Macaron

I only started taking the reddish-green mound in the crook of my left arm as a true, “you have to do something about this”, concern once the decapitation dreams began.

It hadn’t always been a mound. That’s probably why I didn’t pay it much mind at first. Junkies like me pick up infections the way other people pick up pop songs in their head. Annoying, inevitable, and obviously nothing to panic over. The little red halo around my usual injection site looked like just another “wait two days and it’ll die down” problem. So, I ignored it. Moved to a new vein. This all started in the middle stretch of my addiction, when I still had fresh highways under the skin and my parents still thought I was just a ‘pothead’. I drifted through my days chasing the next score, watching time slip like sand through my numbed fingers.

But the spot kept itching. Then… it started rising. The flesh ballooned up in a slow, obscene swell. Still, insanely, I shrugged it off. By then four months had passed since I noticed the wound, and the hazy rhythm of using, coming down, and picking up work here and there had swallowed any sense of urgency surrounding it. Aside from the itch, it didn’t hurt enough to stop me long enough to truly pay it any real attention.

Eventually it had swelled into something that looked like a red-green macaron made of swollen, irritated skin, nestled right in the bend of my arm. It got so big I had to walk with my arm completely straight, stiff at my side like I was doing some demented parade march. Luckily, long sleeves were already part of my uniform. Track marks have a way of making fashion choices for you. So, no one noticed. Not that anyone really noticed anything about me back then, besides the usual nodding off mid-sentence, losing my train of thought in the middle of a word. I was always drifting off in that blissed-out junky fog that so many “normal” people mistook as daydreaming. At worst, most people I met in passing probably assumed I was just slightly autistic.

Looking back, it was around this time the macaron matured into it’s full form that the dreams started. It sat there on my arm, looking like some rotten pastry or even a prolapsed anus. These first dreams were almost tame, at least by the standards of what came later: walking in on my mother ripping her fingernails off, me chasing my screaming father through the woods while I cried over math homework with a knife in my hand, Lilah from next door asking me why my head kept swelling, until it burst, spraying her with reddish-green sludge. That last one… yeah, I woke up from it sticky and ashamed. A nightmare wet dream. That should’ve been one of many first real warning signs.

Then things got worse. Meaner. Heavier. Sleepwalking bled into the dreams, or the dreams bled into me… I couldn’t tell which. I’d wake up sobbing or shrieking; pillow soaked with tears that smelled faintly like something spoiling in the sun. Forgotten glass of milk behind the headboard came to mind. Tears shouldn’t have a… smell.  Not like that.

One night I dreamed I was walking to class with my mouth packed full of something dry and brittle, like stale tortilla chips. I couldn’t close my lips or swallow. People screamed when I walked in. I ran to a dream mirror, and there it was: my mouth packed to the gullet with an assortment of bones and old-looking teeth that weren’t mine. I tried to spit them out but they only ground against each other like gravel, trapped behind my lips.

I woke up to my dad shaking me, lashing out, angry, and exhausted. When I tried to hug him, he shot back out of reach so I couldn’t touch him. He just pointed to the foot of my bed.

The dog lay there. Limp but still alive, whimpering. Bite marks everywhere. My mouth tasted like meat and hair.  I didn’t even have time to process it… no screaming, no vomiting, because then the mound on my arm twitched. One violent shudder and a warmth flooded me so suddenly, so completely, it punched the air from my lungs.

It felt like the cleanest, strongest shot of heroin ever cooked. Pure heaven surging from that red-green macaron straight into the core of my soul.

My parents dealt with the dog situation quietly and hauled me to a shrink the next morning. They were worried, of course they were, but completely out of their depth. Every talk we attempted felt like we were miming some family therapy scene from a bad after-school special. Stiff, polite, everyone pretending they weren’t terrified… The shrink didn’t help. He kept digging for some childhood trauma like he was sure there had to be a neat little origin story buried somewhere under my skin. The whole thing was so far off the mark I actually laughed in his office.

