Work Text:
The other day my nose sprung a leak and spurted thick and red all down my front and sides and all elsewhere. It was like I was turning myself inside out, nose-first, and I wondered if this was how pharaohs felt, way, way back when after they died their lackeys pulled their brains out with special hooks and discarded them; the heart is the seat of reason, they said, and preserved it in jars, like so many pickled snacks, taken with on road-trips in Ra’s chariot. I have cracked open many a soul, kept in such jars, and ate on my way, on the road, for I never stop moving – if I do, I suffocate, just like the shark, only it is the blood and not the water that stops my throat and fills my guts.
I paint my house with my nose’s warm blood, but it must be meant for greater things, for still it comes, thick and flowing and foamy where the air gets into it. It tastes like walnuts and pinecones and the great dark woods far outside the city where nobody lives. It tastes like seasalt and iron filings, all at once, like being hit in the mouth with a mace and feeling everything crack in one swell gust of pain.
I can sneak nowhere no more for my trail gives me away. The papers hardly stop talking about me. Man loses five times bodyweight from nosebleed, they say. Medical nightmare, they say. I barricade my doors to keep the doctors out but keep the windows open – the blood must flow, you see, for I have not yet learned to breathe it. My mouth is constantly open and red-stained. My teeth are stronger and sharper, though, for the constant motion of fluid wears at them, a micrometer a day, and files them to points for me. People come and stay on the other side of the street, peering at the pools and pools and pools I leave everywhere. The wood of the house weeps with it; I am sure it must collapse soon. I am not worried; I will be buoyed up on a raft and carried on a river of my own making.
There are so many small things that I have drowned, quite unknowing, and their equally small ghosts roost in me at night, when the weight of fluid becomes too much and they get soggy. Even the souls die, occasionally, if they are unable to shake free of the pools and cling to me for dear death. They float on the top and shrivel and I pick them out and eat them. I can smell nothing so they have no taste, but it is like eating hard rubber. Some things teeth cannot cut, but those I swallow whole. I must have sustenance to produce so much blood.
They must think I am a god. I try to explain but they do not speak my language. Some of them lap at me. The beetles leave small, steady trails, burrowing into the day-old crust, but are soon washed over, while the others, the smarter ones, stay at the edges. The ones that eat of me change a little. Sometimes it is color, other times they die, other times still they grow wings and sit on my shoulders and whisper to me in their childish tongue. They have not known thought long enough to have judgment, but I do not begrudge them, only whisk them from me when I go to sleep so they do not keep me up all night. The blood does that on its own.
My blood is jealous of me. It seeks to have me all for itself.
I have lost my lover and my friends but not my humanity. People may recoil from me on the street but it is with pity in their eyes, not anything worse. Mothers cover their children’s eyes and cross to the other side; the ghetto people who think they are hard stay and look at me as I pass. They do not try to mug me or shake my hand. Some of them catcall from a distance but I know that if I were closer they would not. My eyes are too bloodshot not to take seriously. Everything I see is in various shades of red, pink, even a shocking orange if the light is just right. I have forgotten the color green; I live in a permanent just-autumn, too early for leaves to have fallen but late enough that they have all changed. So too I live in permanent sunrise, and my blood spatters the sky if I look up too sharply.
I went to the church and asked the priest what I was supposed to do with so much blood, but I was foolish; I flooded the confession box and drowned him before he could answer. I asked my blood what he tasted like and it said communion wafers and honey and wine, and pinewood and the dust in the back of your throat at choir. I nodded, for that was good – he was an honest priest – and blood is circulatory. The honesty will come back to me.
They have turned me out of my house; they want to turn me out of the city but now it works to my advantage. Everywhere I go, I have been before. I can tell from the trails. They cannot find me; I can hide again. I have fun.
I sneak into houses and sit in the cupboard. I tell the blood to not flow out, not yet, to not seek the crack, and it does not. It piles on top of itself and all over me. When the family wakes they open it and we all jump out, we flood out, pour ourselves over the unlucky one. I am so wet and drenched it disgusts me. The blood feels the disgust and sprouts fangs, grows viscous and agile and manifold and quick to anger.
When it is over the blood is not all mine. You can tell, for mine moves.
We laugh and shake hands and marvel at each other. I wonder what godlet breathed breath into my blood, what great thing concerned with the making of little things deigned to take the time. Perhaps it was just a holy conflux of cosmic rays, beamed at the perfect instant, making contact with the perfect particle within me.
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years, as someone (I forget the name presently) heard from Hell, is not true. When writing that he had not reckoned on my arrival, two thousand years short of the deadline.
No, it is my blood that will consume the world. It starts with a city, with a priest, with a cupboard, with streets and alleys and all the people I have accidentally splashed on my weary way on. It starts with me; it starts with the inside of my nose and then draws me out and out and out until I am so attenuated that I am incapable of thought or motion or pain, only of bleeding. And when the world is a great ball of my blood, still flowing over a hardened, crusty center, someday someone will find me, the husk of me, like a great clot adrift on the sea, and slowly piece together how the doom that came to Earth began.