D R A I N
T H E B L O O D
A 'Vampire Red' short story by
Alex Severin.
Lily couldn't take any more. The
knot in her gut would not leave and her stomach felt as if it was digesting
itself. She felt sick, she felt guilty. She felt used. She was every psychotic's
excuse for their own psychoses.
She felt tainted, poisonous and poisoned.
He insides seemed rancid to her, toxic.
The guilt and the fear and the finger-pointing
were taking their toll on Lily. She needed a release from the stress and
the anguish and the guilt that was weighing her down, eating her up. She
needed to be cleansed, be rid of the spilled blood she felt now flowed
through her own veins.
Lily sat on the cold white-tiled
floor in the bathroom and rummaged in her vanity case. She found a disposable
razor and a nail file to pry open the plastic casing and liberate the instrument
of her redemption.
She gazed at the razor blade, looked
at it as if it were something mystical, something mysterious, something
that held answers to unanswerable questions, and all she needed to do was
feed it to gain that knowledge.
She drew the blade slowly across
the pad on her index finger and closed her eyes, savouring the pain and
the release it gave her. She smiled as her blood welled up like a glistening
wet garnet. She watched, entranced, as the blood began to trickle down
the length of her finger and into the palm of her hand. She sat there,
eyes closed again, bloodied palm outstretched, her face beaming like an
ecstatic stigmatic.
Lily raised her hand to her mouth
and slowly licked at the red stream. The flavor of piquant metal on her
tongue sedated her, began to thaw out the chill in her bones and made her
feel a few moments of calm and peace.
But she needed more. Wanted more.
A trickle was not enough when what she wanted was a scarlet gush to flush
out the dirt. She had to cut deeper, harder. She needed to drain the blood.
She didn't want to die. She didn't
want to not exist. She just wanted to bleed.
Lily drew the blade down the length
of her forearm, deep enough for the wound to piss blood, but not deep enough
to bleed her dry.
She felt the pristine chemical rush
of endorphins and adrenaline kick in as the blood dripped on to the clinical
white tiles and the pain made her shut her eyes tight and take in her breath
sharply.
She looked at the pool of her own
blood, warm, wet and fluid, in stark contrast to the cold, hard ceramic.
She dipped her fingers in the crimson pool and began to write on the floor.
She wrote, in bold letters.
Vampire Red.
Make the streets run vampire
red, the Ministry of Lily had told their cult members via their website.
"Vampire red," she said. Her words
echoed off the cold, hard walls and came back to her like the whisper of
a ghost.
Lily cleaned the bathroom until no
trace of blood was visible. She was sure that if it were to be sprayed
with Luminol, it would look like an abattoir , but to the naked eye it
was once again hospital white.
"Vampire Red," she whispered again
a she closed the door behind her.
© Alex
Severin 2004
