Two Truths and a Liar

XVI • Nowhere to run

Leon
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It was seven am when I woke up, skin bare, covered in blood.

Sticky sweat, and red smearing against everything I touched. My hands were covered. I found it splattered on my face and hair and tasted it on my tongue, metallic and warm and ugly tasting, rotting me, filling my head with an ache that screamed shame.

My eyes would hardly open at first, and dazed I pulled myself up off the sheets of my bed, my vision blurred, my head throbbing with pain and every limb aching. I was gasping for breath, coughing up dark liquid that lapped off my tongue and leaked in scarlet rivers from my nose.

Drip

Drip

Dripping onto my bed.

I couldn't think. All I felt was fear, the kind of fear that flashed visions of a night, a waxen moon spilling over me. Of sidewalks, and sickness, and pain. I flinched.

The world was coming back to me slowly, life ebbing into my veins and breath to my lungs, pulling me up, sending feeling down through my limbs as my feet touched the ground.

My legs were collapsing underneath me, and I reached out just in time to catch my crashing fall against the bedside table. I upset a lamp. My vision was half obscured by wet hair that swung, limp, and stung my cheeks, fingernails digging into the wood of the night stand, my heart seizing up in my chest with every beat. My whole body shook, icy cold with trembling, sweat-soaked fear.

What's happening to me?

Light slowly seeped into my before colorless world, golden sunlight that illuminated every droplet of blood as if revealing my filthy deed. I had to do something.

My hands shook as I moved, peeling myself away from the bed stand and standing, wobbling, long enough to lean over and tear the sheets from my bed. Red shapes in bulbous splotches, patterns of blood, forms like roses against a clean, innocent white.

Impure. Stained.

The way my hands now felt as I desperately tried to bunch up the blankets and spread a thick, clean blanket over my bed to cover up the markings. The way my body felt, as I let my hand brush against the wall to guide me towards the bathroom, my arms feeling weak as I wrenched the shower valve on, spewing water into the milky tub. Carefully I slipped in, gasping as freezing water struck my sensitive skin. Beating against my spine. Swirling the now pinkish hues down the drain, leeching every hint of red off my bare flesh.

I don't know how long I stood there, staring blankly at the tiles on the wall as if they might draw me into them if I lost any other sense of awareness.

I tried not to think. But something in me was fighting the overwhelming panic, searching for a plan.

It was simple, really, once my head began to clear and I could finally think through it. There was blood, not my own. Someone else's. I had done something, something I hadn't been awake to witness, but that didn't discount the fact that it did happen and I was here, now, watching the remains lap off my body and wash away with icy water and foaming soap like it never happened at all, wiped off glass tile and porcelain without a trace. I couldn't wash it all down the drain, pretending nothing happened. I would be easily found out, the things I had done but couldn't even remember happening charged against me. It was the price of blood.

I don't know who, I don't know where or when or even how, but I did something horrible to another living being. Something unforgivable. Even the stinging tears now blurring my vision wouldn't forgive anything, they could never pay for that.