The bar is outdoors, by the sea. It’s dusk, and the beach is nothing more than the dark and hungry mouth of an ocean, in that way where all the sand is black, and the water is ink except for the bone-white break of surf. The waves sound like death. The people in the bar are terrified and silent. The man I’m waiting for is on the beach, pacing like a boast through the sand. I climb on one of the wooden tables while the owner of the bar looks over at me, his face creased in worry.
“I’m going to kill him,” I tell the owner. “If you want him alive, I suggest you get to him first.”
He nods, concern spreading thickly around him. The man on the beach thinks of himself as bloodthirsty, thinks of the fight to come as one that belongs to him already. I look like a small woman. He is certain I can’t hurt him. The owner, however, knows I’m a god—there’s no bloodlust that can match mine. I’m considerate for allowing him the option of preventing a murder in his place of business, but the sentence still tastes true in my mouth.
I’m going to kill him.
I pace along the wooden tables and whistle, the tune echoing through the stretch of hungry air before me. I am swinging a weapon in my hand. It’s an unidentifiable blur, but its weight is familiar and comfortable. The man on the beach waits for me to come to him. I want him to come to me instead, to walk his body into my waiting hands. I’m a little nervous, the way you get before something magnificent happens, adrenaline coursing through my flesh like arousal. I start singing: a ghost of a song, a dirge. Everyone in the bar is frozen, barely breathing from their fear. I’m used to that. It’s how they should be, around me.
He’s taking too long.
I taunt him aloud, calling him a coward who’s afraid to face a woman. I’m not a woman, but that’s not the point. It works—such strategy always works with men like these. He comes up the sand like a bull, snorting and enraged. The owner of the bar jumps into motion as well. I—the god—do not move. I only crouch slightly, grinning, heat in my hands, waiting for his flesh to arrive so that I can destroy it.
This is where the dream stops.
I startle awake with bloodthirst fresh under my tongue, my arms humming with excitement, rich with no fear, knowing I can’t be killed. Power echoes through me like a song, but it begins to fade away even as the morning fades in. Reality feels like a sour disappointment, but I remember, Katherine. I remember how it felt, and I know it was true. Maybe not in this life or this dimension, but it was true, and I miss it so much.
Even in this reality, some of me believes I am invincible. I think of it as a vestigial godmemory, of having a body that was not this one, because this body is almost certainly fragile. Its bones would break under enough force; it would bleed, tear, rupture. It can’t run very fast, or leap from building to building the way I do when asleep. I think I like that dream-self better. I’ve killed in that form before, many times. On a different beach, when cornered by men who were hunting me, I speared one of them through his kidney and the others dissolved. Another time, I felt the resistance of an ex-lover’s throat under my knife, the dissatisfaction of the first stroke, the decision in the second. A line from my surgical training chastised me as his blood pumped over my hands: “Don’t whittle,” it said, “cut.” I am always hunted in my dreams; no one ever catches me. I fly through air and run up walls when I am asleep; I have the body of a beast, another life lined with adrenaline and metal.
When I was younger, in this reality, I used to get into fights—quick hot things when I lost my temper. A classmate’s braid ripped from her head, snaked inert on the girls’ bathroom floor. A hand wrapping the throat of a college friend, a man much larger and stronger than me, who’d had the temerity to unplug my CD player when I specifically said not to. I was sixteen. I forgot that I was flesh, that the size of human bodies matters in a fight; they don’t matter if you’re a god. I wasn’t used to being embodied. I fantasized about swinging cafeteria trays into people’s teeth, scattering them across the floor of the dining hall. I lay in bed and imagined being jumped in an alley by humans who made their decisions on premises that didn’t apply to me. One, that your victim will fight to save themselves, not turn on you with a gleeful desire to kill. Two, that your victim is afraid of dying. I imagined the freedom such an attack would give me: to kill someone with a good excuse, to couch it as self-defense. I designed the godsmile I’d wear on my face, just for them, for that private moment when they died and there was no one but me watching their life seep into nothing, just before I fell into careful human hysterics for the benefit of arriving witnesses or authorities. In these fantasies I was prepared to kill, and I was prepared to die.
Precisely because of the irrationality of all this, I don’t fight anymore. I’m not prepared for the way my humanity will disappoint my divinity. Dreams don’t blur over into this particular reality; or perhaps I’m afraid that they will—that I’ll lose my temper and revert to being a god on a bar table, mouth watering for blood. That when it’s over, I’ll wake up to human consequences, or that I won’t wake up at all. Even in this paragraph, the worlds bleed over.
This is really all about power, the memory of it seeping through from the other side. Years ago, I dreamed I was the Messiah. It felt obvious, like a thing I had always known, a thing everyone else had somehow forgotten. It’s one of my favorite stories; I think you’ll like it.
I had an army. We were outside and it had just rained on the hill. I stood on an outcrop, cold grass under my bare feet, a thousand tired eyes watching me. I told them we all have a god in us. “I want you to know we all matter,” I said, my voice ringing with preternatural clarity. They were mine, these loyal hearts waiting to stop beating for me. “We can be humans, or we can be flames,” I called out. “We can burn, or we can burn!”
The sky was gray, and we’d fought so much already, but there was still more fighting to do. I was calm—I’m always calm before the killing. I wanted them to sing murder ballads, to carry holy edges, to be infected by the fire inside me—a licking yellow contagion that brushed them one by one, lighting up god after god, until all the terrible things we were about to do would be in worship of ourselves. I was, in retrospect, the only type of Messiah I could be.
I think about how all this could translate to this reality, this being flesh and dreaming of godselves. I wonder if the dreams are meant to be a blunt reminder of power. All my life, I’ve been hesitant to unfurl completely, worried that there won’t be enough space for all of me, that I’m too much, too strange, too arrogant. I keep halfway secrets, like how failure isn’t one of my fears; I’m only afraid of what I could become if I stopped being tentative, if I rooted myself instead in that dizzying sense of invincibility. This world is not particularly gentle with those whose volume defies decibels, but consider this. What if I faced it like a god waiting for a brawl on a bar table, like embodiment never weakened me? What would change? What could I accomplish?
The dreams translate power as violence—which makes sense for gods, even young embodied ones—but there are other possible choices. The absence of fear. The certainty of self. The ability to catalyze change in tired eyes clustered under a gray sky. The capacity to love past human sense. A knowledge of the future made firm because you’re the one shaping it. Being free; all choices that seem desirable, colored only by the costs that come with them. There’s no power without sacrifice, without losses, without a necessary insulation that can end up feeling indistinguishable from isolation. Embodied nonhumans are often terribly lonely.
Still, the other night, I severed three people’s spines from their heads, pinning them to the wall like butterflies with a triangular spearhead. They were old and frail, dressed in rags; they died easily. Perhaps the dreams are a reassurance—that I can kill the parts of myself that are afraid, the human parts; that the distance between where I am and where I could be, unfurled, is measured in just a few careful assassinations. Perhaps they are a reminder, a booster shot of power so I don’t settle, a nudge that says while the life I want is built out of things I desire and fear in equal measure, blinding with monstrous possibility, it’s still mine to hunt, to seize and drag home by the bloody throat, there for the taking.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from these dreams, it is, after all, how to take a life.