Macaron de Sang

by Dominique Wilson

Junkies pick up infections the way “normal” people pick up catchy pop songs: annoyingly inevitable, but obviously nothing to panic over. The little red halo around my usual injection site looked like just another “give it two days and it’ll die down” situation. So, I ignored it and moved on to a new vein. I only started taking the reddish-green mound in the crook of my arm seriously once the decapitation dreams began.

This was during the middle stretch of my addiction, when I still had fresh highways under the skin and my parents still thought I was “just a pot head.” I drifted through my days chasing the next score; watching time slip like sand through my numbed fingers.

But the small mound started to itch. Then it started to rise. The flesh ballooned up in a slow, obscene swell. Still, I shrugged it off. Four months passed before I realized how much it had grown. The cycle of using, coming down, and picking myself back up swallowed any sense of urgency. Aside from the itching, it didn’t hurt, so I didn’t stop long enough to develop any real concern.

Eventually it became something like a red and green macaron made of swollen, irritated skin sitting in the bend of my arm. It grew so big I had to walk with my arm locked straight like I was doing some demented parade march. Luckily, long sleeves were already part of my life’s uniform. Track marks have a way of making fashion choices for you. No one noticed. Besides the usual nodding off mid-sentence or losing my train of thought halfway through a word, I was pretty easy to ignore. That’s around when the dreams started, right when the macaron matured into something that looked like a rotten pastry or a prolapsed, infected anus. The first dreams were pretty tame: walking in on my mother ripping her fingernails out; chasing my screaming father through the backyard with a knife in one hand and my failed math homework in the other; Lilah from next door asking why my head kept swelling until it burst, spraying her with reddish-green sludge. That last one… I woke up sticky and ashamed. A nightmare wet dream. It should’ve been a warning sign, but I didn’t link the dreams to my growing macaron.

Then things got worse. Meaner. Heavier. Sleepwalking bled into the dreams, or the dreams bled into me… I couldn’t tell. I’d wake up sobbing or shrieking, my pillow soaked with tears that smelled faintly spoiled, like a glass of milk left forgotten somewhere in your bedroom. Tears shouldn’t have a smell. At least not like that.

One night I dreamed I was walking to class with my mouth packed full of something dry and brittle, like stale tortilla chips. I couldn’t close my lips or swallow. People screamed when I walked in. I ran to a mirror, and saw my mouth stuffed with bones and old teeth that weren’t mine. I tried to spit them out, but they grated together like gravel, trapped behind my lips.

I woke to my dad shaking me. He looked furious and exhausted. Terrified. When I tried to hug him, he jumped back like I was burning hot. He pointed an accusatory finger to the foot of the bed. The dog lay there, barely alive, whimpering. Bite marks everywhere. My mouth tasted like meat and hair. I didn’t have time to scream or vomit because the mound on my arm twitched. One violent shudder, and a warmth flooded me so suddenly, so completely, it punched the air from my lungs. It felt like the cleanest, strongest shot of heroin ever cooked. Pure heaven surging from that red-green macaron straight into the core of my soul. 

My parents dealt with the dog quietly and dragged me to a shrink the next morning. They were concerned, of course they were, but completely out of their depth. Every session felt like we were miming some family therapy scene from a bad after-school special. All stiff politeness and fake insight. The shrink was useless. He kept digging for some childhood trauma like he was sure there had to be a neat little origin story buried somewhere under my skin. The whole thing was so far off the mark that I actually laughed in his office.

He kept probing for “early emotional wounds,” while the only wound that mattered was pulsing right there in the crook of my arm, warm and alive, sending shocks of euphoria through me every time he said the word “trauma.” I nodded as if I was finally processing some deep inner-child emotions, but all I could think about was the mound. My rotten macaron, thrumming along with my heartbeat throughout the entire session. That’s when I started to realize something real was happening. Something bigger than trauma or addiction or whatever diagnostic box he wanted to stuff me into. But I wasn’t ready to admit it out loud. I wish I had.

After the dog, the dreams got pretty personal. People who should’ve been safe turned on me: favorite teachers, old friends, my little sister, even the guys from the garage who used to slip me free coffee when I came into work looking extra sick. Their faces twisted into masks of righteous fury as they swung axes, garden shears, chef knives. Decapitation after decapitation, mine every time. Sometimes it was clean, like a guillotine blade in some French Revolution film. Other times, slow sawing through vertebrae while I begged for them to stop, choking on my blood as it filled my lower esophagus. And right before the killing blow, every time, I’d hear a whisper. Words I couldn’t quite catch. I woke up one morning and realized the whispers weren’t just in my head. They were coming from my arm. 

The macaron burned hot, pulsing like a second heart. The whispering came in breaths and gasps. Vague syllables slowly formed into words. It told me I didn’t have to wait for the mob. That I could take control of the whole situation.

The first time it suggested that I cut off my own head, I should’ve recoiled. Instead, something flared inside me. Almost erotic, in that doomed junkie way where pleasure and destruction intertwine until you can’t tell them apart. I’d lie in bed imagining a blade sliding across the tendons of my neck, releasing pressure like cracking your knuckles. I imagined the gush of blood, the bright white crack of the void opening to fold me in. A warm bloom spread up my arm as the macaron praised me for these thoughts. Encouraged me. Promised reward. Promised help.

Eventually, I stopped fighting the fantasies. They came on like nodding off, slow and syrupy thick, and inevitable. I’d catch myself absent-mindedly rubbing the blade of my pocketknife against my throat, just enough to feel the cold metal. Just enough to imagine the slip and then I’d snap awake. 

The whispering shifted from suggestion to instruction, the tone soft and coaxing… almost loverlike. Every day the macaron pulsed harder, sending a euphoric wash through me sweeter than any dope, promising an even purer high once I finally did what it wanted. It promised me release. Silence. Freedom from the dream-mobs. Freedom from needing dope, or my parents, or from waking up sick ever again. It told me I could own my ending.

And in those long nights, drenched in sweat and terror and longing, I started to believe it.

So when it finally happened, it didn’t feel like giving up. It felt like a climax years in the making. The release at the edge of a lifetime. I sat on the bathroom floor, back against the sink cabinet, the mirror angled so I could watch myself. No…so the macaron could watch its instructions unfold. It throbbed, sharing my heartbeat. Whispering louder. Guiding my grip as I pressed the serrated edge of my father’s wood saw into the soft place beneath my jaw. The first drag of the blade ripped a groan from me. Half agony, half bliss. A warmth flooded my chest and skull, drowning everything sharp and real.

My vision shook. My hands kept sawing. No human could have kept going that long, so I knew by this point that I wasn’t the one in control. Every pull of the blade dragged me further from despair and deeper into an ecstatic freefall. When the blood finally surged in an ungovernable rush, hot and wild, the macaron shivered with me, whispering its encouragement. My breath hitched in a sob that sounded too much like an orgasm as the world tilted, beautifully, mercifully, into its final, horrifying parting.

Dominique Wilson is a writer of horror, creative nonfiction, literary fiction, and poetry. Their work has been featured in Hobart, JMWW, and By The WAYE Poetry Issue #3. Their writing explores substance abuse, inherited trauma, queer identity, and parenthood, often blending realism with dread to examine what we carry and what refuses to stay buried.