Red

Blood. So much blood. Red as the dying light of a beautiful sunset. Running and spilling and refusing to clot.  I never knew my blood was so runny -  OUR blood was so runny. And it kept seeping, like a warm spring in the winter; or a gentle diarrhea. 

A smear of blood painted the doorway where I had placed my hand earlier.  It didn’t look like a hand print, but more a slash of red, as if someone had flung red syrup from the edge of a sword, and left it there to dry. I looked at my hand. Manure brown blood, thick as churned mud, already drying like caulk from a plumbers gun.  I had pressed my hand to the wounds, hoping to staunch the flow. I only succeeded in making a bigger mess.  

Such a mess. 

The blood just ran, flowed, a dam opened to release the pressure of blood from within my body. With every beat of my heart, more blood was released and flowed, down my leg and pooled on the cold concrete floor.  Its unfinished surface grated on my naked feet. What a mess we had made. I never noticed how thin my blood was. How easily gravity pulled it, like water spilled innocently from a sippy cup, drip-drop to the earth. My initial reaction had just been to stare at my own blood. I knew I should do something, apply pressure, wrap it, anything. Instead, I had just stared at it.  How much life could I bleed and still be alive?

As a child, a friend once told me that blood turns red when it comes into contact with oxygen, but otherwise, it was green inside our bodies. I believed it then; after all, the veins under my wrists did appear green.  I looked at my wrists and squeezed my Hands into a fist. 

We hadn’t seen them coming. No one even warned us about them. They had simply waited, hidden and obscured under a heavy Nepalese monsoon.  As we passed by, they rose silently, like a dark thought deep in the night. Silent ninja assassins manufacturing an ambush.  One by one they latched to our feet, then our ankles, and worked their way into our socks and shoes. The night ambush turned into a swift success. We wouldn’t feel the first trickle of blood until much later. 

Leeches. Damned leeches. 

They were everywhere then. Streaks of fresh blood and small pin holes that weeped red marked their indulgence. 

I’d never dealt with leeches before. The three of us did what we could, thought we should, to fight them off.  We flicked, we pulled, we pinched, anything to get them off of us. Then we checked ourselves. We checked each other. Later we would pile our backpacks, our shoes, our clothes into a corner, surround them in a circle of salt and ash, huddle on the bed in our underwear, and watch for leeches, waiting for the demons that lurked  inside our things to rise so we could identify them; It wouldn’t be a seance but an exorcism. 

Now I walk into the bathroom and shove my foot into the sink. I'm washing the blood off and I hear and the cries of Zubair and Zeeshan in the next room.   

“Dude, check my Asshole.” Zeeshan is paranoid. His voice breaks a little. I imagine the wild look in his eyes as he asks his older brother for help. I close my eyes in understanding. Poor kid.  

“I can’t - It’s too hairy.”  Zubair is laughing, but I just think he’s gone mad. Seeing so much of your own blood can do that. 

I shake my head. Damned leeches.