Blood Loss

His fist struck the wooden door so hard that, crouching, I pictured holes sprouting as dark, ragged, as the featureless faces in dreams. “Let me in,” he said. My palms were braced against the sweating white wall. My palms were oiled where I’d touched myself for seconds, pulled them away sticky, the streaks of my menstrual flooding tangible evidence of my oddity, black and red splashes Pollocking brightened walls.

“I’m dialing 911,” my husband said. And left.

I lay on my back. The linoleum felt soothing: cold tiles rectangle-stamped my skin. I didn’t ache. I didn’t care. I floated and pushed out of my skulltop, siphoning my final thoughts into the steam on the walls, the mist on the black-and-white octagonals shower curtain; I savored my departure.

I lay there naked with my nipples tilted Heavenward, a stiffening ladder to the afterlife, and enjoyed the blood seeping ever-thickening between my thighs. I could feel it grease my skin, its recurring shocks of warmth; I could feel it slide toward the floor where it pooled and sent up a rank dark smell that reminded me of decaying farmhouses and food left to rot in softened patches on plates—food abandoned by exodents who had, themselves, died—and oil paint, its stark, wilderness stink, which I’d come only recently to sniff and savor and crave, its harshness vaulting me toward heightening aesthetic rapture.

I swear I didn’t mind. I was used to it, the blood. I was accustomed to swimming in pain, wafting out of pain into unconsciousness and darkening waves of blunt suffering—numbed.

This, I thought, was what I loved about life. That I’d been left unprepared. That my body controlled my mind.

That I’d been left whole out of the equation and that someone else now—not me—would be compelled to complete the proof.