Decimation by Rakyah Assam (Lucent Dreaming Issue 12)

Most of my childhood fantasies concerned my decimation. Particularly on nights where I could not sleep. Hot and wet nights, heavy as a slobbering dog on your chest. I would imagine being dragged over cold, sandy soil. I would imagine solid, bodiless hands. Sleep became a forest someone else was carrying me in. The skeletal shadows arching across the ceiling were squinted into dark, naked branches which swayed in the wind.

When I wake up, my home is strange. The air is stiff with fats. Cinnamon scented candle wax and burnt oil solidify as they hit the cold front of the night, stick to the dark wood and clean glass of the cabinets creating a haze, like light reflecting off the glaze on photographic paper. I run a hand over my face. I feel as if I have shocked myself, my fingers prickling against the carpet imprint in my sleep warm skin. The carpet is brand new, and underneath the dusting of spice and perfume it smells of factories.
I had thrown such a lovely party. It was too lovely. For a few hours I had forgotten how it must end, and I must clear all evidence of it alone. Among the sticky glasses and dinner dishes, nothing can distract me from that aloneness, and nothing can distract me from how this ordinary task exhausts me to tears.
I must have fallen asleep on the floor.
I’m not sure if it was sleep sticking to me, or if the air of the house was made thick by the scented votives I neglected in my nap, but walking through my own house I feel sick and paranoid. A child again, not wanting to walk past a door left ajar.

The word decimation comes from the Roman punishment of commanding nine men to kill the tenth of the offending group. Crimes punishable by this offence include desertion, insubordination, cowardice.
I am alone in my house. There is no executioner around every corner, behind every door hanging loosely on its hinges, as if poised to strike. There is no one to desert, no one to demand my obedience. Such are the freedoms of loneliness. No one to call me to bed and end this fear which rises in me like a fever, leaving me cold and damp. I went about my little rituals: blowing out the candles finally, collecting the glassware, locking the doors and stripping down to my skin. They didn’t settle my nerves. I found myself thinking I saw friendly reflections in the dishes, that I could turn and run outside and invite everyone back in and end the awful mistake of living alone. I crawled into bed in a perfectly clean house, with plaque on my teeth, too tired and miserable to do anything but rot.

The dream in the forest ends with a cult of beautiful women. They untack each muscle from the chewy ligament which connects them to the bone until I go completely slack. Finally I would be unable to resist the unwriting of sleep.
Early adulthood greeted me with a strange lethargy that dulled my imagination. But if I can no longer pluck a scene from thin air, I can still distort shadows and stains into new grotesque shapes to entertain myself, the same way I once melted the shadows cast by the glazing bars of my window into a forest. The fantasies which I grew into centre on consumption. I imagine mouths growing in the blooms of damp from the corner of my bedroom.
Often the narrative thread of these bedtime stories would fray and diverge into five or twenty different routes, and I would try to tire myself by combing them out. I could spend the late night and then early morning untangling these stories into their own separate threads, until I had myelinated libraries of pre-bed fantasies.

Tonight I was starting afresh with the dark specks in the corner of my ceiling. Might they be spores of a dry rot with thick, fleshy, fruiting bodies replacing the wooden infrastructure of my house, until it turned soft enough that I would disturb it with one unlucky footfall and the building would cave in on me? The rot would drain the calcium from my bones before I was dragged from the rubble, maybe even before I had suffocated. It would digest through the arch of my foot and grow into my pelvis like the cancer which had killed my grandmother. It would fruit in the ribs and dissolve into the softer, spongier tissues of my lungs and brain. This version feels like being cradled; it has all the comfort of being held in its favour.
Or maybe I picked the mould up in the steam of the shower. Maybe it’s been growing inside of my lungs this whole time and at any minute a twinge of pain in my chest will bend me over. The pain will burst and flower into a thing so massive it curls into my toes and blooms like hydronic needles in my eyes. At that point I’ll be on all fours, a supplicant to my suffering. Two stalks of mycelium will extrude through my eye sockets, the tough protein having penetrated the pinprick through which the optic nerve is strung through the skull, shattering them open. Still alive, blind, the pressure on my brain increasing. As the fungus grows, the stalks will burst and flourish. Does the hunger go inwards or outwards? That’s the thread I untangle as I try to lull myself to sleep tonight.

