text: Genevieve had not stopped bleeding for two months. It was just a small cut--she had been trying to shave the tiny peach-colored hairs on her upper lip that she felt looked manly and the razor had slipped and slashed off a chunk of her pale skin. It started out slow, and then the cut widened, and the blood accelerated, and then it was endless, night and day, an unstoppable flow, from her lip all the way down to her toes, clinging to her body and enveloping her in warm, sticky liquid. It wasn’t even regular blood--it *smelled*, like rust and battery acid, so strong her eyes were almost permanently tearing up. She had always hated blood and been a very easily embarrassed person, and this was beyond a doubt, her worst nightmare. It seeped and bubbled through the bandaids and bandages and duct tape and rubber cement she put over the wound, and it seemed to only flow more and more angrily the more she tried to stop it, and the more she begged it to be done the worse it got. Every day the blood dried and created new layers that would crack and stick and make her want to throw up with every move. She tried to hide from her family, but it began to pool in her room and soak her nice shag carpet and saturate every one of her clothes and fill up her closet. The smell permeated her entire home. Her parents found out after a week of her trying to hide it and forced her to go to the hospital. You cannot imagine the look of defeat on the nation’s greatest doctors and nurses who were brought in to solve the problem of the bleeding. One by one, they threw in the towel and went home, unable to solve the two fundamental questions of the case, which were how to stop the bleeding, and how did this five foot two twenty year-old girl have this much thick, strong-smelling blood inside of her. Her boyfriend came to the hospital for a little bit, but he was squeamish and couldn’t look at her blood-caked face for long without needing to hurl. Before he left she tried to pull him in and kiss him in front of her parents. He pushed her away, his palm striking her sternum hard, and walked out, apologizing over his shoulder. Her parents’ overly sympathetic grimaces made her sick. Finally after two months of constant mopping and draining and circles of doctors poking and prodding her like a lab rat, they sent her home, all of them hanging their heads in defeat. Genevieve was embarrassed they hadn’t fixed her. She had done nothing but waste all of their time and disgust them and fill their blood disposal tanks for two months and somehow she felt like the failure was hers and not theirs. She walked home from the hospital along the side of the four-lane highway, not allowed to bleed in her parents’ new Jeep. People stared at her as she walked past and honked at the bleeding girl and laughed. She watched their smiles and grimaces through their tinted windows and hung her head low. When she got home she sat in her room for the next week, watching TV on her laptop which she sealed in a gallon Ziploc bag. The room filled steadily with blood, until it leaked out the windows and Genevieve could no longer lie down on her bed without it filling her nose and mouth. It leaked through the ceiling and dripped down onto her parents’ expensive memory foam bed below, in thick scarlet strands that shimmered in the Alabama sunsets. The next week they surprised her at the dinner table, which they had covered in layers of black plastic garbage bags, and they told her it was time for her to move out-- make her own way in the world. They had apologetic smiles plastered on their faces, but they could barely make eye contact as they told her. Genevieve knew what was up. Her personality and her love of life and her drive had bled out of her too. She did nothing but stare blankly at her laptop screen and listen to her parent’s conversations downstairs about the cheapest place to move her. Two weeks later Genevieve’s parents waved goodbye as they drove away in their new Jeep. She looked around the dingy, ugly apartment she now inhabited in the three-level apartment complex on the outskirts of town. The green door of the place read 3F. No one else was around. All of her stuff had been ruined months ago, save her laptop in the ziploc, five packages of heavy black garbage bags, and three rolls of black electrical tape that her parents had given her. They hadn’t told the landlord about her whole bleeding issue, so they told her she needed to keep the place clean or else. Genevieve got down on her hands and knees, completely alone, filling the floor under her with viscous red. She already felt her smell annihilating the musty smell of the apartment that had provided a brief and welcome break from the battery acid smell that had soaked deep into her skin. She began coating every inch of her apartment in reflective black garbage bags and electrical tape. The floors, the ratty cloth couch that someone had left behind, the bed that looked more habitable by bedbugs than humans--in a few hours all of it had been covered, and Genevieve lived in a place that she thought was pretty much identical to her idea of hell. The apartment was nothing but black walls and frightening reflective dark shapes and covered windows and her own pungent blood, already inch-deep and clinging to the soles of her feet. She looked around the room again and decided that she was going to block off every single fucking crack or hole where the blood could escape. She stuffed wads of tape down the shower drain and sink drain and taped up every window completely. It was so hot and suffocating in 3F, the one tiny vent in the corner doing an absolutely pathetic job of ventilating the place. At this point Genevieve felt it added to the whole illusion of Hell she was creating, where she apparently deserved to be. Her plan was to lay in bed and watch TV until the blood rose all the way to the ceiling and she drowned. She figured she had no other option. What should have been like any other shaving cut turned into a life-ruining source of humiliation and disgust for basically no reason, and she couldn’t do anything but think about it every single second, and no one wanted to be around her anyway, so why not just