Page 56 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

that, too, is gone—all of it replaced by the glistening red hole where the center of me used to be.

My stomach roils as my grounding gives way to an inky darkness of shock, horror, fear and

shame. Swells of dizziness accompany tingling at the top of my head as I try to comprehend

that the wreckage in the mirror is me.

The final image of the dream was one I did not recognize, and could not reconcile: A newborn is

submerged in a pot of boiling water, then pulled out and held up with forceps. It is beet red,

arms and legs clutched tight, its entire body trembling, its face contorted in a shattering scream.

I woke terrified and choking on tears. Afraid of whatever in me could have conjured this last

image, I told myself it might be a depraved metaphor for something I couldn’t quite decipher,

perhaps related to the bleach water in which my wounds were debrided.

***

One year later, I was reading Eve Ensler's memoir, In the Body of the World. There on the

page, in even more gruesome and impossible detail than in my dream, was the infant. A woman

in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, was telling her story to Eve, reliving it. Raping

soldiers cut the baby out of her best friend’s belly, tossed it in the air and then into boiling water.

The soldiers held a gun to the mother, forcing her to eat her baby or be shot. Eve writes, "It was

here that I walked out of the world.... Here where I decided to exit, to go, to check out. Here in

the suspended somnolent zone where I told my body it was time to die. It was not a foreboding,

as I thought. It was in fact a longing, a decision I made...I saw how death had been my only

comfort. I had quietly and secretly been moving toward it."

Not long before reading this, I had a dream in which elephants self-selected to be culled: Take

me. Take me.

***

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