The Color of Blood

by Mona Kabbani

I offered the snake a pomegranate ​it found the tiny seeds amusing the color vibrant the flesh soft. The snake thanked me but found it could not tell the difference and when it bit my throat ​i understood love. To knowing when it’s venom.

It has not rained for some time, yet the city brims with rainbows. Colors that pulse like heartbeats.

None but I can perceive such hues. None as far as I know.

I suck and kiss and think about that wavelength of light, that brilliant dance. How I’ve rewired my disgust toward bodies to become pleasure for the sake of the spectacle.

But when I paint, I’m seeing into myself. I’m seeing myself through shapes and colors. That’s the goal, at least. It never quite works out that way, and I wonder if that’s the point. If the torture of never being able to truly know, to accurately express oneself, drives one to create.”

I run the edge of the knife across her throat, splitting the skin, the muscles, the cartilage. Color bursts forth in a grand arc, and it’s magnificent. Like parting space and time and creating heaven’s gates with one fell swoop.

There is a gurgle, a pop from her throat as she drowns in her own blood, and I would reassure her in her dying moments that she will be immortalized forever, that viewers will come from far and wide just to catch a glimpse of her, but I am tired now and she is already dead.

I drive the sole of my boot into the chest cavity of Number Ten. Her sternum makes a satisfying crunch, and I drool at all I’ll do with those bits of bone. Perhaps make a collage or use them as scales on a sculpture.

I realize that in this moment I probably look absurd to the human eye. Naked except for steel-toed combat boots, levitating a head like it’s a holy weapon. What a groundbreaking painting I would be.

I am a blank canvas. A nothing person. A void that can be decorated and designed but never filled.

I wish I could tell her all the ways her mere existence destroys and rebuilds every cell of my being.

She is safely and securely sealed away in a tarp along with so many discarded art supplies.

She apologizes. Of course she apologizes—she is a smart woman who can see the bigger picture, who understands that time is a fragile, finite thing and what a waste to give it to those who cannot tell oil from gouache.

There are butterflies in my stomach whose wings are made of fiberglass.

She is radiant, brilliant to the point of blinding,

She turns to me, her eyes that color no one else could possibly see—not the way I see—and I wonder . . . if not like this, then how does the world perceive her? What do they see without the ability to see all of her? Whatever it is, it is a loss. It is a true loss not to know her as I do.

Supernovas form beneath my skin in the places she leaves her touch.

If I am a void, then she is utter totality.

this time I am on top, plunged into her, both my cock and my palette knife, shredding her apart, watching her skin come undone, her color spilling out across our bodies with such newfound vivacity.

There’s a moment of silence that says neither of us cares much for small talk. How are you liking this weather? What have you been up to? What’s new? It’s not small talk I want. I want to ask her questions, so many questions. The first being, Why are you not dead?

How can she be talking like this? So casually, like we are two normal people having a normal conversation over a normal breakfast. As though she is something so basic, something so common in life, when that color surrounds her. When she bleeds that color over and over again and does not die.

It’s starting to materialize, birth itself on this canvas. I am the divine, the guiding hand. The image has always been there, just waiting in oblivion to one day be created by me.

Empty words bouncing inside of an empty skull I could crack open to collect what’s not worthy of the beauty of a blank canvas.

“How many of them before me?” Before her? What a funny frame of thought. Before her—I don’t believe anything could exist before her. There is just her, the start of her, and the silly, trivial things that occurred in another life. Another timeline wholly separate from now.

She laughs. She laughs and it’s a graveyard of echoes.

I hope I am not forgotten. I hope my art bleeds through these tarps and stains my floors. I hope Zahra’s color becomes a permanent installation. I hope I bleed into her and she into me. I hope we can combine to create something cataclysmic.

The pain is iron and velour. It’s pure, untainted euphoria.

Did you know what’s inside of you? Did you know that there are entire worlds inside of you?

When I look at her, all I see is an unattainable infinity. I see the things I thought I was—transformative, revolutionary, divine—but can never be. Not in the ways she is. In the ways she is so effortlessly clueless to.

I want to beg her to stop. Plead that she does not split herself open so I have to see what’s inside of her again. I don’t think I could handle it.

She turns to me with a smile larger than life stretched across her face, lips threatening to split her visage in half. Pearly white teeth hungry with greed. Eyes shielded, soul gone.

I’ll always be grounded, weighed down by her and her worries and her expectations and her fears.

So I ride. I ride and I ride, no longer feeling like a god, or even an active participant in this universe, but a nothing that has somehow managed to lose everything.

She turns around, and the sight of her ruptures every system in my body.

I have died every day since without you.

I would recognize you by your laugh, your smell, the way you breathe, and even if I’d lost all sense of sight I’d know you by the rhythm your footsteps make to accompany the music your existence creates in my head. I know you and I have loved you not by the absence of your flaws but by the presence of your darkness.

I know you like paint knows a canvas, like the waves know the shore. I know you like my wounds know heat and the sun knows the sky, and I especially know you by your color—”

Love is not difficult. It should not hurt. But like alcohol, when you drink the right amount of poison, it can feel deceivingly good.

two people fall madly in love, their egos get in the way, they fall traumatically out of love, they get back together only for the cycle to perpetuate.