A review by scvrdinko
Let's Play Dead by Senaa Ahmad

love love love to see feminist retellings live up to their premise because it happens so rarely but when it does I want to claw my eyes out!! it's so vivid and sensual. when the woman is every woman in the world <333 in the end, all girls are like the rose bride <333 it's quite impetuous but it dwells on such perfect moments!! also a small part of the narrative but effective is how one form of violence induces another, surely not the main focus but the small bits of it are greeat. it's kind of perfect to me... and Body Horror. oh, my beloved wife body horror

She will be taken to a laboratory, which, in the style of laboratories of the time and perhaps every laboratory in every time, feels a bit like the underbelly of a dungeon. Here she will be injected with a poison that liquefies her insides in a matter of hours. One of her captors will spill the poison on himself and this will derail the proceedings. They will perform an autopsy to confirm that she is dead. With a delicacy that is surgical, or at least very thorough, they will crack every bone in her body. They will take out her internal organs, still gooey and falling apart, and feed them to any nearby dogs, who may need a fair amount of persuading. She will wake several times, but never for long. There will be quite a lot of screaming, most likely, but you don’t want to hear about that.

They will set her corpse on fire, and put the scorched bone fragments and teeth and shreds of flesh into a box. They will ship the box somewhere very far away, perhaps the remote island from earlier on. They will wrap the box in weights and cast it into the ocean. They will train a shark to develop a palate for mysterious boxes wrapped in weights so it can devour her remains. They will send a nuke from outer space to the precise coordinates of the shark. The bomb will vaporize the island, too, and everyone who lives there, a few thousand tidy deaths, but it’s probably worth it.

and yeah... you want her to live...