Staunch the Blood by John Whalen

“Yeah,” he sighs absently. A splotch of blood begins to leak softly through his bandana as chuckles to himself. “You were right, after all, Ma; you were right after all.”

Still propped against the wall, he stares distantly at his hands for several minutes. His shaky legs make their own effort to stand; his sneakers flop around ineffectually as they plead with the gawking, pitted tar.

“For me?” he jokes to himself in a childish voice, feet still rolling pathetically. He sees how large his hands have grown, how they’ve hardened and scarred and cracked; he wonders how they got that way, all on their own. “Well, ok,” he grumbles, “but they’ll take some getting used to.” His hands lower, then, and his eyes lose focus for a moment.

A sudden, gagging cough bends him over—the strain of it draws out the cords in his neck and pushes a thick gob blood out from under the bandana. In one sticky strand, it swings and drools from his eyebrow down to the pavement. He wipes at it distractedly, noticing how the sun is swallowed by the decaying skyline at the end of the lot. He’s taken by the way all the stucco and the dirty glass, all the rusted dumpsters and the glinting pipes interact with its fleeting light. The air is dusty, and each ray is described individually by the particles that lie, forgotten, along its path—each one incinerated minutely, voiceless and surprised, as the retreating beams refuse to turn, refuse to acknowledge the nearness of the impending night.

Yes, this is nature—in its glory and its brutality. If a bird’s nest can be nature, how could this place not be?

And he did feel rather nested, then, as the dimming sky began to silhouette each of the squat tenement buildings that pushed in around him. They cupped him like a palm, a bowl, a nest, a cage; he leaned his head all the way back and stared straight up, bemusedly, at the one against which he sat. They gathered around him like a protective herd, leered over their spectacles like disapproving relatives, or tipped back their heads like bullies. He rose slowly to his feet and straightened his back, one hand pushing off a knee and the other pressing into the wall for balance.

He swayed for a moment, allowed the head-rush to clear, and began stitching together a clumsy gait. He swayed with each step and another line of blood was shaken loose, messily joining the last on the back of his forearm. As he dragged his fingers tenderly along the wall, his mind centuries away and unconcerned, one of the bricks handed him a chip of clay in apology. He stopped for a moment, surprised, and considered the way that it fit in the palm of his hand.

“It’s ok,” he said, “I never blamed you.”