Clotted Blood

If being a writer was like being an alcoholic then Bri was fourteen years sober. In those fourteen years, Bri had gone from the aspiring writer archetype to an actual adult living in the real world. She thought she had managed to cure the addictive feeling of words pouring out of her head in the blindingly white screen of a document or the barren, empty canyon of a journal. She thought she had destroyed the frivolous ambitions of living in New York City in a one-room apartment, awake by herself at 4 am, a wine glass in one hand and a cheap coffee cup in the other, passing out over her dingy laptop, missing the ever-important email from her editor with new notes. 

In order to maintain her sobriety, Bri had replaced her hopeless desires with more realistic goals. She now lived in a modest suburban neighborhood in her white colonial house at the corner of Baker and Pine Street. She now worked as a data analyst at a small insurance firm exactly a twenty-five minute drive from her house and she got off of work at 4 pm sharp to make it to her daughter’s PTA meetings. She picked up a decaf, low-fat chai latte from Starbucks every day on her drive home, ignoring her daughter’s never-ending prattle. She always arrived home in time to make a nutritious, balanced meal for her daughter and husband before finally seeking solace in the empty kitchen at night, wine glass in hand as she did the dishes before joining her husband upstairs in bed at 9 pm sharp. 

Bri was pretty sure she had only managed to stay fourteen years sober because of the sheer exhaustion of living a realistic life. That exhaustion is what propelled her through her loveless marriage, the ugly yellow-mistake-of-a-color they had painted their daughter’s bedroom walls, the mindless nature of a job she was sure would eventually be replaced by computers, and the ever suffocating menace of the lavender air fresheners her husband insisted would make their house a “sanctuary.”

Bri hated the smell of lavender more than anything in the world. More than anything except writing.

There had been three times in Bri’s life where she seriously considered becoming a writer. The first time was in sixth-grade when her entire class had had to submit short stories for a local contest. Bri’s story wasn’t selected, some eighth-grader had written a heavy-handed piece on environmentalism, but it was the first time Bri realized she could have control over something. There wasn’t much a sixth-grader could do to take charge of her own life. Her mother packed her lunches, the proximity of the dance academy to school dictated her extracurriculars, and her homework controlled her evenings. But when Bri had written her short story, about a high school girl named Ella and her unrequited crush on her charming classmate Mason, Bri had realized that anything those characters wanted to say, wanted to do, she was in control of. Mason would only return Ella’s feelings when Bri decided it was time. Writing a story meant creating an entire world that was hers to control.

Her parents had, for the time being, apparently wasted their allowance of dreams and ambitions on her brother, whose biggest accomplishment would be failing the MCAT and getting the manager position at a local fast-food restaurant chain, and didn’t give any consideration towards their other child. So when her sixth-grade self came home from school declaring that there was nothing more in life she wanted than to become a writer, her mother had simply hummed absentmindedly while flipping through her people magazine. And so began Bri’s first attempt at becoming an author. She quit her dance lessons, firmly lecturing her parents that “writers needed time to write,” which she then used to practice taking photos for the book jacket cover and signing her name for all the impending autographs. Ella and Mason were left in a graveyard of discarded pieces of lined paper, crumpled under Bri’s bed.

The second time when Bri reconnected with her passion for writing was in freshman year of college, coincidentally when she had also made the switch of going by Brianna to Bri so she wouldn’t “be like other girls.” Her high school boyfriend had just broken up with her over email, bemoaning how they just “wouldn’t make it last long-distance” and didn’t they both “want the chance to see other people?” So Bri, brokenhearted, avoided the fatal mistake of cutting her own bangs and simply found herself re-immersed in the world of Ella and Mason. But this time their world was different, unfamiliar. Ella was an English major at a big name university who always seemed to end up in class next to Mason, another English major who had a penchant for deep, brooding poetry. This time Mason courted Ella, always worming his way into her study group, cajoling her into giving him her phone number which he proceeded to spam with impenetrable poems about destiny and fate. This time Bri was exploring a new way to exhort her control over her characters, realizing that it was more interesting to watch Ella spurn all of Mason’s advances than to have her be the one chasing after him.

