Jennifer A Martin’s work often focuses on the female experience, in its many and wonderful forms. She writes both prose and poetry and has been published in Refresh Magazine, The Everyday Magazine, and The Cambridge-Hall Poetry Journal. 

Draugmas, her current project, has a large focus on dreams as a vehicle to communicate a decline in memory, judgement, and mental health, with the backdrop of a ‘coming of age’ story about Mel; a twenty-something figuring out present-day London. This novella was inspired by the visceral dream phenomenon people experienced during the pandemic, but with a thriller twist.

email: jen.martin180@gmail.com

instagram: @jnnfir.m

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Draugmas

dream (n.)

“Sequence of sensations or images passing through the mind of a sleeping person,” mid-13c., probably related to Old Norse draumr, Danish drøm, Swedish dröm, Old Saxon drom “merriment, noise,” Old Frisian dram “dream,” Dutch droom, Old High German troum, German Traum “dream.” These all are perhaps from a Proto-Germanic *draugmas “deception, illusion, phantasm” 

Chapter Two

A woman wakes up in white linen sheets. She is somewhere in Tuscany; her hair sticks to her forehead in the midsummer heat. Stretching a long, slow, morning stretch, she points her fingers to the top of the bed, touching its wooden frame. Her toes mimic her fingers, peeping from beneath the duvet into empty space. Slowly again, she lifts her torso into a sitting position and swings her legs from the mattress. The balls of her feet retract in shock from the cold blue slate floor.

With her head and shoulders slanted downwards, the woman lifts only her eyes to look at the wall in front of her. Its white is dazzling this morning, reacting with the sun pouring in from the old, shuttered window behind her. 

It seems to take a lot of energy for her to stand, and she wobbles slightly in her now vertical position. She waddles towards the door situated at the far right of the wall she had been staring at, a hand on her stomach. 

The hallway is narrow. She pads down its creaky unvarnished floorboards and passes two bedroom doors on her right. One, slightly ajar, spills fresh light into the corridor and offers a glimpse of its contents. She can only see a slither of a double bed, the edge of a tall mirror and some pieces of expensive looking makeup scattered across the floor. To her left, the woman grasps the bannister; it’s the same unvarnished oak as the floor, and just as creaky. Reaching the end of the landing, she eyes a bookshelf filling the empty space next to the bathroom. The bookshelf is filled with colourful old books and decorated with succulents and family photos, though the faces of these people are indistinguishable to her. She avoids distraction and begins her descent down the untrustworthy stairs guiding her towards the clattering sound of cooking. 

Rather than following these sounds to the kitchen, the woman takes a right out of a large blue front door onto a sun-soaked terrace. She takes in the morning, breathes in the warm air, and feels the slightly cooler breeze across her legs. Her eyes scan the slopes below, scattered with lemon and olive trees. Her hand still cradles her stomach.

She is, for some reason, fully clothed, though she can’t place when she has done this. Her red strappy dress sways around her calves in the breath-like air. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, she inhales, she closes her eyes, she exhales. 

Another touch opens her eyes. A man has joined her, he is cradling her stomach from behind. It’s nice.

She looks left and now sees a long table dressed in plates, glasses, cutlery, napkins, large bowls of colourful food, and all her closest friends. They are smiling morbid smiles and clapping silent hands. She is deaf to their words. Like tinnitus, a high-pitched ringing creeps into her ears, it fades into the foreground and it’s all she can hear. 

The second pair of hands that held her abdomen are gone, and looking down, she feels the hot iron liquid before she sees it. 

Her red dress is dripping. The blood is pooling at her feet and her friends are clapping for her, smiling, raising their glasses, toasting. Like their laughs and jokes, she cannot hear her own guttural cries, but she can feel the familiar pain those sorts of sobs bring. A dryness right at the back of the throat; right at the uvula. She sinks to her knees and feels the warm, damp ground around her. 

She is open-mouthed crying, ugly crying, yelping – the sort of cry she thinks her mother would hear even from England. But shush. She stops and looks into the faces of her friends. She looks and she joins them in their maddening grins, she laughs, she silently laughs, she stands, and she spins in the glory of all her red. Her head tilted towards the sky as though she is in ‘Singing in the Rain’. The rain comes and it’s hot, it’s vermillion and it’s thick like gravy. Blood covers them all, it fills their plates and overflows from the bowls of food. 

She beams, they all do.

*

I woke up the next morning covered in sweat and my period had started. I often wonder why I have such visceral dreams around that time of the month, I suppose it’s hormonal. 

