come to define his sense of being.
"I know," I say in turn- and it's not my voice, not the one that I've heard in recordings. It's a little deeper, closer to how I hear myself: reverberation and rattling around bones will add a little weight. Everyone sounds different to how they perceive themselves to, and that's sort of a shame. I fiddle with the coffee stirrer. I always thought these sticks were stupid. He laughs- he doesn't smile, you wouldn't really be able to tell, behind the miasma, like black rot eating away at his face. Where his face should be is nothing but planes of shadow. "You don't really drink that sort of thing." It's true- he doesn't. His lack of reliance on caffeine is baffling to me, as someone who was once slugging back 4,000mg of it on the daily: approaching half of what it takes to kill a fully grown adult. I'm smaller than the statistically modelled average human adult.
He pauses, cradles his cup of coffee in between the palms of his hands, rolls it, like he's trying to smooth out clay walls of some lopsided pot, fingers digging strangely into the cardboard sleeve, melting around the grooves of it, deforming like wet slip. "You're right, I usually don't. Or- the me that you see, when you're not here with me, doesn't." He taps his fingers against the table, leaves black smears on the surface. They pool and slide around like liquid ink, a true black so dark it looks like shellaced beetles. "But you're here with me now." He shrugs, leans back in his chair, one arm tossed over the back as he pats his palm against the plastic. "And that's not so bad. It's not as scary as it usually is, huh?"
Another point I have to concede. My dreams are usually nightmarish- like the cold wet girders that I slip and slide barefoot across as lightning lights up the sky and thunder roars, whiplash cracks of slack cable lines in howling winds and a deluge of rain, certain peril swinging inches askew, atop sky scrapers and construction half done- one foot in front of the other. A step at a time. This cafe is dark, and sleepy- it's just the two of us, and the whir of the coffee machine in the back. No pressed shots: no weird squelching sounds overlaid the airy mist of frothing milk. I can smell coffee. The scent lingers thick in the air, tousles fingers through my hair- in my dreams, it's long again, as dark as midnight. A LED screen proclaiming to be a clock broadcasts nonsense lights: I can't recognize them as any numbers I know. Then again, dyscalculia makes it hard to see them even under ideal circumstances.
"Yeah," I say. "Yeah, you're right," I add, trying to keep my voice a little more firm, stronger in my conviction. "You're right. This is nice." They're empty pleasantries. I can already feel the cold seeping in- I keep my window open, for fresh air: the looming anxiety of suffocation always weighing heavily on me. Even in the dead of winter, I like to keep the window open- and the cold does something for me, takes the edge off: aching chronic pain replaced by acute sharp windchill. I know it won't last. I stare at him, at the mess where his face ought to be- and close my eyes tightly, holding that lamplight close in memory. I already know that I'll wake up having been crying in my sleep, face wet with tears, mouth salted.
rusted mouth
I'm bleeding, because of course I am. Blood soaks into my waking life, burrowing into the crevices of grout that can never be quite scoured clean: I joke that if I were ever murdered, the forensics crew would have a hell of a time with luminol: it would light up like a rave. That it haunts me during my sleep comes as little surprise: I would wake up with a halo of blood soaking and matting my dark hair into the pillow, wet strands of not quite congealed coagulation strewn over my face, my shoulders, snaking over my throat. Nosebleeds. It's an awful thing, to wake up suffocating, the blood gone sharp in your nose and mouth.
In the dream, I'm bleeding. It's a slow trickle, a nauseating slide down the back of my throat: thick enough it forces me to have to swallow a few times to have it pass. The lines of my teeth would be luridly marked, if I were to look. I don't have a face in this dream, either. I rarely do. Only flesh tone smeared and smudges of color, like water blotted paint, colors hazing into an indistinct halo, prickling with light and tone, but eschewing solid form entirely. It looks a little like how I imagine angels might. In my dreams, the angels are always set aflame, heads burning, a pillar of light: too bright to make out anything other than holy fire.
I'm standing in front of a mirror. The black tarnish of mirror-rot is seeping in from the corners, layers bubbling and distorting from the moisture creeping in beneath the looking glass. The sink is full, a thick layer of half congealed jelly like blood settling overtop the surface. A skin is slowly forming. I'm still bleeding. It won't stop. It never stops. My hands are smeared down to the elbows, blood running the length of my arms. I'm trying to staunch the bleeding, but the raw, angry wound continues to bleed. My stomach roils with nausea, in protest- how much blood have I swallowed? When I lean my head down to throw up, it all comes out bloody.
Choking on the clots takes my breath away. My ribs ache. My stomach is killing me. My insides feel like they've been seized up and snarled, tightly wound around a clenched fist. I grip the edges of the counter. I'm down on my knees. The carpet is soft beneath them, but sodden, slowly soaking through with the warmth of blood, cooling incrementally in the damp bathroom. The air is thick with the cloying sweetness of coagulation. I can't escape it. It's all over me.