In this "hallucination," I was a little Bosnian girl. Soldiers were pouring into my village, forcing everybody out of their homes. I watched my father get thrown up against a wall and shot...
My younger sisters and I watched the soldiers rape our mother. We could do nothing but cry.


This is the part I can't get the psychiatrists to understand: When I say I saw my mother raped, it really was MY MOTHER. Her skin was white, her eyes were blue, but she was my mother. The same with the rest of my family. My father really was my father. My sisters were my sisters. Our love bond was still exactly the same, even if our outward appearances had changed.


The soldiers finally threw my mother to the ground and shot her. The scene melted. The Bosnian village morphed into a Vietnamese village. Those stories you told me about My Lai, about those other undocumented massacres... I wasn't just remembering them, General... I was now living them.


I was still a little girl. My sisters were still huddled around me in terror. Again, the soldiers lined my father and the other men against a wall, and shot them. Again, the soldiers beat my mother, and raped her. My sisters and I cried. Our father collapsed heavily, with blood spurting out of his head.
Our village burned.


I looked into my sisters' faces, twisted with terror and grief, saw the fire reflected in their tears, saw their eyes looking to me, the oldest, to do something.... but all I could do was cry with them. We had nothing to offer each other except fear. And there, crying, terrified, we were killed.


It didn't end there. The scene kept melting. History rolled over us. Nanking. The Ukraine. Atlanta. Sand Creek. Rwanda. Kazhmir... On and on... The location changed... our skin color changed... the soldiers' uniforms changed... but always it was my family being killed before my eyes.


Always the same screams. Always the same tears.
And the blood never stopped flowing. Centuries passed, and the blood flowed together, formed a great river, a river crusted over with rotting flesh, in which, every so often, you'd see something resembling a face or a foot.
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The Spiders: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.0
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We're dying.
About
    3000 years    
longer.
... was the single most horrifying experience of my life?
We're dying....
....
No sir. I was on nightvision. They went down like green ghosts in a video game.
They called you
"The Celicianator"
after that night.
I don't remember his exact words. Something about re-activation of a dissociated traumatic memory triggering a cascade of morbid hallucinations.
Official diagnosis: Bitch be trippin'.
If only I could have put a webcam inside my head that night.
If only the world could see what I saw. Feel what I felt.
Give or take a few centuries....
They're killing us.
Somehow I doubt those were Dr. Brodsky's exact words.
And yet... you say, subjectively, it felt... longer?
Could you do it?

    Yes sir.    

General... How do I make them understand...
this... "hallucination"...
What was in that gas I breathed?
Lieutenant... I have watched the video. Your... episode.... seems to have lasted about 4 minutes realtime.
Tell me, Lieutenant....
How were you able to emerge from this nightmare?
General.... I swear, I'm not making any of this up.
My psychiatrists can't seem to believe the human brain is capable of something so extraordinary.
They keep telling me:
"It was just a hallucination."
I can think of one way, but it wouldn't be ethical.
Eventually, the tears of all the children formed a mighty river... of pure, clear water....
...which washed away all the blood, all the corpses.
Over the roar of water, I heard a woman's voice, singing.
I didn't understand the words, but it was the oldest of all songs, a song as old as mothers:
"Everything's going to be all right."
Killing us...