The sheets had been stained, and I kicked myself because I knew that I was due. It’s always interested me. The way that blood oxidises. It goes from that brilliant shade of rosso corsa, that tear-like consistency, to the gooey carmine substance of a semi-healed graze. It firms up and cracks, doesn’t it? Goes burgundy and then maroon, deeper, and darker, until on the skin, it looks almost black. On my ivory sheets this morning it looks almost like Marmite. One large clot must have escaped last night, and it looks just like that. A large dollop of Marmite has been dropped onto my ivory bedsheets and I study the colours that have spread into the fibres of the material like ink into water. The centre of the blood spot is dark, it’s black, but as it has spread, its colour has changed.  It is rose, it is carmine, it is mahogany, and it is brown. 

I rip the sheets from my mattress and throw them into the corner of my bedroom while I get dressed. The room is a medium size and it’s cold. I’ve tried to warm it up. I added a high-pile rug in the middle of the hard-wood floor, and I’ve put up some of my paintings on the wall. There is mould around the windows, and some in the far-right corner on the wall that faces the road.  I’ve told my landlord about the mould problem, but as with most London landlords, he doesn’t seem to care. I don’t wear pyjamas and looking down at my body I feel an urge to get dressed quickly. I don’t like being naked, but I love the feeling of being nude between the sheets. 

I throw on a vest and some of my boyfriend’s boxers. I keep all his things in a very small box at the bottom of my hanging rail. I wonder what this means about the way that I feel for him. Perhaps I could fit all those feelings into that small box. It’s a shoe box, a large one that my Doc Martens came in. I tie up my hair, grab the sheets and make for the door. 

Downstairs the house isn’t awake yet, and I wonder what the time is. My flat mates should be bustling around down here, making coffee, brushing their teeth, bitching about the co-workers they will have to confront today. Making my way through our open plan living/dining and into the kitchen, I trip up on something. The light isn’t on, and I can’t see anything obstructing my path in the shady morning haze, so I forge ahead and shove the washing into the washing machine. I’m generous with the detergent and softener and pop a good glug of bleach in for good measure – that’s the trick for period stains. The coffee machine is flashing: 4:45am. Yes, I’m awake far too early for a twenty something. 

I’m not one of those girls. You know the ones. The ones who have YouTube channels that are so popular they make a salary from them. The ones with ‘Spend a day with me’ videos where they wake up at 4:00am just to get a run in before they come home, take a shower while their porridge cooks, and whip up a green juice before settling in for a day of working in their high-profile tech jobs. No, I’m not one of those girls. I’m quite lazy. I like to wake up at 8:00am in the morning, take a quick shower and do the washing up from the night before, throw on minimal makeup and some joggers then get set-up at my desk to start work for 9:00am. I’ll work until maybe 5:30pm, taking intermittent social media breaks, and then migrate down the 11 steps in our house to the living/dining, park myself on our huge sofa and watch some crap TV. At the moment, the crap TV of choice is ‘America’s Next Top Model’.

It’s pitch black apart from the faint yellow hum of streetlights through our linen curtains. I trip up again and stub my toe. The floor is bare, I can’t see anything that I could trip on. There isn’t a pair of Amber’s shoes in my way, or one of Ella’s over-filled tote bags littering the path to the kitchen. There are just the same panels of hardwood flooring that are in my bedroom one floor up. I’m approaching the stairs when a bright light pings through the bay window and I whip my head around, startled. I’m like a moth, drawn closer to the light, past our sofa bed (no-one likes to sit there) and the larger sofa left by previous tenants (everyone likes to sit here, and it causes constant squabbles.) A car is parking on the road and its headlights aren’t dimmed. 

Then there’s a rustle. A loud scuttling sort of rustling and a squeak. It sounds like it’s coming from the kitchen, where I just was. I’m quite cold suddenly. My breasts are firming, and my nipples are erect in the misty morning air. It’s as though the winter frost has found a way inside, and I half think that my next step will be on to crunchy grass, like shards of glass. It is not though, and I trip again. No time to stop though, there must be a mouse in the kitchen. The squeaking is loud and quick and filled with panic. Maybe it’s trapped somewhere, in a cupboard, in a glass or something.

I think for a moment I’m losing it. The light in the kitchen is still on, though I could have sworn that I turned it off, or did I never turn it on in the first place? The washing machine is overflowing. Bubbles are lathering at the edges of its cyclops eye and my sheets are smiling out. The sounds of rushing water are much louder than the small squeaks coming from the floor, but they are new to me, I had not heard any water before. The water is nearly at the top of the step down into our kitchen. How long have I been wandering around down here in the dark? The coffee machine flashes electric letters: 3:45am. Did I misread it earlier? 

