By Lily Mengual
The siren wails in the distance. One short, sharp bleat. Ever closer.
We both know it’s on its way. Who it’s coming for.
For him, because I was stupid enough to love him enough to want to show him all of me. My innards ripped up until I am inside out and he can see it all, hear it all, know it all.
My boy holds up his hands to the sky, his face blanketed in blinking red and blue. They are here. His hands are bloodied, cerise running between his fingers in veiny rivulets. Even though we are standing on the cusp of the end, and the police are no longer coming for him but are here — here, literally getting out of the car in droves, sirens blaring straight into our ears — he remains with his eyes locked firmly on mine.
They remain the same steely and brown that they have been all night, from the first moment I began to bleed until the bloodletting was over, until we both knew he was doomed unless he made a break for it.
And yet.
The lamplight bathes him in golden light, until his dark hair glows as if it is aureate. His lips twin his palms: thick, heaving blood smatters his cheeks and mouth. He’s metres away from me, but we might as well be conjoined.
The moment freezes, right here: my open, now edentulous mouth, trying to call out his name; his eyes shadowed, standing directly in his spotlight. Everything around him darkens, even the face of the police officer mid-step, seconds away from grabbing his forearm, far too close to my boy for my liking.
Before this, the blood had been building up in my chest far too much. I could feel it clogging my lungs in the mornings, to the point where I was coughing it up in the bathroom and choking on it whenever I spoke. His hand on my hand brought it up my throat, only at bay when I swallowed… and even then I would wake up and brush my blood-stained teeth until my toothbrush was stained crimson and dripping. Expenses were beginning to add up: each week I needed a new one, the blood soon rendering it unusable.
I held it back as long as I could: the vermilion of truth. Tonight, it spilt.
It did not just trickle down my tongue and neck calmly. No, it bled ferociously: down me, engulfing the ground, until I was encircled in it, covered in it, my own tears mixing with the deep scarlet. My gums tore open from the force of it until only a single tooth dangled from the top of my mouth, then it too joined the cherry flood cascading from me onto the pavement.
Any other man would have stood up and left, kept me hunched in my own detriment. Any other man would have decided this was a case not worth investigating: someone not to love.
Not my boy.
His hands joined my body in hue — and he painted his cheeks with my blood until he looked flushed. Reveled in it, swam in it until I was done coughing it all up, until he knew everything, everything. My past, my present, my hopes, my dreams; the way my blood smells, tastes; the reason why I fear the fall.
How I am waiting for my boy to leave me.
He whispered to me, promised me more than I ever could have believed. Then he stood, wiping blood so crusty it had turned a deep black from the corners of his eyelids, and helped me up from the side of the street. The shadows twisted between us until he broached them, winding an arm around my sodden form and pulling me across the street.
Long before I knew the twinge meant the first release of blood into the pit of my stomach, I felt it when I watched him lean across the table in the room with the carpeted floor. He stretched out a hand to steady the cue and let the white ball sail across the table, knocking neatly into another. Through the glass, his eyes found mine.
I had felt it before, but it had liquidated: this time, it stayed. It built, and then the dam burst.
The frozen moment ends: the policemen are upon him, encircling their arms around him like roots. He doesn’t fight them off directly, but bounds forwards, looking at me still, lips cherry-red with my blood, my blood. My own mouth finishes forming his name, and I too launch forwards, spanning the space between us until I am almost nose-to-nose with him. If only. An officer grabs me, too, holds me back; he is too strong, but the release of my blood has strengthened me. My boy and I are tethered: we cannot be kept apart. I kick, I punch, I grapple — and then his dusted knuckles are in mine and he leaves a bloody handprint on my neck, pulling me closer.
A kiss that tastes of iron and rust.
We are ripped apart. My police officer catapults me backwards; his does the same. I can still see the wine of my blood on his tongue as he cries out in pain. The blood is mine, all mine.
Still, his love is the reason I bled tonight.
For that, he will be taken away forever. Manslaughter of a different kind: a kind of death of the heart, as now he knows all of my carmine secrets.
The last of my boy is his fingers in my hair and then he is thrust into the cop car and driven away from me. Even the glare of the blue and the red leaves quickly, as if it was all a dream: as if my boy were never there at all.
I stand in my pool of blood and watch the spot where he stood. The lamplight flickers. I swallow, just once, and no pool of red awaits me.
The bones in my chest feel heavy, but I am no longer weighed down by truth. Slowly, I lower myself back into my murder scene, and wait for him to come back and save me.
He will never come back.
Hello. My name is Lily Mengual, and I’m a first-year student at the University of Toronto. I can be found on campus, or @lilymengual18 on Instagram — and lilyreadsandposts on Goodreads. Apart from writing essays for class, I tend to write fiction via short-form and long-form prose. This is not the first time I’ve been published online, but most of my previous published work has been non-fiction, so I’m excited to be publishing something out of that sphere! This work is very much made-up, but there is always some truth in fiction. I actually came up with part of the idea for this literally walking around my residence, which just proves that creativity can be sparked anywhere. I hope to continue to publish increasingly more visceral short-form prose, so watch this space!
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