Eager about her rediscovered passion for writing, Bri came home for her first winter break with a cliche, metaphorical pencil tucked behind her ear as she enthused to all of her family members about her life’s goal. She stayed up every night, detailing vivid descriptions of the outfit Ella was wearing to the class where Mason tried to offer her a rose he’d painted black, trying to create Mason’s cryptic love poems that would cause Ella to lock her door at night and keep a wary eye on the window. It was over that seemingly life-defining winter break that Bri first saw the bewitching stillness of 4 am, her hand cramping from all of the ink of her pen spilling out like blood onto thin sheets of paper. Those 4 am writing sessions had become intoxicating for Bri, who now slept through the days with her family in order to dive into Ella and Mason’s world since her own seemed too lifeless. It was this Bri that dreamed of a life in the dirty streets of Manhattan, trading in her life for one she could control.

Her parents at this point had learned their lesson from her older brother and were ready to instill newly thought of ambitions into their college daughter. They thought that “writing could be a fun hobby but never a job” and constantly attacked her with not-so-subtle printed articles about the perils of the publishing world, about how a future in writing would only lead to “inevitable rejection.” After weeks of watching their daughter chugging coffee late at night, sleeping in until dinner time, Bri’s parents had decided to forcibly suffocate their daughter’s hopes and dreams. The future of Elly and Mason was locked away for good with the resounding click of the lock on the door to her father’s office. 

The third time that Bri plunged headfirst into the murky, bottomless waters of writing was when the Starbucks barista handed her a caffeinated chai latte by mistake.

For the first time in a long time, Bri had come how wide awake and focused. Instead of cooking a meal balanced between vegetables, fruits, and non-fatty proteins, Bri’s restless energy led her to the dusty magnet on her fridge with the number for a local pizza place. Her trembling hand wrote a simple note to her husband on a yellow sticky note, the same ugly yellow shade as their daughter’s bedroom, that she had some work to finish and not to bother her. Her shaky feet took her upstairs, to her private office, where the click of the handle as she opened the door let in a tumultuous flood of forgotten memories.

Typing furiously, watching the blank document fill up with sharp, sinister Times new Roman font was intoxicating. Bri had sold her soul to her forgotten ambition as she violently purged all of the ideas that had been soaking into her head, unnoticed for these fourteen years. She had thought that the bandage of realism she had wrapped around her craving had blighted her aspirations. But the caffeine now coursing through her veins, the knowledge that she would be awake for the 4 am stillness, had challenged her to peek under the bandage and now she was drenched in the gushing blood of having ignored her passion for too long. The ideas, furiously squeezing their way out of her head, were too overwhelming to keep up with. They set a furious pace that left Bri trailing behind, typing furiously, pure adrenaline blocking the pain of her cramping hands.

Ella was not so lucky.

Gone were her and Mason’s days of being innocent college students, the days of painted roses and alarming poems. Now Ella was on the run from something not quite human, not quite monster. She didn’t know the face of the imminent peril that chased after her, but she had felt its warm breath dragged across the nape of her neck. She didn’t know the purpose of the inevitable doom following her, but with the sinking feeling in her gut, the sweat racing down her body, maybe she was better off not knowing. 

Bri watched as the hands that didn’t feel like her own frantically described the hazy massacre of trees in Ella’s periphery as she accelerated her car faster and faster. Her own breath stilled as a sudden passenger made its presence known, grabbing Ella by the arm as it scraped her soft, supple skin with sharp teeth. Bri winced as she heard Ella’s harrowing scream, her last attempt at saving herself, screaming for the nobody that would come. It was with a dark rasp that the creature finally spoke, its voice echoing in Bri’s head.

And as suddenly as it had come, the hazy spell wrapped around Bri’s mind came undone, her fingers stalling as she debated between a period and a comma, uncertain if there was anything left to come. But for now, at least, Ella’s fate was frozen as the excruciating cramping in her fingers, the pounding of her head became too much to bear. 

Dizzy, weak, Bri stood up from her office chair, running her tongue gently along the torn, gnawed skin of her lip, tasting blood. She slowly lurched across the room, leaving the office door wide open behind her as she staggered into the bathroom. The fluorescent lights felt like arrows attacking her skull as she used her still cramping hands to gently massage her temples, trying to relieve the headache. The lavender scent of an air freshener clogged her senses, aggravating her pain. Bri already desperately missed the graveyard stillness of her office.

But it was in the grimy bathroom mirror that Bri finally looked at herself, at her frazzled hair, sweaty forehead, torn lip. It was in the grimy bathroom mirror that Bri finally noticed the words that had been etched into her left arm, blood the color of wine dripping down her wrist, the same words that the creature had spoken carved into her skin like a bloodstained tattoo. Bri couldn’t read the backward letters in the mirror, but she didn’t need to read them to know what the bloody letters spelled. The creature had said them. She had written them. 

“Why were you running.”

It was 4 am and Bri was no longer sober.