And now those small screams; where are they coming from? I lower one bare foot into the sudsy water; it’s luke-warm and it fizzles slightly, it ever so slightly burns. Strange. The water is cloudy and dirty and it’s hard to see where my blind feet land amongst the bubbles. Where is that small squeak? It sounds more and more strained, more and more human. Like a scream or a shriek in pain. The water is just above my ankles, nearly mid-calf. The cupboards are covered in a plastic coating and it’s peeling off. I wonder if that’s water damage. They are usually cream and now they are grey. 

I turn off the washing machine. It’s a bit quieter this way. The screaming persists. It sounds as though it is in the water, this poor mouse. I haphazardly throw the cupboards open in a panic. The bowls are wet and my saucepans are floating slightly in their inch high bathwater. No small creature. I turn to the sink. Under the sink we keep the detergent and cleaning products. The small screams sound loudest outside this cupboard, and pulling the doors open I see the bleach bottle is on its side leaking into the water. 

Still no mouse. The screams still. My feet are burning; they are red and angry in the bleachy water. I kneel nonetheless and pull the bottom panel of the cupboard away from the main frame. It is filled with water, and the screaming has stopped. I’m now wet all over, and I remember that I’ve begun my period. That must be why the water is a pinkish hue. It’s spreading throughout the kitchen, colouring all the sudsy water pink. Like a bath bomb. I’m lost in this thought, and how revolting it is when I see it. The small furry body bobs up from beneath the water. Its fur is dissolving, its long narrow teeth and beady eyes corroded and eaten away. The paws are stuck in position, petrified and skinless. The mouse’s fragile body meanders across the room to where the kitchen meets the bathroom and is stopped by a wall. 

It must have been living under the cupboard, and I’ve not only drowned it, but chemically burned this mouse to death. The pink isn’t coming from me I realise, but from it. I should have known as well. My blood would have made the water carmine.

*

I woke up again at 8:30. This time I was certain I was awake. I could hear Amber and Ella downstairs, having some sort of muffled debate. Such strange dreams I have been having. My room was dark, but dark in the way that blinds make a room dark, not in the way that the night does. Dark in the synthetic sense, dark enough to impair my already impaired vision but not quite so dark that I can’t make out the silhouettes of my furniture. On my desk, standing in the corner to the left of my bed, my laptop is open, and it’s on. I can’t remember signing into work, but I must have used it before resigning to sleep. I can’t think why its screen would still be lit; I have it set to ‘sleep’ if it hasn’t been used for 30 minutes. I think it must be a technical fault and roll over. My hanging rail is standing where it always has, parallel to my desk, and the window next to it must be partially open as the blind is lightly trembling away from its panels. It looks cold but sunny outside. I like days like that. My eyes drift to the ceiling, and I lie on my back like a mummy, my hands holding each other on my stomach. The ceiling is white, but my walls are cream. There are some small grease stains on the ceiling in circular shapes that must be from Blu Tack. What had been fixed to these walls before I had considered them my own. How many different pairs of eyes have looked up at this ceiling? Does my bed stand in the same position that theirs might have, or am I looking at these grease spots upside-down or sideways to the way they might have looked at them? The stains could have held a poster of an 80’s heart-throb. Perhaps I am lying in the love-lorn spot of a yearning teen, who would gaze up at their poster of Simon Le Bon or Debbie Harry and dream of a life of fame, sex, and fortune. 

Swinging myself both from bed, and this thought, I look at the blank wall in front of me. I’m still exhausted and I wonder how much I managed to sleep last night. I read an article that says that you sleep in 90-minute cycles, and that you are only ‘truly asleep’ for the middle 60 of that 90. I wonder if I woke up in my 55th minute and that might be why I am still tired. It’s the kind of tired that you can feel in your forehead, the kind of tired that pushes its way into the bridge of your nose. I lean, a whole body, head lolling lean to my left and grab the small black tube of metaboliser weight-loss tablets on my bedside table. They are called T-Black, and I order them from Amazon; it says that their main ingredient is caffeine, and they make me shit like nothing else. I pop one angry black and red tablet into my dry mouth and knock it back with the stale water I’ve had out all night. I started taking these tablets years ago now, and they have just become part of my routine. I take one in the morning with my contraceptive pill, then I’ll have a coffee to exacerbate the effects. I’ve not got the best track record when it comes to eating. It’s because I am lazy. I was overweight for most of my teen years, and I thought that my looks were a reason why people wouldn’t like me. I had this insane notion that fun, interesting, popular people were only the attractive, skinny people. The ones with effortlessly clear skin and thick strong hair. That those people were only friends with people of the same calibre. If you were a ten, the lowest number you would associate with would be an 8. I wanted to be thin, but I didn’t want to sweat; sweating felt like I was admitting I was fat. I’m 5 11” and I weigh about 62kg. I have weighed that much since I was 15; now I’m 24. 

