You’ve had the Nightmare app installed for months, but all you’ve ever done is create an account. It’s not that the service is pricey, even though it is.
It’s because you haven’t needed to use it.
Until now.
Deep breaths. Deep breaths. You have to do this tonight, before you can face your family tomorrow. Before you can spend a day trapped with them. You tap the black-and-white icon. The screen fills with a map, a blue dot pulsing over your apartment. Arcane symbols drift around in a five-block radius of your location. Your thumb hovers over the single button centered at the bottom of the screen.
REQUEST NIGHTMARE.
You want to chicken out. Turn your phone off, get some sleep, face tomorrow as it is, even if you shake the entire time. You’ve never had to deal with your family on such a large scale, but you’ve gotten through one-on-one interactions dozens of times. Surely tomorrow won’t be so different.
But you know it will be. Even the thought of tomorrow makes you feel nauseated.
You have to do this. You have to show yourself that you can deal with worse.
You tap the button.
USER AGREEMENT: YOU AGREE TO HOLD NIGHTMARE, INC. HARMLESS FOR ANY LASTING PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS THAT MAY ARISE FROM CALLING A NIGHTMARE…
Your eyes glaze over as you scroll through the legalese and tap AGREE. You don’t care. It doesn’t matter.
You need to do this.
CONFIRM REQUEST.
Tap.
CANCEL? 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
You let out a breath as the cancel button goes gray, disabled. A circle with an icon of an eye spins on the screen as the app finds you a match. The screen refreshes and centers a single arcane symbol. A line connects the Nightmare and your home.
YOUR NIGHTMARE WILL ARRIVE IN 3 MINUTES.
You swipe up and view the Nightmare’s profile. Gingko. It’s a surprisingly pretty name for a Nightmare. Five stars, twenty-three ratings. They’re new.
You hope they can deliver.
Gingko finds you moments later popping an anti-anxiety pill. Hydroxyzine. Mild, but effective enough to kick in quickly.
Hello.
Their voice makes your bones buzz. They are simultaneously void and not void: a black so deep it transcends color, an emptiness that creates a presence outlined by everything it displaces. They have two pairs of horizontal eyes and one vertical eye centered above those two rows of eyes. Purple-deep irises rimmed with gold turn to focus on you. They are many-limbed and multi-winged, the column of their body fading into a star-dusted nebula of unbeing.
“Hi,” you reply, your throat hoarse. “I’m Em.”
I know.
“This is my first time calling a Nightmare.”
I know.
You tug at the too-tight collar of your shirt. You’ve thought about what a Nightmare would be like before: in the moments when panic consumes you, in the moments when you dissociate and let your mind wander to protect you, you’ve thought about what you’d have a Nightmare do to you, exactly what kind of catharsis you seek, exactly how the Nightmare would tear you asunder.
“Please,” you say. “I’m ready.”
The Nightmare shifts, as if tilting their head and nodding.
Very well.
Reality distorts subtly at first. But that’s always been how it is, isn’t it? An overwhelming feeling of wrongness displaces the calm in you like a stone spilling water. It’s suffocating. You can’t breathe. You can’t breathe.
Gingko watches.
You hold your hands up before you. Is this Gingko’s power? Or is your mind pushing you to unreality again? These are your hands, but they aren’t your hands. You splay your fingers open and shudder—how bizarre it is that electricity crosses synapses and transverses your body to create this instantaneous movement, transverses this husk, this cage. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. The lines on your palms—have they always been twisted and braided as they crease your skin? Forks and branches, wrinkles creating canyons in the membrane of your being.
The realization strikes you then: this is not you. This is not you. You don’t know what you should be, but this is not it.
You want to tear your skin off, claw your way out of this prison. When you catch your reflection in the darkened glass of your windowpane—your crazed, wild eyes, your heaving chest, your clammy, sweaty skin—you don’t recognize it.
This is not you.
Shall I begin?
You turn your gaze back to Gingko. They’re so close now, pressing into the bubble of your space, unblinking.
You nod.
A tendril of void-black reaches out to wrap around your wrist. You expected to feel nothingness, but instead it’s a myriad of contradictory feelings: cold so cold it feels as if it’s burning you, pain so fierce it short-circuits your brain and becomes something else entirely, purely sensation.
You throw yourself into Gingko.
You are a stampede of horses, manes wild and brilliant as they stream out behind you, your many-legged herd rampaging the plains. Twin suns shine down on you and splinter over dozens of racing hooves. Everything is sweat and spit and stink flung into the air; the grass gives way to gravel, gives way to rock, until one by one each horse-you dives over the precipice that appears and falls, falls, falls. You feel the gravity in the pit of twenty stomachs, each leap hooked behind your navel and tugged by a line. The ground is coming up at you and there is nothing you can do to save yourself. The wind tears whinnies from your throats. The first of you hits the ground. The air fills with cracks like gunshots, like fireworks. Over and over and over again, but you never die, only scream from the bedrock as your fifty legs jut out at wrong angles, as your eyes roll wildly from heads stiff on broken necks.
