You've Lost a Lot of Blood

by Eric LaRocca

Each precious thing I’ve ever shown him is a holy relic from the night we both perished—the night when I combed him from my hair and watered the moon with his blood.

a glorious thing to be worshiped, or to at least be acknowledged as “vessel of sorrow,” “creator of tides,” “pitcher of divine light.” He was nothing more than milkweed to be plucked, a discarded plant to be uprooted and torn by the stem until it lies there quivering in your hand—shaking, trembling, frightened.

I killed him because to let him live, to let him exist would have been an insult.

a priceless vessel to warehouse the marvelous and the celestial.

You’d think a young man qualified for even the most menial office job would understand I was the furthest thing from a delicate heirloom—that I was a vile thing, obscene, and unspeakable.

I had thought of ending things for a while. I suppose we all do in some way even if we’re content, dangerously happy with the body we’re sleeping next to, with the body we use for sex, for companionship, for love. Little insects—barbed and dangerous with their glittering exoskeletons and their sharp pincers—circle inside my head and whisper indecencies to me. For once, I’d like to see myself outside of myself. If that even makes sense. I’d like to crawl outside of my head and look back at the horrible thing I’ve become, the soulless spirit residing inside my shell.

Being in love with him was very much like executing a game with a mechanical chess-playing machine, I imagine. I knew in my heart that I would always win, that I would never compromise, that I would never let him deep enough inside me to latch on and secure himself as if it were a new home. I knew I never wanted to be his home. No matter how much he begged, no matter how much he pleaded—I’d sooner swallow wet concrete than let him call me his or dare to call him mine.

I killed him because if I didn’t, something might have tethered us together and that would have been a suffering far too unimaginable for me to even consider.

The carnage of my thoughts. The privacy I had been afforded. I had killed him many times there—imagined what it might feel like, how he might panic, how he might plead and beg with me. I haven’t thought of him much since it first happened—since the night when I first pulled his teeth, plucked his fingernails, and organized them accordingly; as if they were broken remnants, artifacts in the museum of our love: a gallery of yellowing antiquity.

cracking him open as if he were some expensive delicacy imported from a faraway land and gorging on his entrails until my stomach was fit to burst.

Something that might float up and away on an invisible string pulled by an ancient deity until I’m left standing alone on the chessboard of the mess we’ve made together—the illusion we had shared, the magic we had wrongfully invented.

until I can taste only blood and ash— both siblings of your exquisite martyrdom.

you had once held me like a child’s body to be served as if it were the Holy Eucharist— a whisper closed off inside a metal sarcophagus, a mistake once made that can never be unmade.

Stuck in my mind. Like our brains are made of flypaper and our thoughts are little insects to be captured, caught, and killed.

She’s blind now in her left eye. Wears an eye patch—a permanent souvenir of her mother’s affection, her mother’s playfulness, her mother’s terrible mistake.

Stories don’t belong to people.

But I’m talking about oral history—stories that aren’t written anywhere, that are mythic, that belong to the mouths that share them. For instance, that story you just told, that became something else when you told it. You could’ve left out certain information, added what you wanted. Storytelling is an art form, and it belongs to no one.

If we see something truly horrible, immediately we can assess it and recognize its flaws. But to be sidelined by something from beneath the water, to become prey to some ancient deity circling the black depths is something far more serious. Your mind can invent something truly horrible when the monster is kept out of sight.

Someone could easily be sitting there—watching you—and you’d never know. That’s more frightening than seeing them there. The possibility of them being there—knowing that they can see you, but you can’t see them.

“Verisimilitude,” the boy says, as they filter inside the house. “The appearance of being true or real.”

I think there’s a small, quiet part of you that enjoys the misery I carefully feed you each day— as if it were the very thing keeping you alive.

Although drowning might be peaceful—gently being lulled to sleep as if in the cradle of some underwater God—the aftermath of drowning is unsavory at best.

I can’t help but think how he resembles a distinguished Russian aristocrat from an era now long since gone. Perhaps a Tsar or a Grand Duke with a dark red scarf draped around his neck—a scarf I’ve arranged there, a handsome blood-red pashmina to compliment his looks. This is how I’ll remember him—a beautiful boy with an artery-red scarf tightening about his throat.

Instead, I marvel at my creation—the grotesque artwork I’ve made with his body as my canvas, his blood as my oils. I don’t mourn for him. He’s achieved something far greater than what was originally his purpose when standing in front of the bodega on the street in Chelsea.

