dream

last night i dreamed of blood inside my abdomen, and my body like a tube allowed the blood to flow downward with gravity, into my legs. i scratched my calf, and a plum-red bruise blossomed along the path of my fingernails like a rorschach test, and i could see that there was so much useless blood inside me, a legion of rogue platelets that were no longer confined to my veins and capillaries to deliver oxygen and nutrients and carry away waste. i pressed my fingerstips into my thighs, gripped my knees with my palms, pinched my toes, and the bruise followed everywhere, until my legs were a watercolor of red and purple and charcoal black stains. each leg held gallons of blood, and i sat in bed, staring at them, feeling my bones quake within the pressure, my exo-sheets of skin cells and lipids strain desperately to dam it back. the blood had nowhere to go. i took hold of a small paring knife, and pressed it into the flesh above my right ankle, and followed along my shin bone up to my knee. blood flowed forth from the wound in halting waves, pouring over my sheets and into my mattress, and i felt the whole bed swell as it drank me up. the warmth was so heavy over me that i wanted to sleep, but the blood continued to flow and the wetness kept me awake. the force of the stream made it seem like the bleeding would never stop though i could feel my loss growing palpably. my feet emptied first. they flattened, and soon the flatness spread upwards as my blood drained, over my legs and my pelvis and my abdomen and rib cage and neck and arms and hands and head, until i was practically 2-dimensional except for my heart, which looked like it was shrink wrapped inside my chest. it continued to beat. i watched it beat but didn't know what it was beating for, i had no blood inside me. it beat with force, and i knew as it pulsed on and on, that if someone were to press my shrink wrapped heart like an on-off button, my paper doll body would go up in flames, and my bones would become ash, the rest of me would melt, and i would escape with the smoke.