Gingko closes their eyes, then opens them again.
You are tied to a stake and being shot through with arrows. Someone releases a bowstring, the twang its own assault, the whoosh as the arrow cuts through the air mirroring your own intake of breath. The arrowhead buries itself into your side. You arch your back to meet the pain, your ribs straining against muscle and skin. The fletching quivers as you weep. Again: the twang, the whoosh. Another arrow pierces you. You can only take and take and take. An arrow pierces your neck. An arrow pierces your eye. Stop, you want to say, but the word will not come as blood pours from your mouth. Stop, you want to say, but they will never stop.
You have so much blood to give.
You are an egg now, your shell thick with years and years of calcium. If your shell were cut sagittally, you would see the rings forming your fortress: thin some years, thick during others. A palm touches either side of your shell and begins to press. You are tiny and soft within the egg, embryonic and malleable. You push back against your walls with your translucent hands, your fetal bones so small, so delicate, thinner than a pin. The pressure builds. You will crack. You will crack, and you and your amniotic fluid, you and your tenderness, will spill out and die, thick and coagulated on the ground. The hands push. The hands squeeze. Let me be, you want to demand.
But you haven’t learned yet how to form words.
The hands want to break you. You can do nothing but yield. Your shell breaks. You are clay with palm prints indenting your form, every finger-skin ridge masking the blueprint of your self.
“Please,” you choke through the fugue, the haze blinding you, “tear me apart.”
I shall.
You are young again, virgin enough that a boy, a man, could cup the curve of your hip in his hand and call you his, and you would be his, the whole of you. You open your mouth.
“I’m not…”
Not what? There are eyes everywhere. Eyes in the sky. Eyes embedded in every wall. Eyes on his hands. Eyes in his mouth.
Eyes all over, and all of them are looking at you, but none of them are seeing you.
So what are you then?
Gingko cradles your jaw in their void tendrils. You don’t remember when you started crying, but tears are streaking your face now, salt abrading your soul. You don’t remember when you fell to your knees, but here you are now, the hardwood digging into your bones. You look up and meet Gingko’s eyes. Each of them blinks at a different time. Their pupils widen as if to devour you.
I will see you.
They do. They see you. They see the fear, the panic, the anxiety whirling in your gut, scrabbling at the walls of your stomach, desperate to unmake you.
You know what you are.
They begin to pull you apart then, their tendrils leaving a wake of devastation on your skin: they rip away your fingernails and expose the tender beds of flesh to the air. They yank your teeth from your skull. They pry your eyes open impossibly wide.
I will see you:
They claw your mouth open, tear your uvula from your throat as if pulling the root of your skull away, the center of your head in their grasp. They open their mouth, rows and rows and rows of dark teeth, and swallow your uvula like bitters.
You are not the monster.
They gouge rivers in your flesh. Carve you away until you’re bone and carnage. Until all you can do is scream and sob, too wracked with pain and horror to do anything else. You’re clinging to Gingko and the void is burning your fingertips away, and you welcome it, oh God, you welcome it.
You welcome it.
Reality fades back in slowly. Bit by bit, piece by piece. Your throat is raw and you have no more tears to offer as libation. You’re shuddering, heaving. You think you might throw up. Gingko watches you from across the room.
You are here.
“Yes,” you croak.
You have survived this.
“Yes.”
You will survive more.
“Yes.”
Your phone buzzes. Your mother is calling. You close your eyes, brace yourself, and tap the icon to answer.
“Emily?”
“Hi, Mama. I told you, it’s Em.”
“Don’t forget to bring a side dish tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“You don’t sound excited. Your auntie Jennifer will be very excited to see her niece again after so long, you know.”
You swallow. Not a niece, you want to say.
“Okay.”
“Cover up your tattoos and don’t be difficult. Love you, Emily.”
“Good night.”
You hang up and stare at the screen.
“It’s Em,” you say after a moment.
I know, Gingko replies.
“She’s going to introduce me to everyone as Emily. They’re all going to use the wrong pronouns.”
You survived this. You will survive tomorrow.
A notification pops up for the Nightmare app. Gingko has concluded your session. You pay the bill and leave a hefty tip and a five-star review.
Thank you.
“No,” you say, wrapping your arms around yourself. “Thank you.”
Gingko disappears as silently as they arrived.
You know what you are.
You survived this.
You will survive tomorrow.
S. Qiouyi Lu (they/them) writes, translates, and edits between two coasts of the Pacific. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, and Strange Horizons, and their translations have appeared in Clarkesworld. They edit the flash fiction and poetry magazine Arsenika.
You can find out more about S. at their website, https://s.qiouyi.lu
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2019.