Bloodlust

Chapter One- The Beginning of the End

Every Thursday for the past three years I've had the same plans, and this Thursday is no different.

After my shift ends at Miller and sons lumber yard, I make my way ten minutes into the city to the biggest hospital in the state.

"Name and ID?" The receptionist sighs. Her eyes are staring straight ahead at her computer. I don't reply, just placing my ID on the marble blue counter before her. She finally looks up, eyes peering over Red Cat eye glasses. "Oh. It's you. You know the drill, go take a seat"

After seeing me once a week for three years, silver haired Connie already knows what I'm here for. I would even go so far as to say we've become unlikely friends at this point.

In the corner, the news plays softly on an old flatscreen screwed to the wall. The walls are a boring gray, covered in generic paintings and the chairs a dark burgundy, old, faded, and fringing at the seams. An old man sits in the corner with his wife, coughing his lungs up. I know this room all too well, yet every time I'm here it feels as cold and uncomfortable as the last.

As I take my seat across from her, Connie continues to stare at me. "What?"

She pops her gum. "Lopez family, you can go up, room twelve G, elevator is to your right" she says, gesturing towards the big blue hospital doors with her pen. She waits until we're alone to speak again.

"Gabriel" she starts, her voice raspy from years of a smoking addiction "you don't have to visit every Thursday, why don't you take a week off?"

I clench my teeth and say nothing. After years of questions, I don't have an answer anymore. Connie sighs again. "Honey, maybe it's time to...". She trails off. She can't finish her sentence and I don't want her to. The reality is too hard to face, for both of us.

We fall into an awkward silence. The news continues quietly in the background, and all I catch is "120 dead". Connie points to the tv and sighs. "You hear that? There's something going around. It isn't safe to be visiting so often. Maybe give yourself a break until everything quiets down." I don't reply.

After what feels like forever she pops her gum again. "You can go up now, they're ready for you".

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Her room is on the fifth floor, twelfth door to the right. It's a cozy little room. A comfy cloth chair sits in the corner, right next to a big window looking into the hospital hallway. Both nightstands are covered in flowers, and the back wall has floor to ceiling windows, overlooking the city. A small couch sits in front of them, that I've spent many nights sleeping on. As I enter, soft beeps sound from her bedside, the only indication that she still exists. I walk over to the bedside.

Lying there softly, just a shell of a human is my longtime girlfriend, Mae. Her hair falls softly around her head, its grown so much since she's been here. She would be happy, she always did want her shoulder length hair to grow longer.

I place a quick kiss on her forehead, then sit down next to her. Pushing aside the IVs, I grab her hand and just like usual, they're ice cold. A huge gash of a scar stretches across her forearm and besides the coma, its the only indication that that night ever happened. The worst night of my life.

A year later, it still haunts my dreams. The sound of metal scraping, Mae's screams, the smell of burning rubber and metal. My hand instinctively flies up, to where my neck and ear meet, the scar just as present as Mae's, where a large piece of windshield had once been.

Shaking off the harrowing memories, I leave the bedside and sigh as I collapse into the chair in the corner. As usual, a cloud of sawdust flies into the air as I sit. I shake out my hair and there's sawdust flying everywhere now. Just about every inch of me is covered in sawdust these days. Hospital bills are expensive.