There’s apparently a word for that. There’s a word for everything, after all. Excarnation. It’s common in anthropological circles and details the act of removing flesh from the dead before burial. However, I have no intention of burying my protégé. Instead, I intend to leave him there and take a piece of him with me when I leave—his index finger.

There’s something so graceful, so delicate about witnessing the human body welcome death, whether willingly or not as they furiously spray the floor with their final masterpiece: their blood.

Something that’s scary is intended to cause fear, to frighten you. However, something that’s disturbing is intended to cause anxiety and be worrying.

Masters of every craft bite off the talent of those that came before them. It’s perfectly natural. I expect the authorities have noted my preference for the romanticism movement in art with each of my offerings being elaborately staged like a grotesque painting. The last one I did—that poor boy from Chelsea—I had arranged him like the ravished woman draped across the divan in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare2

I take from things all around me all the time. I take and I take and I take. I never seem to give. I’m just not that way. Ambrose is, however. He’s a giver. Always has been. Always will be. I have to think of the perfect painting to pair his death with—something grand in design, but tasteful in execution. Something that will make people marvel at his demise and think to themselves, “What a beautiful young man. What a glorious way for things to end.”

I wonder how exquisite it might feel to unspool their skin like cheesecloth until their body was a murmur that could no longer share their most shameful secrets. To hold their coat of flesh in my arms like a broken child— like a beggar sent to be tortured until they weep.

To him, their bodies were exotic gardens blooming with disease. To him, they were hardly human—bodies made of honeycomb instead. He said he felt no pity for them, felt nothing remotely like sin or perversion when he contemplated the seriousness of what he was actually doing. There was no remorse, no semblance of sympathy, no hint of compassion.

He resembled one of those monks from the 15th or 16th centuries—a pastiche of a Holy man when I knew full well there was nothing holy or sacred about him.

I wondered if I was right to kill him—if I had saved some poor innocent child from his cruelty, or if I was no better than him: a monster capable of performing the most sadistic and vicious acts. Surely there must be something said for my intentions, my yearning to smear him from the world and others like him. Then again, it begs the question: why do I kill? What satisfaction do I derive from taking the life from someone as if I were squeezing the juice from a lemon? Am I a monster because I killed him? Of course, he deserved to die. But then, do I for what I’ve done? Am I no better than him? Does morality serve a purpose here, and if so, who comes out on top? Or are we both monsters that deserve no sympathy?

There’s something unnatural, something so deliciously grim, when you consider what we’ll become in due time—when you consider how our fragile bodies will break down and rot, entropy and decay claiming us before we’re nothing more than a mere human stain: a sculpture puzzle of bones, a liturgy of human anatomy that once was and will never be again.

If that’s where I’m to end, then what’s the point of any of this? None of this has meaning. You and I have no worth, no real consequence if you look at it objectively.

Ever since the invention of skin, the human body has been a vessel of mystery—a purposeless shadow of oneself, something to be revered for its complexity but also never understood.

He’s already pinning my body’s most vile secrets to the small board and gesturing to The x-ray as if it belonged to someone long since dead— a secret language lovingly buried in hemlock and ivy.

I think I can sense it when I close my eyes— my mind’s most shameful secret, a lewd thought armored with spikes and centipede feet to carry it toward oblivion I feel the small pebble whirl inside the riverbed of my mind Drowned by a gentle current, a voice that only speaks when no one is listening.

MARTYR: I could do it right now. Yes. It wouldn’t take much at all. Just a flick of my wrist. Like when an artist invites paint to a canvas. Ambrose is my canvas—my grotesque creation in the making. There’s something about him—something I can’t quite explain that makes it difficult for me. Difficult to consider following through and hurting him. 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 it—before I take the hammer in my hands or before I grip the knife’s handle to make good use of the blade.

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.

It seems to me that it’s an all too human projection of a romanticized image of suicide that’s been perpetuated by our culture.

If relationships were physical things and not figurative constructs, then they would be parasites. Love between two people always changes who you are.

He looks peaceful. Lying there. Almost as if he were sleeping. As if he had asked us to do this to him.

He smiles at me with a graveyard of rotted teeth where his mouth should be—a voice that tells me, “this body is not for you.”

How could he even ask me that? 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.

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.

Adults love to say those things to children. 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. And perhaps they have. But it’s really the adults that have failed them. It’s the adults that have misguided them into thinking that they were special, that they were destined for such greatness that never came.