This is a red dream
This is where it begins.
This is a dream without shape or form or borders.
This is pain.
It is red and it is wet.
First there is no physical pain, no mental pain. Only shock.
That moment, it twists and turns like cold steel. Goes back to the start: every footfall, every second, every word and movement crystal clear and perfect—as if watched in a mirror. And then that final, cold, paralysing moment when Vesin, beautiful, brave, strong—stupid stupid stupid—Vesin, chose to protect her rather than walk away. If she’d just said nothing. Kept her mouth shut, let him go. But it is too late. He is dead.
She cannot think about him.
Think about Vesin alive. Think about being together. Think about anything but the knife going into flesh and … Oh dead gods, she’s going to die. How can this have happened, how can this be?
There is a voice.
A small voice, an old voice, one she knows, one that spoke to her long ago and then faded away when she stopped answering.
Get up.
This is a red dream.
This is a dream without shape or form of borders.
This is pain.
It is red and it is wet.
She is no stranger to blood—what woman is? But she has never seen so much, not coming out of her. She felt the blade go in. Felt it as ice. Felt it as unconnected to the horror of Vesin’s death. Almost welcomed it—and would have, had she not also felt it as the inevitable death of the tiny life within.
A boy. She’d known from the moment he was conceived, from the moment they joined together and a shock went through her. Not shock like the one she felt now: as different as was possible, as pleasurable as this was painful, as right as this was wrong. She’d felt him come into being in that moment of joy as surely as she’d felt the tiny light of his life flicker in this moment of horror.
Crying, he’s crying. No, she is crying.
Get up.
This is a red dream.
This is a dream without shape or form or borders.
This is pain.
It is red and it is wet.
Now it hurts. The physical pain comes in waves: unbearable, unbelievable. She curls around it as if protecting the ragged line of flesh across her stomach. She had eaten tamish for lunch, spicy and strong, and she can smell it—smell the contents of her guts—and it makes her vomit. It is another level of agony, blood fountaining from her mouth, nose full of the smell of food and the stink of the butchers. She is talking, telling herself it will be all right, saying the words as she breathes, barely breathing, barely speaking. Is she even saying the words or are they only in her head?
Tamish for her last ever lunch. Thankful food.
Get up.
Who is that?
This is a red dream.
This is a dream without shape or form of borders.
This is pain.
It is red and it is wet.
Father. Father, I should have told you. You would have understood and now your little girl is dying in the wood far, far from home and everything she loves.
The sun is high, bright and strong and it heats her skin but she is cold. Cradling her stomach; blood leaking through her hands; blood everywhere. Pain, this is pain. Women are born into pain. Birth is pain. Oh, my boy, my little boy, lost in the wood, lost for love. My boys, my boys all gone. Darkness. She longs for darkness.
Get up.
That voice.
Get up.
From so very deep within her. Something is stirring, something desperate to continue. She hopes it is the child but it is not. It is something old and dark and it wants her to live, but she is not strong enough. She is dying in the wood. She is dying in the wood. All she has left is gone. All her life is flowing away.
Get up.
That dark voice.
“Get up.”
Who?
“Merela!”
Who is there? No, no, leave me to die. My boys, my boys …
“Please, Merela, get up.”
Just leave me to die.
“Merela, get up!”
She knows that voice.
“Get up!”
She cannot. She has not the strength, and though it feels like life is everywhere she does not know how to take it and use it. Does not even know that she can. Not yet.
Then she feels it.
Surrounded by silence. A tiny, barely formed hand takes hers. It has no voice—not yet. No name—not yet. No sense of self—not yet. It is only life, pure life. And in that utter silence, without asking or offering, it passes all it is to her and that is the sharpest pain of all. Feeling the sacrifice, the end, the loss. The tiny almost-hand slipping away as it becomes nothing, gives her everything.
“Get up, Merela!”
She is pulled to her feet.
This is where the real pain begins.
Oh, my boys.
My boy.
This is where the real pain begins.
My boy.
This is a dream.