be dead. She laid down on her garbage-bag bed in her hell room, opened her laptop, and began the drawn-out process of waiting to die in one way or another. At this point she just wished the flow of blood was faster. Three days later, the blood was up to Genevieve’s chest. It had covered the wall outlets and her laptop charger had shorted out, so she was just staring at her reflection in the wrinkled garbage bag wall, composing songs in her head and singing them to herself over and over, all of them involving the blood. She knew they were terrible. She had nothing good inside to sing about. Then came a loud knock, and then another. Genevieve said nothing. Then there was another, angrier knock, and then the door handle turned and someone kicked it. Her plywood door swung open with great force, and the tape and garbage bags that had been keeping all the blood in fell to the floor. A massive torrent of blood rushed past someone’s strong, tan legs. The owner of those legs stared at Genevieve, lying lamely on her back on her garbage bag bed. She looked very, very upset. “What the fuck are you doing??” Genevieve was taken aback. A tall, young latina woman with black hair, wearing a white tank top and now-bloodstained jeans, stood with her arms folded, glaring at her. Genevieve had no idea how to explain that she was waiting to drown in her own blood. “Hi, I’m Maria, your downstairs neighbor? My ceiling? Is *bulging.* There’s drywall flaking all over my place and my kid is afraid that it’s going to cave in on him.” “I’m--I’m sorry--” “You can’t have all this *blood* in here. It’s creepy, and a bunch of it just went on my *car,* like--just now*.* You’re going to have to clean that, you know. And jesus christ, put a bandaid on, okay?.” Genevieve was near tears, trying to explain herself. “I’m sorry--bandaids don’t work, nothing works--I can’t stop it.” “Well you need to stop it! You’re ruining my place! People *live* here!” “Please just leave me alone. Don’t look at me. Please.” “What? Why? I’m telling you something. I need to look at you.” “Just don’t look at me. Close the door and go away and I’ll be gone soon and I won’t bother you anymore, okay?” Suddenly Maria’s anger faded, and she got a very odd look on her face, and she stared at Genevieve for a long, long time without looking away. “Please stop. Stop looking at me.” Maria didn’t say anything, and she didn’t stop. Her and Genevieve stared at each other, Genevieve near tears, still bleeding, smelling herself and looking at herself through Maria’s eyes and imagining how disgusting and horrible and monstrous she looked, a lonely beast in a garbage bag cave with a carpet of blood. She started to cry, and the salt and the warmth of her tears mixed with her blood and she was covered, encased in her own fluids. Her cheeks flushed with the purest and most potent embarrassment she had ever felt. She felt like a prisoner in Maria’s gaze. Then Maria stepped over the threshold, and walked into Genevieve’s hellish black room and over to her, and lightly ran her hand through her hair. “Don’t touch me. Just leave me alone. Leave me alone.” “Shush. Sometimes people just need to be looked at and touched for a minute.” “I smell so bad. Please don’t.” “You do. But it’s okay. You’re here and I’m here.” Maria placed her other hand on Genevieve’s leg. She didn’t stop her. Maria leaned down and put her chin on top of Genevieve’s head, and she reached out and put her hands on Maria, and the two of them breathed together in sync for a little while. Genevieve’s breathing slowed, and so did her thoughts. The blood began to taper off until it was barely a trickle. Then softly, slowly, Maria lifted her hand from Genevieve’s leg and covered the cut on her lip with her finger. The blood, as if suddenly realizing its vulnerability, reared up like a liquid snake and turned to a firehose. It threw Maria’s arm back and drenched the walls, ripping the ugly beige paint and the garbage bags to shreds. Maria and Genevieve were helpless against the torrent. The door slammed shut and the room filled with blood up to the ceiling--then the floor caved in. Her apartment and Maria’s apartment below her were joined into one container that was filled completely with blood in seconds, and before long the dividing walls and floors and ceilings of the entire apartment complex were gone and filled with red. Genevieve and Maria floated in the center of the scarlet aquarium, barely contained by the brick exterior of the complex, surrounded by blood, smelling of rust and fire and acid and musk. For the first time in months, Genevieve thought not of herself but of someone else, and she looked to her left to see the woman floating unconscious in the deep red haze. She swam toward her, put her arm around her slim waist, and pulled her towards the sunlight, streaming in through a door and turning the muddy scarlet a brilliant orange. The bricks and mortar of the apartment complex burst all at once like a dam breaking, and the massive tsunami of blood carried Genevieve and Maria atop it over all the people who had evacuated the apartment complex, then crashed with a giant roar onto the local four-lane highway, stopping traffic. Genevieve slid and spun to a stop in front of dozens of cars and prying eyes, a massive trail of destruction and viscera behind her. In her arms was Maria, curled up in a ball with her eyes closed. Without a second thought, she rolled her onto her back in front of the hundreds of eyes glaring at her, and softly pressed her lips to Maria’s and began giving her CPR. As she alternated between furiously pumping on Maria’s sternum and breathing for her, she had the fleeting thought that she was no longer embarrassed. She was just scared. Then Maria’s eyes fluttered open, and she coughed a little bit, and Genevieve’s heart jumped into her throat in a way she had forgotten it could. She picked Maria up and threw her over her shoulders without a second thought, then gave a little wave to the furious drivers honking and screaming and laughing at her. Genevieve ran across the highway back towards the apartment complex, feeling Maria’s body upon her, not even realizing that she had finally stopped bleeding.