Sweet Dreams

Last night, I dreamt that I was being tortured. The details elude me, as dreams do, but the general idea was a constant stream of beatings, deprivation, lots of trash talking. I recall that there was one particular torturer who took a fancy to abusing me. Actually, there was a lot of talking. He would taunt me as he damaged me. Just for fun, I suppose.

Then one day, there came news that we would be freed soon, that the torturers were evacuating. When the night before the evacuation came, my special friend showed up and started talking again. A litany of complaints about his superiors, and his sadness at losing the war or something. Again, the details slip from my grasp. Eventually I realised that this fellow was simply being a sentimental. One more torture session for the road. He started telling me that he was going to break some parts of me, enough that I would be left for dead when our rescuers arrived. Specifically, my left arm and shin, certainly a number of ribs, probably a hip. Slow and deliberate fractures. Try to imagine your arm being bent, slowly, to breaking point, then feeling your bones start to crack, to be pulled apart, centimetre by centimetre, a break taking minutes to occur, not a split-second. Then repeat that with as many bones as are convenient to the person doing the bending.

So as he was working on my arm for starters, he was informed that he would have to leave immediately. So I was left with the quick versions of the bone-breaking. Collapsed in a pile in a dark corner of my cell, the rescuers apparently did decide that I should be left for dead. My friends in the other cells, people I had called friends from before incarceration, were so glad to be out that they didn't give my broken form a glance as they shuffled out. No one bothered to check if I was alive. It seemed that the point was irrelevant.

I have cheerful dreams, huh?