He kept pushing questions about “early emotional wounds” while the only wound that mattered was pulsing right there in the crook of my arm, warm and alive and giving me those perfect little aftershocks of euphoria every time he spoke the work “trauma”. I sat there nodding, pretending to reflect on my inner child, while all I could think about was the mound, my rotten macron, thrumming along with my heartbeat. I started to fully realize then that something real was happening. Something bigger than trauma or addiction or whatever psychological boxes he wanted to cram me into. But I wasn’t ready to admit any of it out loud. I wish that I had.

After the dog, the dreams didn’t just get worse… they got personal. It was always people I knew, people who should’ve offered comfort or at least some vague sense of safety, all turning on me like they’d been waiting their whole lives to take my head. Teachers, old dealer friends, my little sister, the guys from the garage who used to slip me free coffee when I looked extra sick. All their faces twisted into masks of righteous fury as they swung axes, baseball bats, garden shears. Decapitation after decapitation, mine every time. Sometimes it was clean, like a guillotine blade in some French Revolution film. Other nights they sawed through vertebrae while I begged out for them to stop, choking on my blood as it filled my esophagus. And right before the killing blow, every time, I’d hear a tiny voice murmuring non-distinct words beneath the sounds of the dream. A whisper reverberating through my bones. I woke up one morning and realized the whispering wasn’t  in my head or only in my dreams… it was coming from within my arm.

The macaron had grown warm, pulsing like a second heart. The whispering came in breaths, in gasps, in syllables half-formed but slowly taking shape. It told me I didn’t have to wait for the mob. That I could take control of the whole situation. The first time it suggested cutting off my own head, the idea should’ve repulsed me. Instead, something inside me lit up. Almost erotic, in that doomed junkie way where pleasure and destruction get confused until they’re the same animal. I’d sit in bed and imagine some blade sliding across the tendons of my neck, releasing built up pressure like getting your back popped. I’d imagine the gush of blood and then the bright white pop as the fabric separating me from the void tore apart. I’d feel this heavy, electric warmth bloom and rush up my arm. The macaron praised me for these thoughts. Encouraged me. It said it would help and reward. It said it would guide my hands.

After a while I stopped fighting the fantasies. They came on like nodding off, slow and syrupy thick. I’d catch myself absent mindedly rubbing the blade of my pocketknife against my throat, just enough to feel the cold metal, just enough to imagine the slip and then I’d come to, realizing what I was doing. The whispering shifted from suggestion to instruction, the tone soft and coaxing… loverlike. Every time I resisted, the macaron pulsed harder, sending that euphoric wash through me, sweeter than dope, promising a longer and truer high once the requested job was done. It promised release. It promised silence. It promised that the dream people wouldn’t have to chase me anymore, that I could beat them to the punch. It promised that I’d no longer need the dope, I’d no longer need to depend on my parents or wake up sick ever again. That I could own the ending. And in the haze of those long nights, drenched in sweat and terror and longing, I believed it.

So when it finally happened, it didn’t feel like giving up. It felt like a climax years in the making. The release to the edge of a lifetime. I sat on the bathroom floor, back against the sink cabinet, the mirror angled just right so I could watch myself. No…so the macron could watch me perform its work. The macaron throbbed, sharing my heartbeat. Whispering louder. Guiding my grip as I pressed the serrated edge of my father’s wood saw into the soft place beneath my jaw. The first drag of the blade ripped a groan from me: half agony, half pure bliss. A warmth flooded my chest and skull, thick and shining, drowning everything sharp and real. My vision trembled. My hands kept sawing. I no longer was in control of my body because no human could have kept going for as long as I did. Every pull of the blade tore me further from despair and deeper into some ecstatic freefall. When the blood finally surged in an ungovernable rush, hot and wild, the macaron shivered with me, whispering its encouragement. My breath hitching in a sob that sounded too much like an orgasm, as the world tilted, beautifully, mercifully, into that final horrifying parting. My sight tumbled backward with the head that was no longer mine.