What Have I Done

Meghan Lamb

Now she’s sleeping on her side, pressing into my body as far as she can without waking. Unconsciously, she reaches for my arms and wraps my hands around her throat. I wonder if she tries to keep me up all night. Maybe, in her quiet way, her dreams are just as paranoid as mine.

I can’t sleep because I see my fingers poking through her skin. I’m easing through, though sharply, which is how most pleasures train themselves as habits. In the dream I’d dream her skin is just an excess sheen for future growth, the starting up of something that could callous over.  I’ll scrape at it for hours knowing that is all it is. I will not understand until I wake to feel the cold and damp beneath me, not until too late to learn What have I done.

I know that this could happen in a dream. I’ve taught myself to recognize the signs. I know now there is no way to unteach
myself, to let my body sleep without the fear of what's to come.

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Meghan Lamb is a first year MFA student at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Her work has previously been featured in Thieves Jargon and Prick of the Spindle and is forthcoming in Dogzplot.