Blood

Generative Capacity


In the parking lot of an oversized, corporate grocery store in a small-standard college town, a chubby nine-year old Hispanic boy was choking on his own blood.

Streamers of it streaked his dirty cheeks and chin, gobs of it coughed down the front of his oversized and now undecipherable T-shirt (quite possibly black with a familiar wrestling logo adorning the fabric front). He did not know where his mother was. His mother, who was more concerned with her grocery selection (quite possibly not the healthiest given her own overweight appearance and casual disregard) left him in the car for "not very long at all" while she chose her poisons from the long shelf lines in Capitalism's clutches.

A kind, middle-aged woman found the boy stumbling deliriously around the cemented plains of the parking lot, where heat waves rose and bounced off the glares of mirrored metals. She spoke to him in soothing tones and pressed a miniscule wad of paper towel against the scarlet; he struggled to recede from hyperventilation and spit fat piles of the thick fluid onto the dusty pavement. It stained the woman's carefully manicured hand, swirled around the edges of her carefully placed gold ring, and threatened the careful floral blends on her blouse, but through calm questions she ignored it.

Another concerned couple caught the scene in passing and found an old red dishtowel in their backseat, rushing it to the boy, who was now surrounded by strangers and sweat and blood but no worried mother or father. The solo napkin drenched with body dahlia:discarded and replaced, as more curious bystanders peaked and briskly turned away. The male measure of the couple, a selfless and wise Capricorn, lowered the bleeding child to the hot asphalt between the cart return and a vague Suburban as the workers were alerted of the parent-less boy's distress. Warm-hearted Cap's inherent quiescence placated the boy slowly, while the girlfriend quietly and gently distracted him.

The milling marketing masses tuned out the loudspeaker like always, and the unfit mother blended into the aisles like the stale frigidity in the meat section (plump with preservatives and mindlessness, the rankness of exploit). While her son had stumbled out of the deserted car in a panic to seek help, unable to manually cease the flow of his blood, she tapped her Target flip-flops and tried to decide between instant rice and potatoes-in-a-pouch (might I add, neglecting to pick up repetitive cell calls).

Uneven pitches of tone and breaths of frantic pants as his chest heaved in beats of two and three; between all these he admitted this bleed was the first with unknown cause and the worst one yet. His grubby white sneakers were now gilded with the cardinal spattering of a day he wasn't soon to forget...hopefully. His mother, on the other hand-
she is lost already.

His sable hair shone slick in the perspired drops of sun, a close cropped sort of flat top, and the blood kept ebbing nimble and sticky beneath the pressure of rag. His own wet, coagulated gurgles brought cries of near terror from his throat; the couple murmured comforts and convinced him to lean, lean and breathe deliberately,
it's okay, it's slowing,
Mom will be here soon.
She'll hear her own voice through the overhead and come running.
He drank the cold water Capricorn brought him and attempted communication through muffled fear.

When Mom came, however, she simply walked to the corner between cart return and car where he was slumped and wedged. With demand to know what had taken place in her innocent absence, annoyance a plenty, her only worry centered on abandoned groceries and the possibility of her car doors left unopened in her son's haste to find a pair of attentive eyes. As she went to check on her vehicle, he spat more wads of red on himself and averted his eyes in shame.

His rescuers patted his sweat stained back and hesitantly took leave with hidden disgust,
sinking into the sanctuary of themselves and trying to fight off the anger and creeps of disquietude.




and on a night that silent sirens swirled with patriotic colors that penetrated fall's new stillness,
and outside the open doors the air smelled of moist, sunken earth,
she almost stepped on dried wax the color of dried blood in the bathroom,
a simple tealight spill after he lined her bath with candles and incense,
turning off harsh fluorescents and opening the window to let the cricket music in.
But now as she studied the clammy, hardened splotches of burgundy and copper,
so oddly reminiscent of mummified plasma
she was no longer thinking of their wedding music,
and instead was remembering the involuntary twitches and visions and impulses
as the energy cross-haired her body and electrified her pore by pore.
She remembered her dreams of harvest,
of strange Indian women lying upon her mother's bed unclothed from the waist-down
in search of healing-
she kneaded the dark skin and dug for the abnormalities she feared in herself,
feeling the entity of her own fertility impale her
with questions and a truth she could not uncover nor deny.
She felt the call, the sting of semiotics,
remembered her own blood being pulled from her core like clockwork
or moon hypnotism,
the red tide,
or return of fruitfulness after las inundaciones y la sequía.

And then, the choking...the painful, heavy inhalations of heady sex in disguise.


He left his roseate juice in disregard and
She imagined the ghost of a teakettle to be a train

but this time, when she fled the bathroom,
she didn't forget to close the door to keep the heat in,
the oxygen out.