AUTOPSY OF MY DREAMS

Our love was a dose of insulin: a constant reminder of how too sweet is fatal.

I don't know how there's blood on my hands. I was never there. It's everywhere—dripping, gushing, metallic, tangy. I can almost taste it in the air.

Sujoy is staring at me from the floor, silent. I like it that way. Quietness suits him. He has so much to say, always. I had never noticed the golden specks in his brown eyes. They're beautiful. The hollowness creeping into them is beautiful too, but not as beautiful as the pomegranate battlefield surrounding me.

Human bodies are fascinating. Passionate. Just a little incision and they effuse colour—the colour of Phoenix. Every time I make a cut, **I feel reborn.**

If you can control the want, it's desire. If you let the want control you, it's obsession.

I have always loved old Chinese movies. In one, a knight was executed by Lingchi.

**Death by a thousand cuts.**

As a girl, Lingchi fascinated me. Fiction exaggerates, of course. My first prey, Rohan—crooked nose—didn't survive the first six. He taught me that knives may cut human skin as smoothly as a doll's, but humans cannot survive a thousand cuts. His carotid burst; country-wine blood covered my face and hands. The memory still makes me grin.

Ritwick survived two hundred and fifty.

Sujoy will do better.

I have made a hundred and two meticulous incisions from his face to his ribs. I must be methodical. He cannot die. Dying means game over.

Another dose of Alprazolam. It keeps my performers compliant and slows their blood flow. I am a perfectionist. A Virgo. I am trying to perfect Lingchi.

Time to work on his arms.

I flick the lighter. A hungry flame creeps out. I sterilise his shoulder, pick up the scalpel, and move horizontally along the invisible line of his bicep. As skin parts, I see my girlhood—menarche spilling out, menopause fading in. The pain has cleared the haze from Sujoy's eyes. He looks at me.

He doesn't smile.

How rude.

**What if there wasn't one large red flag in the end? What if death arrived as thousands of tiny ants, creeping silently beneath the door while I kept watching the peephole?**

I remember a beetle from childhood: bright, metallic, majestic, floating across grass while its limbs remained still. My sister showed me the truth. It was dead, being carried by tiny red ants to their anthill.

What looked like royalty carried on a palanquin was really death carrying its dinner.

My phone buzzes.

**Dead body on 6th Avenue.**

I close my eyes.