I stare blankly at the wall in front of me. I haven’t properly decorated it yet. I smoke sometimes in my room, and I can see slight stains where the tobacco smoke has stuck to the walls, and I wonder if this will be my Blu Tack mark for the next person who presumes to ‘own’ this house for renters. I sigh a long sigh and stretch. I’ll make my bed and head downstairs to see my flat mates. Opening the blinds, I can see that I was right. It is a cold but sunny day; the bare trees are moving slightly in the wind and the people walking down the street are bundled up in oversized puffy jackets and scarfs that might as well be blankets. The window I thought would be open is not, but on inspection, I can now see that the mould around the edge of my window has corroded the wood, it has a spongy consistency. I poke it a bit and it swallows my finger; a hole has formed, and I can feel the bricks of the outside wall. 

The light pours into the room, illuminating all my things. My life in a singular room. These objects that explain my past and my present. I think of Sir John Soane’s house, how it was kept in the same way since his death in 1837. It has become a time capsule. I think how this will not happen in the future because of all the renting. We will be left with shells of houses; the only remnant of life having been lived in them will be Blu Tack marks and smoke stains.

Looking at the bed that nightly holds my body, it seems quite sad. A bereft sheetless bed.

I think of last night, I think of the dark substance I had imagined ooze from my body to my sheets, I think of my hasty removal of them, of the curious tripping in the dark downstairs and of the whir of the washing machine eating away the memory of those stains. It had felt a very visceral dream, one that I’m sure I could have sleep-walked and talked during. The facts weren’t adding up. Facts, indeed, are only so if proved by others, I think. I wipe my privates through Elias’ boxers. They are not damp. I remove the loose shorts and inspect. I’m not bleeding, and I agree with the thought that says that I haven’t in 250 days. I climb over the top of my warm, lonely, bed and snatch up my phone. Open the cycle tracker app. Yes, nothing recorded for 251 days. Facts are only so if proved by others, and I don’t mind that the ‘other’ in this case is an operating system. I am reliant on operating systems, namely iOS. I need my phone to tell me what’s on my ‘to-do’ list, to remind me to buy flowers for mum’s birthday or milk from the shop. To let me know what meetings I have that week, and when to prepare for them. I hold my little life in my hand when I’m holding this rotten piece of glass. 

“Do you like this?” A message from Elias flashes at the top of my screen. 

“Not really… but if you like it, get it x”

Elias has a habit of asking for my opinion of clothes and accessories that he knows I will not like, waiting for my response, and then buying whatever it is anyway. Of course, I always give him my honest opinion, though today I have the feeling that he knew I wouldn’t be a huge fan of the latest Marvel X Casio watch collaboration, not to mention the Spiderman-themed timepiece he has just sent me a picture of.

“L”

“I’m gonna get it anyway, I likes it, so I buys it”

“What are you up to today? Coffee?”

He likes to text me in cannon like this; each message arrives a second after the previous one. I smile to myself; it’s nice to have a relationship without fuss, without waffle. 

“I’ve got to do some work this afternoon, free around 12?” I reply and the two little ticks next to my message immediately turn blue.

“Roman Road?” 

“I’ll meet you there.”

I stand up and think. “Right, I need to get dressed, have a shower, put some slap on.” I move towards my Mac. Its screen is bright, flashing the time 10.00am. I could have sworn it was 8:30am only a few moments ago. How long had I been inspecting the mould on my windowpane? I enter my password ‘noturbabe24’ to unlock my computer. Google chrome is open, and it’s on Amazon.com home page. This is not unusual for me. Despite my vaguely anti-capitalist tendencies, I can’t help but fall for the comfort of next-day delivery. I suppose you could classify me as one of those false do-gooders. I like to have oat milk in my coffee, but I eat meat; I shout on social media about how good charity shopping and sustainable fashion brands are for the environment, but look at me, sat here, riddling out what this week’s order from Jeff Bezos was. In the time it has taken you to read that, I’m going to bet he made about, what, $120,000? I wonder if I have bought anything. I click ‘orders’. It’s nothing to worry about particularly, I ordered more coffee filters, another tube of T-Black, and some notebooks – what is strange is that I have also ordered 8 bottles of industrial bleach.