I had what some might call a nightmare last night. The below is not for the faint of heart, it's one of the few nightmares where writing it made me feel physically ill. I really do not recommend reading this unless you've got a stronger stomach than I do and your hands are not shaking like mine were when I typed this.
It started out normally enough. I wanted to go to a party. No, it wasn't me, it was a character. A female with long hair, slightly overweight, and really depressed. It was her wedding, I think. She wanted to wear a specific dress, but it wasn't in her closet. She had to wear something she didn't like, something with a lot of scrunches in the dress and the dress was either black, pink, or green. Sometimes it was a really glitsy dress, other times it looked like a trash bag.
Something attacked during the party. Whatever attacked dumped her in the middle of a river gorge with a bunch of children. She was the only adult. Well, sometimes she was the only adult, sometimes the kids were adults too.
She was trapped there for weeks, months. Her dress was ruined, she became terribly depressed and considered jumping into the swiftly flowing river.
Instead, she made a game. It was a terrible game.
She made a bunch of dummies that looked like people and acted like people. She set them all up in a row and gave them guns. These people were just torso, head, and arms. They moved like robots and each had a gun put in their hands and fingers on the trigger. Long strings connected the guns to the front of the game.
The game was to stand across from your dummy and pull the string. You had to stand there and let the dummies shoot at you. The girl only had six bullets. She told the kids, six of them, that they each had to stand in front of a dummy and it would shoot them. The seventh dummy, one of a large man in a black uniform, was hers.
To top it all off, they were all in survival mode, so while they pulled the string, they had to pull a razor over some wood, making a stick into a straight arrow. Again and again they had to pull the razor over the wood. The kids thought this was stupid, so she put the string on the razor and put the razor on a handle. Each time they pulled the handle across the wood, the gun would shoot.
The kids didn't know, but she put all the bullets in her own dummy's gun.
They started the game. I'm getting sick while I write this, knowing what comes next.
The others, they made their arrows and pulled blanks.
The girl. She knew what she was doing. She did it with finality and few tears. The bullets went off. She pulled the razor of the wood. Blood. And pain. Oh gads, so much pain and so much blood. My hands are shaking. My arms hurt and I'm not sure if I can push through this part.
The bullets impact her, but the pain of the bullets lodging themselves inside her are not as terrible as the pull of the lathe over the wood. It's not wood she's carving up. It's bone. I realize this slowly in the dream. The wood, I think, that doesn't look like wood. It's translucent and covered with red stains. It splinters under the razor and I check my own arms to make sure they're whole. It helps that in the dream she's pulling on only one bone, and in real life I have two bones there. It can't be real, it can't be real. It's just my dreams playing games. I think it's her arms in the dream only because my own arms are sore. I projected the soreness in my arms into the dream, that's all.
Six bullets and six pulls on her arm bone. The people around her, are they children again? They scream. She screams.
Then she's back at the party. Wearing a sleeveless dress. Her bone is still half shaved and her skin has healed and is pulled back from the.... ugh. I'm getting sick feeling again. ... the bone is just out there, still slightly bloody, still shaved. The people at the party whisper about it. An ambulance is called. The forgotten bullets are still inside her...
I know I'm about to wake up, but I want to wake up faster. Please, please wake up!
Somehow I must have been making noises or moving around because my husband turns and drapes an arm across me, jolting me awake. It's only a dream, it was only a dream...
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