Please don’t read if you are hemophobic (afraid of blood).
I was the contestant on a reality show, and all the women were stripped down naked, led to showers. When the shower heads turned on, blood sprayed from the spigots and I swallowed some. I slipped and fell in it, blood coating one side of my body.
I put on a hospital gown and the blood seeped through. I was walked into a church and sat beside a teenage boy who was a cutter. His wrists and forearms were covered in scars. He held onto a notebook where he sketched pictures of me and wrote me poems.
He clung to me while trying to push me away, telling me lust was a sin. When I tried to speak to him, he silenced me and brought me back to the showers where he tried to rape me.
A shriek echoed inside of my head like the sound of a metal saw blade grinding against a sheet of metal. I ground my teeth against each other, squeezing my eyes shut. When I opened them again, I was in the kitchen of a group home, making pancakes.
A younger guy, probably in his mid-teens who seemed to be a little intellectually delayed, approached me and asked me if he could go outside and play basketball as I made breakfast. He kept describing another guy in the group home as his surgeon. I thought it was a harmless delusion, so I told them to go play basketball outside until breakfast was ready.
I went outside to tell them breakfast was ready and the guy I identified as my brother (the one who initially approached me about playing basketball) was wailing in heart-wrenching pain. At first, I thought his arm had twisted around his back at an awkward angle, but then I saw from his elbow down, his arm was missing. Dark crimson red blood was everywhere. His screams were agonizing. The bone left behind was black from oxygen depletion and decaying.
The boy they called the surgeon showed me the saw they had used and pointed out the jar with his lower arm sealed inside. The water they kept it in was red with blood.
The guy I identified as my brother sniffled and told me that it was okay because his arm was infected and had to be sawed off to be saved.
I cried hysterically because I knew the truth…
his arm was fine and did not need to be removed.
Isabelle Palerma 