A Nightmare

I’m lying in a bathtub in a dingy house. The light is yellowish and there is some water in the tub, and it feels warm. I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’m on my back looking down at the mangled flesh where my clothing has opened up, and my skin has opened up, too.  I guess it must have been a shotgun; my whole torso looks like shredded meat. I try not to move my muscles, terrified to see my mangled midsection contort and squelch. In the other room, out a door to my right, where it is dim and grayish, I hear footsteps, and I try my hardest to pretend I’m dead. Secretly, I think I am. The footsteps walk out, I hear a swinging door, a swinging screen door, a slam.

Somehow I crawl out, into the other room, where there is a big disheveled bed, where the blinds have broken so a little dirty light is streaming through and I can see a dead girl in a heap. She has blond hair. She was shot in the stomach. All around her is berry brownish red. Sticky. I find a phone, retreat into the tub, and lay on my back again, with my legs splayed over the edge, just as I was before. In case. I call 911.

My mother answers, and this seems natural. I am very calm. I say hello, Mom, it’s me, I’m just calling to tell you I was shot in the stomach and I love you very much but I am going to die now. She says, ha ha ha. This is frustrating. I touch the edge of my big gaping wound, just barely. Mother, I’m not joking. I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’m lying in a bathtub, there is a dead girl on the bed in the other room. My fingertips are sticky. I hear footsteps, and suddenly it occurs to me in this very obvious kind of way, that I want to live. The footsteps are still outside. I manage to hurl myself over the edge of the tub, to the door, and lock it.

The man outside is furious, and he looks a little like my father or maybe a neighbor we once had. I know he is wearing work boots with steel toes. He kicks the door.

Mother, I think I could maybe live, but I’m going to need an ambulance, very fast, and somebody with a gun, or this man will kick down the door and kill me now. It’s funny how much and how little I know. For example, I know that he will kill me, and I know that if he does not, I will live. I do not know why he will kill me, who the dead girl is, or where we are. The house reminds me of the daycare I used to attend when I was little. In fact, outside of the broken blinds, I think I can see the big old willow, drooping over the sidewalk. I remember when that willow was cut down, though, and how the woman who ran that daycare out of her home mourned for it.

Somehow, my mother decides I am not joking. I live, although when the ambulance comes I feel a sudden surge of disgust and nausea because I know they will touch my wet, open flesh. Otherwise, I am stuck in this floating kind of logical detachment. I don’t know what happens to the man who wears work boots like my father, who mourned for the girl in a heap on the bed, or what became of the house that resembled a cramped together, torn down version of the place where I once ate little plates of lasagna and traced my hand in glitter glue. Later, I will make a joke about not eating too much, so as to not come apart at the seams.