Whole Blood - IV. Rebirth (chapter 4) by Alika Yarnell
chapters
chapter 1:
I. Crystal
chapter 2:
II. The Death of the Rainbow
chapter 3:
III. Huetech RLX System
chapter 4:
IV. Rebirth
chapter 5:
V. Wheel of Fortune
chapter 6:
VI. Instructions for Extinguishing
chapter 7:
VII. The Shield
chapter 8:
VIII. Periodical
chapter 9:
IX. Refuge
chapter 10:
X. True Blood
IV. Rebirth
chapter 4
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updated May 28, 2008
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4245 characters
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I wish I had been the one to see her first. Maybe then the world would be different. I wouldn’t have told anyone and she would be mine. If I hadn’t been behind the laboratory doors, perhaps I’d have stood a chance.
“How did you hide it all this time?”
“I didn’t,” she said, holding her hand out to me. “No one noticed.” My heart.
I loved her instantly: her soft wide nose, her thick down-turned lips. That she went by Pam instead of Pamela. She didn’t look at me as I took her hand, her dark skin rich and velvety against my veiny skim milk.
“This won’t hurt much.”
She said she’d always been that way. No one had ever been right there when it happened. A prick of a thorn, a sliver of skin. It only lasted a few seconds before the magnetic hue turned to bright red and then the familiar dull reddish brown we were used to seeing in our own scabs. Maybe she had inattentive parents or maybe they kept it under wraps. But no one claimed to have seen her blood before that day in the chrysanthemum bed.
She’d worked as a potter in public parks. It was her job to take new seedlings out of their plastic containers and nudge them into even rows of fresh soil. She told me her gardening partner flinched when he saw it. A broken piece of plastic tore her skin and Vierge spilled from her finger and he took her hand and kissed it. She pulled away and the blood changed to red. Being exposed to the planet’s air seemed to make the color turn. But the split-second of witnessing Vierge burned into the backs of his eyes and deeper into the folds of his mind where treasure is stored. He was ten years older than her and remembered Vierge from his childhood like I did. She was in her 20s so she’d only heard about it. People didn’t talk much about it anymore. It was the Great Disappointment of our times.
He asked her out to dinner, to movies, to plays. He talked to her softly in the park gardens. He brought her a rare kind of flower. But she wasn’t interested in him. He began making threats, saying he’d contact the authorities. And one day he did. He took her by the wrist and chained her to his own and walked down to the station. No one believed him. He thought not. But he was prepared. He took a knife and made a little slit.
* * *
I slid the pipette in and out in a smooth motion and snapped the sample in the cassette to store with the rest. The fluorescent light made her ragged afro shine yellow-green. I swallowed.
“Are we done?”
Inside my head, I screamed no. No, we are just getting started. There are worlds to share, galaxies to explore within each other. My skin pricked with the heat of possibility. But the words stayed within my body and she left the lab with only a thin plastic bandage around her finger, the “flesh tone” strip contrasting against her gleaming skin.
I wasn’t the first to see her. She came to me later in the process, after she’d been poked and prodded and hardly had an unmarked inch of skin on her body. If only her tears had Vierge in them—¬she’d given them her fill of those. But when she came to me, she was all dried out. Her blood was still strong but her heart had grown a thick casing to protect its weakened state. I was the last phase of her suffering. They’d devised a tool to extract the blood and preserve it, but they were still unable to reproduce the color. All their methods from the previous Vierge time had failed. There were no billboards or cars or hair with the new hue. Only small samples of this woman’s blood in tiny refrigerated vials.
No one knew what to do and the story leaked out. Not only had the color returned, but there was a new blood type. And if one person had it, maybe there were others. The fingerprick ensured a quick and relatively painless test to check blood for abnormal hues. There were people who tested newborns. I got to test her. Everyday. For over a year.
She was nice to me, considering what she’d been through. She would hold her hand out as if asking me to take it and press it to my lips. And I wanted to. But then she’d say, “Which finger today?” and sit on the stark metal chair and look away. She didn’t like the site of her own blood.
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“How did you hide it all this time?”
“I didn’t,” she said, holding her hand out to me. “No one noticed.” My heart.
I loved her instantly: her soft wide nose, her thick down-turned lips. That she went by Pam instead of Pamela. She didn’t look at me as I took her hand, her dark skin rich and velvety against my veiny skim milk.
“This won’t hurt much.”
She said she’d always been that way. No one had ever been right there when it happened. A prick of a thorn, a sliver of skin. It only lasted a few seconds before the magnetic hue turned to bright red and then the familiar dull reddish brown we were used to seeing in our own scabs. Maybe she had inattentive parents or maybe they kept it under wraps. But no one claimed to have seen her blood before that day in the chrysanthemum bed.
She’d worked as a potter in public parks. It was her job to take new seedlings out of their plastic containers and nudge them into even rows of fresh soil. She told me her gardening partner flinched when he saw it. A broken piece of plastic tore her skin and Vierge spilled from her finger and he took her hand and kissed it. She pulled away and the blood changed to red. Being exposed to the planet’s air seemed to make the color turn. But the split-second of witnessing Vierge burned into the backs of his eyes and deeper into the folds of his mind where treasure is stored. He was ten years older than her and remembered Vierge from his childhood like I did. She was in her 20s so she’d only heard about it. People didn’t talk much about it anymore. It was the Great Disappointment of our times.
He asked her out to dinner, to movies, to plays. He talked to her softly in the park gardens. He brought her a rare kind of flower. But she wasn’t interested in him. He began making threats, saying he’d contact the authorities. And one day he did. He took her by the wrist and chained her to his own and walked down to the station. No one believed him. He thought not. But he was prepared. He took a knife and made a little slit.
* * *
I slid the pipette in and out in a smooth motion and snapped the sample in the cassette to store with the rest. The fluorescent light made her ragged afro shine yellow-green. I swallowed.
“Are we done?”
Inside my head, I screamed no. No, we are just getting started. There are worlds to share, galaxies to explore within each other. My skin pricked with the heat of possibility. But the words stayed within my body and she left the lab with only a thin plastic bandage around her finger, the “flesh tone” strip contrasting against her gleaming skin.
I wasn’t the first to see her. She came to me later in the process, after she’d been poked and prodded and hardly had an unmarked inch of skin on her body. If only her tears had Vierge in them—¬she’d given them her fill of those. But when she came to me, she was all dried out. Her blood was still strong but her heart had grown a thick casing to protect its weakened state. I was the last phase of her suffering. They’d devised a tool to extract the blood and preserve it, but they were still unable to reproduce the color. All their methods from the previous Vierge time had failed. There were no billboards or cars or hair with the new hue. Only small samples of this woman’s blood in tiny refrigerated vials.
No one knew what to do and the story leaked out. Not only had the color returned, but there was a new blood type. And if one person had it, maybe there were others. The fingerprick ensured a quick and relatively painless test to check blood for abnormal hues. There were people who tested newborns. I got to test her. Everyday. For over a year.
She was nice to me, considering what she’d been through. She would hold her hand out as if asking me to take it and press it to my lips. And I wanted to. But then she’d say, “Which finger today?” and sit on the stark metal chair and look away. She didn’t like the site of her own blood.
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