The Truth Serum Dreams

"They call it anaesthesia, but it feels more like confession—the kind you make when your body finally stops lying for you."

"Count backwards from ten," someone said, but I was already falling through numbers that weren't numbers. Ten was the age I learned to smile at breakfast. Nine was the number of times I'd tried to tell. Eight was infinity turned sideways. Seven was—

Seven was everything.

The mask pressed against my face like a palm, but this time I was supposed to breathe through it. The gas tasted sweet-sick, like overripe fruit, like the lollies he'd sometimes leave on my pillow after. "Breathe normally," they said, but I'd forgotten what normal breathing was. Every breath since I was seven had been measured, careful, trying not to make too much noise, trying not to exist too loudly.

"She's fighting it," someone said, and yes, I was fighting, I was always fighting, even when I looked still I was fighting. My body knew how to resist unconsciousness—it was dangerous to be unconscious, that's when things happened, when guards dropped, when—

The needle went into my arm. "Sodium pentothal," someone announced, like naming it made it medical instead of another violation. Truth serum, they called it. As if I hadn't just told the truth with glass and blood. As if my whole pregnancy hadn't been my body screaming the truth while my mouth smiled lies.

The world began to soften at its edges. The operating theatre lights became halos became angels became eyes watching from my childhood ceiling. I could feel myself dissolving, but also multiplying—I was on the table and above it, I was twenty-two and seven, I was pregnant and empty, I was cut open and sewn shut.

"Can you hear me, Heather?" A man's voice, professional, distant. But it merged with other voices, older voices, voices that had asked similar questions in the dark. Can you hear me? Are you awake? Don't tell anyone.

"Yes," I said, or thought I said, but the word came out as a colour, deep purple like bruises that never showed.

My body wasn't mine anymore, but then it never had been. They were doing things to it—I could feel pressure but not pain, movement but not meaning. Someone said "scalpel" and I thought about sharp things, about glass, about the knife my mother used to section grapefruit so precisely, never knowing what else had been sectioned in her house while she slept.

"The uterus is badly lacerated," someone said, and the word 'lacerated' bloomed in my mind like a poem. Lacerated. Lace-rated. Rated for lace. I was thinking about the lace curtains in my childhood room, how the moonlight threw their patterns across my bed like a net, how I'd count the holes to distract myself from the weight, from the breathing, from the—

"She's saying something." A woman's voice, concerned.

Was I? I was seven and telling my mother about a bad dream, but she was saying I read too many fairy tales. I was fifteen and telling the school counsellor I didn't feel safe, but she was asking about my grades instead. I was twenty-two and my mouth was moving but sodium pentothal was making all the words true, too true, dangerously true.

"The baby needs to come out now." Urgent voices, hands moving with purpose. I could feel tugging, pulling, like they were trying to extract something that had roots, tentacles, that had wrapped itself around my spine and grown into my bones.

The thing inside me was fighting too. It didn't want to leave its dark, warm cave any more than I'd wanted it there. We were both prisoners of biology, both victims of conception without consent. The thought made me laugh, or maybe cry—under anaesthesia, all emotions felt the same, just electricity firing in wrong patterns.

"Almost there," someone said, and I was almost there too, almost back to that room with pink wallpaper, almost seven years old forever, almost free from the weight that had defined me. Time was a circle and I could feel it completing, the ouroboros swallowing its tail, the end meeting the beginning in a moment that lasted fifteen years and fifteen seconds simultaneously.

Then—pressure released. A wet sound. A hollow feeling like something essential had been scooped out. The thing was gone from inside me but I wasn't empty—I was full of absence, stuffed with void, pregnant with nothing.

"It's a boy," someone announced, but they were wrong. It wasn't a boy. It was a consequence. It was history repeating. It was the physical manifestation of everything I'd never been able to abort—not just this pregnancy, but the memory, the trauma, the seven-year-old girl who still lived in my cells.

I waited for crying—his or mine—but heard only medical sounds. Suction. Clamps. The wet work of trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again. They were sewing me up but I knew they couldn't really close what had been opened. Some wounds went deeper than skin, older than this pregnancy, further back than any scalpel could reach.

"Is she still conscious?" Someone sounded worried. "Her eyes are moving."

My eyes were moving because I was watching everything from everywhere at once. I was on the ceiling watching them work on the woman who used to be me. I was inside the red cavity they'd opened, swimming in my own blood. I was seven years old in a pink room learning that consciousness was optional, that you could leave your body when things got too heavy, too hard, too much.

"The bleeding's not stopping." Panic edged into professional voices. "We need more units."

Bleeding. I'd been bleeding since I was seven, just internally where nobody could see. This was just the first time it had been made visible, the first time my inside trauma matched my outside appearance. There was something honest about bleeding out, something that felt like justice—all the blood that should have been shed then, finally being shed now.

"Her blood pressure's dropping."

Dropping. Falling. I'd been falling since childhood, just very slowly, and now I was finally reaching the bottom. Or maybe there was no bottom. Maybe falling was just another way of flying. Maybe—

"Heather, stay with us!" Someone was shouting but I was already gone, dispersed into particles, dissolved into the space between heartbeats. The sodium pentothal had made everything true and the truth was that I wasn't really here. I hadn't been here since I was seven. I'd been performing presence, miming consciousness, acting alive while being fundamentally absent.

The lights above me were dimming or maybe my eyes were closing or maybe there was no difference. I could hear them working—urgent sounds, metal on metal, flesh being sutured—but it was happening to someone else, some other body on some other table in some other life.

"We're losing her."

Yes, I thought, or dreamed, or knew. You're losing her. But she was lost a long time ago. You're just now noticing.

The last thing I heard before the darkness completed itself was a cry—thin, angry, alive. The baby. Luke. The name came to me like drowning, like surfacing, like both at once. Luke, bringer of light into my darkness. And even then, sinking, I felt the dread of it—that I would carry the weight toward him without meaning to, that I would look at my son and feel seven years old, that the thing torn out of me long before he was conceived would stand between us and I would never learn how to cross it. He was thirty seconds old and already I was afraid of what I would not be able to give him. Whether that was prophecy or only the truth serum, I couldn't tell.

Then even that sound faded, and I was falling through layers of consciousness like sediment in dark water, settling into somewhere deeper than sleep, older than memory, safer than any waking had ever been.

In this place, no one could touch me. In this place, I had no body to violate. In this place, I was seven and seventy and ageless. In this place, I was finally, finally free.

But even as I sank into that freedom, I knew it was temporary. They would pull me back. They would stitch me closed. They would call it saving me.

They would never understand that some people don't want to be saved. Some people want to be allowed to dissolve. Some people want to stop pretending cohesion when they're made of fragments.

The anaesthesia pulled me deeper, and I let it. This was the only consensual unconsciousness I'd ever experienced. This was the only time someone had asked permission before putting me under.

Even if they hadn't waited for an answer. Even if the answer would have been yes. Even if yes and no had stopped meaning different things when I was seven years old in a pink room with lace curtains and a door that didn't lock.

The sodium pentothal made everything true, and the truth was—

The truth was—

The truth—