I don’t think there’s something wrong with me, other than the sleeplessness. What I’m failing to tell all my doctors is that I don’t think I’m disturbed, mentally. I think I’m sick. I feel so weak all the time. All the tests kept coming back clean, so I stopped going. Chasing after my health was another labour that exhausted me. I don’t think that I’m sick any more than a child is sick for imagining the bogey man behind each door. And the child, in bed, dreaming of being torn apart on the forest floor, is just a child. Myself, fantasising about being torn through by fungi? I am not sick. I am lonely and I want a justification for my aching body that keeps falling short, but I’m not sick.
The fantasy of fungi betrays me. Their consumption without mouths doesn’t cure me of my lethargy or tear me into sleep like those slender, deadly women of my youth. I need human company, mammalian violence. The minutes stretch and smack like gum after the flavour is gone. I try to recall the long shadows of the butcheresses of my childhood dreams to no avail. There are no trees outside these windows. A yellow stain is dragged out on my ceiling, painted by a streetlight I can’t quite see.
This gives the new woman the appearance of liver failure. This fantasy starts not from inside me, but from inside the house, kept in some secret compartment, locked and tidied away until all the guests had left. She moves with a sulk. She’s never invited to parties.
Her arms, and then I realised only her forearms, are covered in rings of red marks. First I assumed my fungus had alighted in her. I remember a ringworm infection my mother had when I was a child. For a second this new woman was patient zero, and through her animal body the disease could finally break inside of me. Then I realised the pattern of teeth. They were bite marks. As if she had been stifling her screams by biting down on her own self. Some of them had the raised quality of scar tissue. How long had she been gagging her agony on her own flesh in my cupboard?
Or was it hunger which drove her to chew on herself, the instinct to eat raising her own meat to her stomach? The only thing to hand after feasting on moths and the dead wasps September had littered in between the nylon and indigestible elastane of my jumpers and sweatpants.

There are lots of theories on why we dream, but no answers yet. One is that our brain wants to prepare for changes or disasters in a theatre of its own design. It’s a protective measure. Another says that the brain chokes on stress, and dreams are where your unprocessed traumatic would-be-memories go. These both sound like hopeful explanations for nightmares. Most likely your brain just spitballs the things you’ve seen during the day, an accident of lucidity. I think that, as my insomnia progresses, these stories I tell myself are a compensation for whatever function a dream is supposed to carry out. I have been watching a lot of documentaries on parasitic fungal infections in ants.
I can’t move. I’m in that space between waking and sleep, with my eyes open, my neck locked into position, watching the cupboard she’s crawled out of. She’s on top of me now. From here she has the advantage. She can see the waxing gibbous of my face, and I can only see the awkward angle of her chin and the dry bleeding skin of her lips.
She keeps moving where I can’t. I know now that it was her I could hear breathing behind each crooked door. It was her in the bad, stale air I’ve been breathing. So maybe she’s a better woman. A stronger woman. I’m losing to a stronger woman. A woman who has the strength to do what I can’t bring myself to do.
My skin is paler than I remember it. Yellowish in the streetlight trickling through the blinds. As if I had been keeping myself indoors. Starving myself without noticing. I smell the plaque on my breath from the inside of her own rotten mouth. My hands, which are her hands, are dry. That skin scratched as she wiped away my tears. I hadn’t realised that I was crying. I think she was going to kill me. Even worse, I think I was going to let her.


Rakyah is based on the Welsh coastline, the natural surroundings of which inform her explorations of the surreal, otherness, and contemporary anxieties. Her pamphlet, LOBSTERGIRL, is forthcoming.
T: @RakyahAssam | I: @rakyahassam

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