By Cayenne Souknary

All the places in my history are mine not because they are in my memory, but because my blood claimed it.


I have bled in every place I’ve been.

The nurse’s office at my elementary school is small with flickering lights that make the tan walls seem even smaller. I sit, my nose plugged and my head tilted down on a navy blue plastic chair, my legs a pendulum as I wait for the nurse to finish writing my report.

Across from me, another kid sits on the sticky plastic nurse bed with an ice pack.  The eerie hum of the AC and chatter from the front office are the only sounds. Pen scratches echo from the nurse’s personal office.

Our silence is broken as the nurse rolls back into the sick room on her chair. She hands me a slip of paper and slides across the room to grab me some more of the coarse brown paper towels I had been stuffing my nose with. She sends me on my way and I hear her start scratching away at the other kid’s report as the door closes.

The walk back to class is long and I still drag my feet to lengthen it.

When I open the classroom door, every head in the room stops to stare. Their eyes burn as their whispering waves of speculation loom above me. My cheeks heat up as I sit down, my face still covered with the brown paper towel and a rough ball of extras in my hand. I grow horns, the whispers watering them as they sprout through my hair.

I have bled in every place I’ve been.

I am soaring through the air, my hands on the bars grounding me so I don't fly off. Around and around I go. Methodically, I look at the ground where a pile of blue mats awaits my fall. Then to the ceiling with their bright white fluorescents. Then the ground again. I am upside down when I feel my grip slip. There is a blur of white and blue before the impact of the ground winds me. My world becomes watery as my chest tightens and my breaths become shallow.

Slowly, the world returns to me, and the water spills over, clearing my view slightly. I sit up. The disrupted chalk from the mat swirls around me.

Drip.

I look down to see a droplet of my blood, bright and crimson against the blue mat I crashed onto. I wipe my nose with the back of my hand and it comes back with a pale streak of blood and chalk. I feel my coach’s hand on my back, guiding me out of the gym. I tilt my head up towards the oversized fluorescents to prevent more blood from getting on the mat. Beneath me, the floor turns from plastic mat to carpet to tile. I tiptoe to avoid the unpleasant feeling of the cool grey tile sneaking into my bare feet and crawling up my back.

My coach leads me toward one of the benches where I sit. He hands me a scratchy white paper towel which I promptly stuff up my nose. I watch alongside the parents as my coach steps back onto the gym floor with a spray bottle and a rag. He stands over my fresh blood and sprays it down with hydrogen peroxide. I watch my teammates continue their practice as normal while occasionally looking over at me. The horns return, breaking through my hair. Scales unfold down my back. A tail wraps around my body, suffocating me.

I return to practice a week later with the shame of knowing why there is still a spot on the blue mat, cold, damp, and two shades darker than the rest. I was exposed without the tissues and paper towels to hide behind; everyone in the gym knew it was my fault. And they would stare until the shame rose in my throat, accompanying the blood.

I don’t always have a tissue or a mask available to hide behind.

I stand with my family before a frozen lake atop a mountain in Colorado. I am bundled head to toe like my poor Texan body has never been bundled before. The many layers make it difficult to move my arms, the zippers choke me. The wind strikes my face, the only part of me not covered. I swear I have never inhaled such crisp air before.

The fresh air in my lungs turns to rust as the familiar metallic smell fills my nose. I bring a gloveless hand up to my face in hopes that I am just imagining a phantom of the sensation. But my hand comes back warm and covered in crimson and I watch as it starts dripping down my hand, seeping between the cracks in my skin, creating a mosaic of flesh and blood.

Desperately, I tilt my head up to slow the river of blood, but there is nothing I can do to stop it.

I rush down the mountain to the visitor’s bathroom, the blood running down my face. The sound of laughter fills the air and I pass a flock of colorfully bundled Coloradan school children on their field trip. I cover my nose with my hand and turn my face away from them as I carefully speed past, frightened of scaring them with my bloody face. My other hand cups my chin, so as not to taint the pure white snow beneath me.

I go as fast as I can while still making sure I have a grip on the slippery ground below me. It is like I have claws to hold me up. I keep going because the smallest drop in the snow means I could be seen. The playing children will create stories about how the blood got there. My horns, scales, tails, and now my claws will all become real to them; a monster. The adults will imagine something worse, but maybe more realistic.

I don’t want to cause a panic, though I’ve done it before.

My friends and I are squished in the backseat of a car on a road trip to Galveston. The AC blasts on high as if it would do anything against the heat. The sun glares at me through my sunglasses and overheats my exposed thighs, melting me to the white.

We are on the highway when I smell the blood. Again, I try to tilt my head up to stop it. I sniff hard to try and keep the blood inside me and keep the problem to myself. I press the back of my hand to my nose and calmly try to ask for tissues. My friend next to me smells the blood. She turns to me and lets out a blood-curdling scream that causes our friend’s mom to swerve.

I try to turn away from her but she’s already seen the monster I’ve been trying so hard to hide.

She sees my horns, my scales, my tail, my claws, and my bloody face. A red river runs down my hand as I try to stop the flood. On the other side of the car, my friend searches for something to help me. From the driver’s seat, my friend’s mom scrambles to pull some wipes out of the center console, which she haphazardly hands to me as my friend next to me starts gagging.

My friend’s mom pulls over on the road to find tissues. The tissues help the bleeding but not the realization that I am a monster.

Despite this realization, my friends reassure me that I am not. “It's just a nosebleed”, they say.

I bleed everywhere I go.

I still haven’t grown out of the nosebleeds that were supposed to go away as I got older. The doctors haven’t found any abnormalities in my blood, despite the amount of tests I’ve had. My nosebleeds have become a part of who I am. I have become one with the monster.

All the places in my history are mine not because they are in my memory, but because my blood claimed it. ■