Vivid Dreams

Her dreams are vivid.

She’s cutting vegetables in a sterile, silver kitchen.

She lines them up, then cuts, cuts again, sliding the pieces into a pile, repeating the process. The vegetables are replaced with miniscule aliens, tiny monsters. She’s cutting off their arms with casual efficiency, ignoring their screams in favor of humming along to some tune on the radio.

“Are you going to enlist?” A woman with black hair is speaking to her, mixing something in a bowl. The first time she glances at her, it’s egg splashed on her apron. The next, it’s blood.

“I can’t fight,” she replies, frowning as one of her cuts goes awry, leaving the screaming beast with a half-stump. She chops down again, correcting the mistake, only to slide the results into the trash can beside her. “Besides, there are enough soldiers. Nobody wants a chef on some battlefield on Mars.”

She glances out the window at the sound of a child laughing.

Now her companion is burnt away, half a charred skeleton, flesh sloughing off as she keeps mixing, keeps sloshing that blood and ash into a slurry that clings to the bowl.

“I don’t know,” the skeleton sighs, tapping the whisk on the edge of the bowl. “I just feel so useless here.”

“Everyone has to eat, and there’s good money for chefs on Titan,” She shrugs. “Even if there is a war.”

She chops the head off the next alien, sucking the gore off her fingers like frosting.