The Color of Blood

by Mona Kabbani

The limbs dangle over a bucket to collect what color is left in their veins. The midsection is not something I particularly enjoy dealing with, besides the occasional intestine play (with gloves on, of course). And who can blame me? They look like glowworms crawling within a nest of bioluminescent flesh. Remarkable.

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. The foundation I’ve erected my life upon. How she sets my soul on fire.

She sticks her tongue out and I ponder how much pressure it would take to bite the muscle off. If I could use her own teeth as a paper cutter. To truly feel her tongue against mine could I swallow it whole? Would I? How would it feel to consume a piece of her?

We share a bag of popcorn and with kernels stuck between my teeth, I wonder if her color would taste like deep-fried Oreos.

Those butterflies with their deadly wings fill my heart, my throat, and tear at my insides with sadistic hedonism. I could swallow her whole. I could drink her, fill my very veins with her.

She tilts her head toward me, her eyes now strobing through every color of this earth, its heavens and hells, and it’s like standing before oncoming headlights.

I grab at her stomach, pressing that color into our skin, finger-painting a living canvas, and she grabs at the backs of my hands. She guides my touch to her face, wipes away those galaxies of tears with the heel of my palm, and I think about her bones. If they’re made up of dying stars. If they’re made from the same stuff that keeps space suspended.

And the thought passes me so sweetly amidst this world-shattering violence: If I am a void, then she is utter totality.

We both know each other’s darkness now. We are the only two beings on this earth, its heavens and hells, who can harmlessly feed into the other. A snake eating its own tail, forever hungry yet forever providing. She wants this as much as I do. She needs this. “Yes,” she says. “If it will make you happy, then yes.”

She laughs. She laughs and it’s a graveyard of echoes. Of items she has taken into her hands and eaten. And when she rolls over to kiss me, I feel the energy of all that’s within her. I feel the synthetic sight from my consumed contact lenses, the bone of whichever

number I killed to create the blade of that palette knife. Those echoes travel through infinity, through Zahra’s throat and soul, just to break open the back of my skull and see if I’d heal.

Some people say they see red when they go into fits of rage, but all I saw was his color. An overwhelming saturation of it. I reached for that color, grabbed it, held on to it for dear life, and did not let go. When my vision cleared, I had his broken neck in my hands.

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.

And the void. It’s nothing. I thought the absence of everything was the truth of the soul. But it’s nothing. It’s fucking nothing.

Did you know what’s inside of you? Did you know that there are entire worlds inside of you? The snails, the snails, oh god, the snails.

I want to ask, but I don’t. I don’t because to speak it into existence, into my studio that is my own slice of a kingdom, would be too much. And I’m still trying to comprehend. To wrap my brain around what I just experienced. How I reached inside of her and discovered something so horrifying, so ancient and eldritch. Something I could never have the mind to create.

I snap out of my daydream. I turn to the gallery owner, who is leaning in to get a closer look at one of my paintings. They’re all one color. They all drip and bleed Zahra’s color, a dash of my own

blood here and there where hers didn’t ultimately consume mine. They all depict a timeline of a single, abstract subject. A birth. A life. A death.

A resurre...

I see what I have created in a new light, and a part of me inflates inside. The work I’ve bled for. The work I dug my fingernails through all manner of skin and veins, bone and flesh, to get to. Me. This was all me, for of course this couldn’t have been the makings of someone else. I am the artist. I am the king—no, the god—amongst colors.

can’t help but search for her like she might be standing there in front of the stove, pan in hand, ready to make breakfast. Like I might tell her of my dilemma, as though I could explain the paradox

of her needing to be here for me to express my sorrow, but that by her being here, this pain would not exist in the first place.

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. How you dig

your nails into your palms to break your skin when you’re worried or stressed, how you can only feel joy in the forced moments of blissful pain. 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—”

Maybe if I dig in deep enough, bleed for long enough, I’ll see. I’ll see what color sits inside of me. I’ll see it and it will be something extraordinary and I’ll show it to Zahra and say, Now you have proof that we are each one of a kind. We are made for each other. I made this for you and you are mine. And then, because the blood is rushing out of me faster than I can reproduce it, and because I cannot sew myself together with an invisible thread, I’ll die in her arms. My final masterpiece, a last act, a declaration of love, a dedication to her.

I will hold her tight and make it clear that I will never let go. Even when she falls, we will fall together. That is what the universe demands, the sun purrs, the snails whisper: She is owed to me.