Blood Loss

Fiction by Mary Salome

If she asks me what they are, I’ll throw them at her like Molotov cocktails.

Don’t tell me this isn’t a prison just because it smells so sweet.

This is a prison, and if I ever get out, I swear I’ll be nothing like my jailor.

So, this is what it takes for my mother to remember her captive. She and the doctors think I can’t, that my body is incapable, but the truth is I refuse to menstruate. Like that old man in the movie who swore he’d live to 108. He did, and right after he blew out the candles, he made the choice to let it all go. Just like no one believes I get to decide when to bleed, no one believed he could have chosen when to die. He obviously did. They think there’s a problem with me, but I recognize it as my right. I won’t bleed for them. I won’t bleed unless I want to. I won’t bleed until I’m ready. And they can keep those goddamn breasts, too.

They can keep their doctor visits, while they’re at it. They can keep their blood tests, medical terminology, hormone pills, and expressions of detached concern. And the conversations they have about, above, and around me. I’m not a textbook example or an interesting sample or an experiment. No matter how thick their cloying concern, it can’t mask the smell of their own self-interest, and I’m not a reflection on anyone but myself.

If she asks me what they are I will empty them on her one by one, leaving an embarrassing stain.

Don’t tell me this isn’t a prison just because they claim to have my best interests at heart.

I’m fettered, charted, plotted, and graphed, and if I ever get out, I swear I will never use the word cycle again.

It was a blood test that gave me the idea. Maybe it wasn’t an idea, exactly. I had a little too much of perfume-sweet. At one point, I thought I would die without it, but I need a less vaporous love.

I loved my mother. Everything about her. When I was about five, she gave me some perfume samples, tiny glass vials capped with plastic, filled with her favorite scent. I would wear it, feel comforted by her smell, thrilled to think that maybe one day I could be just like her.

I think I had a little too much of perfume-sweet. Was it only a blood test that gave me the idea, or is something really wrong with me, like they say? I had handfuls of tiny, half-filled perfume samples stuffed in drawers to scent my clothes. I used a razor blade to cut my finger and let the blood trickle into the first slender glass tube. Over a week, or so, I filled them all. They look pretty in the sunlight, different shades of red, depending on how much perfume was left in each vial.

I’ve started wearing her scent, a dab of crimson behind each ear or on my wrists. The only way I can be near my mother now is, in a way, I know she would it find hurtful and repulsive.

She noticed the cuts on my fingers when I left a smudge of blood behind on the light switch. Not even a flicker of concern on her face, just “Get a band-aid.”

Don’t tell me this isn’t a prison. No one ever noticed me unless I was bleeding.

Or until I wasn’t.

BIO: Mary Salome (she/her) is a queer Arab- and Irish-American writer and media activist who lives in San Francisco. Her prose and poetry have been published in Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, Solstice: A Winter Anthology Vol 2, Archive of the Odd, and SPROUT: An Eco-Urban Poetry Journal. Her short story "Okami in the Bayview" was nominated for a WSFA Small Press Award.