This is like nothing I’ve ever felt.
I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to go back to it because from the brink of waking, it feels like what Jerry Whitman did to me—only worse.
I fight to stay even though it’s an inferno where I am. Inside the dream, I’m on our bed in the room I share with Cherish, but it’s ablaze. All around me, the air is thick, yet somehow there isn’t any smoke though every direction is bright with flames. The expansive room is full to the point of claustrophobia with fire, hot and smothering and alive. It dances while it devours, lapping at the vaulted ceilings, curving down toward me at times, and then rearing back as though it is saving me for last.
I am lying on the bed, my wounded arm tucked between the mattress and my side—but I’m not afraid. I am quiet inside the wreath of flames that have covered the wall behind me like living wallpaper and left the bed untouched.
Where is Cherish? I don’t ask it aloud, but I listen for the fire’s response.
Fire pits crackle, small and contained. This is different.
This blaze roars. It bellows. Sometimes it screams.
It wants me to scream back, to cry out, but I won’t. The way I didn’t when Jerry painted my wound a thousand times over with liquid skin.
I did not cry out.
This isn’t going to hurt.
Except that it was agony. From the moment the silky brush and liquid compound touched the rawness of my wound and the still-stinging edges of freshly trimmed skin and the cut he’d accidentally made, I wanted to plead with Jerry Whitman to stop.
This isn’t going to hurt.
So I didn’t show it. All the time I could feel the bristles, could feel the liquid adhering to the shreds of remaining epidermis too small for the eye to see. All the time I felt the liquid move into the cut, seep into the shallow slice, I didn’t make a sound.
It was a test. It had to be. When I anchored my gaze on Jerry Whitman, looking through his pupil and into the stabilizing darkness, he was watching me. Waiting for a reaction. Waiting perhaps to see if I’d meant the words I’d said.
This isn’t going to hurt.
So it didn’t. No matter how it felt. No matter how the ravaged area burned and tightened, the way it felt like tiny teeth were sinking into my raw flesh.
He said it wouldn’t hurt, so it didn’t.
The dampness that had been pool water became sweat, the effort of swallowing my pain and my tears sending it boiling to the surface until I felt it slip down between my shoulder blades. It beaded along my forehead and above my lip, but I tensed, and reached further into the dark of Jerry Whitman’s eyes.
When he was done, he smiled and cupped my shoulder.
“All better?” he asked, and I mirrored his expression.
I never broke, not even when I was climbing the stairs to bed and I could hear him setting the kitchen right again. I didn’t complain to Cherish before we turned in. I only changed from my wet suit in the bathroom and stole a single glance at the spot.
I didn’t let myself gasp at the way it looked like he’d skinned another layer, not added one. How I wouldn’t have had to see it if we’d bandaged my arm with gauze.
Sneaking her grandmother’s bracelet back into her bedside drawer was the last thing I did before joining Cherish in bed. I know I’m all but awake because as I lie alone, curled at the foot of the bed, surrounded by the shrill screams of a fire that has raged but kept a distance from me, I am remembering it all. As though this is waking, and that was a dream.
The pain has followed me here; I cannot escape it.
Rah!
I pull up from the bed with a start and search the flames.
“Che?”
RahRah!
“Cherish!” I’m up on my knees and the fire responds by stretching higher, as though wherever she is, it wants my Cherish hidden.
The fire screams, and it is beginning to sound like me.
RahRah, please! Wake up!
The light is sharp when it cuts through the inferno and the dream breaks. The bedroom explodes into view around me, and I am looking around wildly, aware only that I am burning.
“Mom!” Cherish is at the door, yelling out into the house, and then she’s running back to my side, her eyes wild and worried.
I am still screaming.
I am still burning.
My arm is hideous. I cradle it but I don’t dare touch it now. The rim of the wound is somehow both swollen and shriveled, and alarmingly black, as though there really was a fire. It feels tight and tearing. No matter how closely I study it, I cannot stop myself from believing there is something unseen chewing into and under my skin.
“Get it off!” I beg Cherish, and when I stumble out of the bed, the damp sheet tangled up in my legs, she runs to help me.
We make it into the bathroom and I turn the faucets on full blast. I don’t know whether the water should be cold or hot; I don’t know what will soothe the nightmare of this.
I’m emitting something like a panting growl, and Cherish involuntarily replies with a humming whine, her face a constant replay of tension and collapse, her eyes wide. She will never get a handle on the situation, never be clearheaded or cunning enough that I can fall apart.
Control. Control. Control.
I keep the arm stiff and angle it away from the rest of me, and from Cherish, lest she do something ridiculous and try to touch it. With the skin bubbling black around the rim and the rest of the wound swirling red and orange like magma, I can see the layer Jerry Whitman applied, like cellophane on top of it all.
“I have to get it off,” I say through the low rumble still escaping me, snatching a towel from the ring hanging closest to me. I wet it and first press it against the area to saturate the liquid bandage before trying to scrub it from my flesh. Immediately, I crumple forward and howl with regret.
“RahRah!”
I cast the towel at Cherish, who grips it tightly enough to wring the excess water out of it and onto the bathroom floor while she rocks from one foot to the other, too confused and afraid to successfully cry.
“Cherish? Farrah?”
Brianne is in our bedroom now, and Cherish, who was already horror-struck but at the sound of her mother’s voice turns frantic, rushes out as though the woman will need a guide.
“Something’s wrong with her arm,” she’s crying when they appear. “She was crying in her sleep, she wouldn’t wake up—”
“Farrah, let me see,” Brianne tells me, but at the sight of the ugliness she recoils.
It’s only wet because of my attempt, but at first glance it must look like my forearm has exploded in a mess of tar and rainbow sherbet puss.