Whole Blood - X. True Blood (chapter 10) by Alika Yarnell

The boy snaps his metal firecracker wheel and edges closer. I snatch the wheel from him and pump it fast, sparks flying. The boy looks as me as if to cry and I push him away with the force of my stare.

It is twilight when Crystal comes to sit with me on the bench facing the water, facing the fairgrounds. She must be in her 40s now. She looks only vaguely like her mother, but her mannerisms are the same. She sits with her legs uncrossed but pressed together and her hands rest lightly on her lap, as if waiting to be plucked and kissed.

“Why have you come here?”

“We have something in common,” she says. “She didn’t love us the way we loved her.”

I shake my head and run my fingers over my rough face. “She didn’t have to love us. She was love. She had it circulating through her veins.”

She looks down at her lap and laces her fingers. “She ignored me.”

“She protected you,” I say. I flick the wheel, spinning it into a hazy purple blur. “The media would’ve devoured you. Whatever the color of your blood, they would’ve drained you until you were sucked dry. Pam shielded you from their siphons.”

“No.” She is quiet for awhile. “She didn’t want anything to do with me or my father. Everyday she sat underneath a tree and stared out over the hillside. Or sat by the brook and listened to the water rush. She wanted to be left alone.”

I can’t help but wish Pam had been pining for me even though I know it isn’t true. Crystal continues with her story, but it is hard to follow. There is so much missing information and the summary of the past can never do itself justice. It’s like trying to explain colors to the blind. She tells me what happened but I can’t hear her properly. Something about Pam walking into the night and never coming back.

Her voice gets tangled in the water and lights. The sun dips down and I forget to pay attention. She grabs my hand and forces me to look at her, her eyes, ignited charcoal embers. There is something she knows that I don’t. Something she is trying to tell me. Her mouth opens wide as if to form a scream but no sound escapes. She jolts back and her head shakes and she lets go of my hand. Her lips curl downward. I catch her spark and my ears turn on to hear her screaming. She points to me and I look down. My fingers are sliced with red. The innards of the wheel have caught my flesh. The blood flows freely for several moments, then begins to freeze.

Twilight definitely has a look, but does it have a sound? I could say it sounds like the faint turning of the Ferris wheel in the distance. Or the wavering line of the shore sloshing over the black lava rocks. But she might say it sounds like a man’s heart leaving his body for the first time, sprouting wings and beating over the sand like webbed fingers paddling through water, over the molten fiery river, into the peak of the rupture, and down the hollow into the churning liquid fire of the volcano.

Some people think color is just personal preference, like wearing a particular style of denim jeans. But I have felt their energetic properties and I know their hidden powers. They can lock themselves inside, deep within your ribcage, deeper, in the folds of your skin, in the cracks of your brain, deeper, in the twines of your intestines, in the shadows of your cells, in the spaces between thoughts. They can make your arteries speak, give voice to the mind of your guts until you are out of breath with the realization of possibility. Imagine if everyone wore the same color on the same day. What would that do to the energy of the planet?

“I want to show you,” she says and I shake my head. After all these years, what does it matter. But a fire burns in her eyes and before I can stop her, she pricks her finger with a pointed seashell. I close my eyes, not wanting to see, not wanting to know the truth about her blood.

The boy’s toy wheel is still in my hand and I drop it to the ground. My wound is already closing. This is what The Shield can do. The bleeding has stopped and there are only droplets of red/brown on my hand.
She pricks her finger and it bleeds. Red. “AB negative,” she says. “It used to be the rarest blood type.”
I catch my breath and our eyes meet with our hands, the blood mixing with the sun gone and twilight rising. We are the same.

“Are you disappointed?” she says. Her tears are cloudy with salt. Colorless.

I shake my head and press my thumb to her wound and her wound to my lips. “I’m ecstatic.”

We walk, and then sail together in an orange peddle-boat to the island which holds the Ogon Fairgrounds. From the boat, we watch the colored lights blink and pop against the twilight sky fading into night, and somewhere in the deep ocean trenches the phosphorescent fish buzz with their own private lightshows. And deeper still, in the blackest parts of the planet, all probability says there are more phenomena that await our discovery. And I can feel those who are restless for them, but I am not one of the seekers. This time, I am content.

Now, near the bubbling pool of lava, I feed her cotton candy and adorn her with charged obsidian jewels, not to protect her, but because she says they remind her of me. She smiles, her mouth a smear of pink and blue, and for once, I put the past and the future aside. Our hands touch. The wound on her finger has formed a scab, the familiar dark reddish brown which I call Crystal.