BECOMING SUPRA

Chapter 11.2

RAË

I lay in bed beat, fighting exhaustion and sleep, till my body lurched in hypnagogic jerks before slipping into an unshakable slumber. My eyes in rapid movement, I dropped into a dream. A dream with a certain piquancy rarely forgotten upon waking.

Broadcasts of rape and beheadings, videos of acid-attacks and stoning by death. Daily reports covered the aftermath of violence on a pallet of women, from the Native Reserves of North America to the tip of Cape Horn, from Saudi Arabia, Africa and India. Their stories invaded me and retreated inside like a virus. The residual effects of psychological warfare coming out in nightmares. And once the nightmares began there was no escaping. I was, after all a product of my times: a woman of the 21st Century.

Facing a mirror, my focus transfixed, I was masking my face with warrior-paint, dots of mustard on stripes of black and red. Staring at my reflection, I rehearsed in my mind the undertakings of the mission.

In my dream, I whispered to a tree, a wish; to journey deep into pockets on earth where crimes against women were most violent and extreme. The tree granted my wish by releasing a flower, the flower dropped to the ground and I somersaulted out with the stealth of a ninja.

Every night the location changed and so did the circumstances.

I was there to hunt men who had raped and mutilated women. I perceived my way by reading their vibrations, I peered into their auric-fields and saw their evil doings. Sometimes, the bleating screams of the victims led me to their perpetrators. My powers ignited, I could track any monster I decided to avenge.

A jilted man hurled acid over his lover's face. Her face bubbled over like blistered-plastic. Her eyes singed shut, her hair, a net of blood and skin. Her breasts hung upon her like lepros'ied limbs. She could no longer see or swallow again.

I found the perpetrator, I approached him fangs bared, my tongue folded to the back of my gullet I squirted acid to sear his eyes, throat and chest.

He was wailing like a banshee when I left him for dead.

In one dream, I cracked open the jaw of a man by hooking it to a chain attached to a high-crane. I yanked so hard, his neck ripped and his head severed off. His decapitated body fell to the ground, writhing. A beheading for a beheading.

I once gutted a man with my bare hands. He had raped a woman then cut her up like chattel, from belly to rump to ribcage. I tore him apart with my fingernails, his entrails unspooled and dropped out of his gut, steam escaping from the life still left in him.

One night, I was transported to a desert dressed like a classic storybook superheroine. I arrived in a rage-red outfit, a creature with lucent ruby wings, face dotted with warrior paint.

Gliding, I alighted in the desert in a plume of dust. Upon descent, in a flutter and a click my wings dissolved into the pivots of my arms.

I stood before the man, solid and absolute.

He was buried waist-deep, like the woman he had stoned to death for committing adultery. A decree, still legal in 12 countries.

I unfolded my bicep-cuff and took out a sharp stone. Feeling the weight of it, I gazed directly at him. As I angled myself in position, he began to wriggle and scream.

I took my time aiming, all the while him screaming, then flung the sharpie at a precise curve which struck his eye then burst through the bridge of his nose.

"AAAARRRRGGHHH!"

Walking past his blinkering screams, a dust-storm was collecting, a pincer'd centipede crawled onto his nose towards his bloody eye-sockets. The slits in his eyes becoming ports of entry for all the desert creepy crawlies.

I disappeared the way I appeared, cloistered in petals of flowers. Upon waking, I recalled the horrors, my eyes ravaged by fury, my body spittled with guts and gore. Sometimes, I saw myself hysterically laughing, sometimes I was wailing and shrieking.

Surrounded by the horror of rape and death, I could no longer tell who the monster was amongst us.