You've Lost a Lot of Blood

by Eric LaRocca

Of course, the thoughts are plenty. There’s certainly no shortage of thoughts. But there’s something that always stops me before I actually go through with

MARTYR: He’s always going on about the inanest things. Things most people wouldn’t even consider. Then again, Ambrose isn’t like most people. I suppose that’s why I first fell in love with him—because I could tell he saw the world differently. If whimsy were a language, Ambrose would be fluent.

If I’m guilty, then he is too. I can never let him forget that.

AMBROSE: Are you a coyote killing for sport or are you a parasitic worm that only wants to live?

AMBROSE: “All cruelty springs from weakness,” according to Lucius Annaeus Seneca. MARTYR: Is he saying that I’m weak? Is he implying that I’m a monster because of what I do, because of what I’ve dedicated my life to?

MARTYR: That’s the best word to describe me and Ambrose—“diluted.” That’s the word that best describes what we’ve become. If relationships were physical things and not figurative constructs, then they would be parasites. Love between two people always changes who you are.

MARTYR: A worm doesn’t listen to a grasshopper.

“The boy’s the only one to set us free.”

“How could you—waste a second chance again?”

MARTYR: Why is he saying that to me? What have I done? What’s happened to me? I feel like a starving Venus fly trap.

It’s as if time had become soup for me. A liquid to pass through. Something for my bones to soak while I melt away.

MARTYR: Of course, I stole it from him. I steal from everyone, everything. I don’t have an original thought in my head. Everything I have ever thought has been ladled into my brain and pushed around there like bits of broken sea glass.

AMBROSE: The way you chose to use them makes you a thief. You always have been. All those stories you made me read. All those poems you pretended belonged to you. They didn’t, did they? They belonged to other minds, other hands that wrote them.

Don’t you? Don’t you hate who you are just a little? I’d like to meet the completely self-aware person who’s enraptured with themselves, in love with their entire being. That person doesn’t exist. And if they do, they won’t be alive for long.

It hurts them more than they could ever know. Because when a child grows up to live averagely—to live a mediocre life—they think they’ve failed somehow.

There’s nobody left here for you to plagiarize.

MARTYR: I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore. AMBROSE: You don’t expect me to believe that.

The answer for such an inquiry can be found in a quote once made by David Leavitt: “Sometimes brutality is the only antidote to sorrow.”