Nightfall
The first time she came to me, I woke in blood. My bed was crimson velvet – at least I called it velvet, though of course it was velour, scratchily artificial and bought from some high street discount place in the post-Halloween sale. The man-made whatever-it-was soaked up the blood beautifully so I didn’t notice at first that I’d got my period: gushingly so, bright red, flooding out like the elevator in The Shining . What I did notice was the suck on my cunt. More specifically, the tongue slipping between my inner labia, the languid drag on my clit. I thought it was a dream – wanted it to be a dream – was afraid it was a dream. I kept my eyes closed. The room was too hot and smelled like rotting flowers. I felt teeth. A blissful, burning pull. The jab of a forked tongue. I came, hard, in a hot gush of blood, and I felt my whole body convulse and pulse and pulse and she climbed on top of me and lay her body on mine, the sweet weight of her, her cool clean skin on every part of my skin, and by the time I could open my eyes it was all gone: the blood, the throb, the night, the oxytocin, her.
The morning sun felt sour. I could smell my mother burning the toast.
The menagerie of crystal animals by my bed had all fallen over. The lilac crystal deer, the size of my clit, had fallen and lay nestled in a light fuzz of dust on the plush carpet. I picked it up and swallowed it.
In the library, I doodled cobwebs on the corner of my notebook. Clouds and a crescent moon. A heart pierced with an arrow. I glanced over at Thessaly’s homework and it was just Keir Keir Keir, Thessaly Byrne-Burke, Mrs Byrne-Burke, T+K. Milagro’s homework I couldn’t see because she’d fallen asleep leaning over it with her head on her arms.
Boys think they know what girls want: an inverse of their own needs. Where they desire, girls want to be desired. Where they want to penetrate something, girls want to be penetrated. Where they hunger, girls want to provide for them. You have to laugh. Poor things. They have no idea of the ferocity in a girl, the ravening wolves pulling in opposite directions.
No idea that a girl can want to be the passive fuck-toy, hypnotised and hogtied, body pulsing as she’s penetrated. And at the same time want to be the one penetrating, the one powerful, the rock star, the fuckboy, a lanky seven-foot devil up on a stage humping a mic stand while girls scream until their throats bleed. And at the same time want to be soft, pulpy, clothed in pale velvets, adorned with flowers and worshipped with a dozen gently lapping tongues. And that she can feel all those experiences at the same time during one ordinary morning wank. The thought that one man with one penis could possibly provide that. What a joke.
That was the inside of my mind, the hidden part of me; when on the surface I was pure and clean and doing my Advanced Higher Physics homework. Rotational motion. A little bit of electromagnetism.
It was late closing on a winter evening and the library was saving on lights. The darkness at the end of the corridor said no one else had been here in a while, or if they had then they weren’t moving. Sitting in the dark, holding their breath and their tongue. Waiting.
‘What’s the best thing a guy ever did to you?’ said Milagro from the nest of her arms, her voice muffled from her school jumper.
‘Left me alone,’ I muttered, and I didn’t think Milagro had heard but she snorted a laugh.
‘With me? Or for me?’ said Thessaly. Her jaw worked rhythmically, a fast heartbeat, and she blew a big red bubble and let it pop against her glossed lips.
Milagro’s head jerked up. She looked confused. ‘No, to you. You know.’
‘Keir always says he’ll kill me if I leave him.’
‘Oh my God,’ Milagro breathed, eyes wide. ‘You’re so lucky.’
I think all girls want to be a little bit killed. But only a little.
Milagro was still staring enviously at Thessaly, and Thessaly was toying with this tiny gold pendant she wears – we all have them, it’s a theme, she has a guillotine, Milagro has the thumbscrews, and I have the pear of anguish. We’d started with the standard instrument-of-torture accessory, the crucifix, but we liked to branch out, because we were not like other girls, just like all girls say.
I went to say something, I don’t know what now, maybe that thing about being killed but only a little, and something caught in my throat and I sneezed and a fine red mist of blood landed like dandelion fluff on the desk between us.
Thessaly shrieked and yanked her books off the desk. The movement triggered the lights and they all flickered on.
‘Not again,’ I said, tipping my head back. I felt the blood drip metallic down the back of my throat.
It happened fairly regularly – still happens, sometimes. Thin skin somewhere inside me, not enough to keep my insides inside.
‘Did I get blood on you?’ I sounded like I was speaking through a gag.
‘No, it’s just …’ Thessaly sounded awkward. ‘It was just a surprise. It’s not like I think you’re gross or anything. It’s not that. It’s just, the blood and stuff, that’s how you get diseases.’
Milagro gasped. I still had my head tipped back, so I could feel rather than see that she was glaring at Thessaly.
‘Faith, oh my God, oh my God,’ said Thessaly, awkwardly patting my shoulder. ‘So stupid, I’m sooooo sorry. I didn’t even think about your brother. Did I make you sad? Do you think you’ll cry?’
Christian is five years older than me and I haven’t seen him in almost that same amount of time. My mother was too angry at him leaving to ask herself why he did.
When the blood seemed to have slowed, I did a big sniff. A gelatinous clot of blood hit my throat and I swallowed it silently, not even gagging.
‘I don’t think he caught it from a sneeze,’ I said. Probably a cock, possibly a needle.
At a sleepover once I woke to a sex-like stickiness on my lip and cheeks, and found blood gushing from my nose. I don’t know why my first thought was to turn to Kerensa Byrne-Burke – whose house we were staying at, and who had heard me shifting in my sleeping bag and had also sat up – and grin, knowing that my teeth would be bloodied. I liked the thought that I was a still from a horror movie poster. I don’t know if I thought Kerensa was going to kiss me, or laugh, or run away screaming, and I don’t know which I wanted. In any case, she just stared at me, and I went wordlessly to the bathroom and spat a gloppy red clot into the toilet bowl, right on the shit smears her older brother had left. Unless it wasn’t him, and it was Kerensa; everyone shits, after all, even posh girls. Maybe especially posh girls.
After I woke up bleeding a few times, my mother decided it was time I stopped, and she took me to the hospital, to a strange below-ground department with extremely bright lights and fake birdsong piped in and a smell of bleach and pollen. There a nurse put hot needles up my nose to cauterise … something, I don’t know exactly what. It didn’t hurt. I still taste blood some mornings, but now it only goes back into me, and never out, like the nurse put up a little construction barrier. The building of my body is still crumbling, but I can’t see it, so I guess who cares.
She’s like that, my mother. Always a barrier. I know it sounds dramatic to say but I don’t think she’s touched me since I was a baby. Even then, she told me that when she fed me and Christian, she had to use these plastic nipple shields, because we wouldn’t latch on properly. But I think it’s so that no part of her had to touch us. It’s safer that way, I know. A placenta so our bloods didn’t have to touch. Rubber gloves. Hair nets. Face masks. Condoms.
‘Wash your pad,’ my mother said when she found the packet in the bathroom cabinet. I hadn’t even told her I’d got my period; I just went to the pharmacy. ‘Wash it off in the sink and then wash the sink.’
‘And then what do I do with it?’
My mother wrinkled her nose like I had just thrust my bloody pad under it.
‘Then throw it away.’
‘Then why wash it, if I’m going to throw it away?’
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, like I was getting on her last nerve, and breathing techniques were all that was standing between her and murder. The brand of pad I bought had the tagline ‘… Because.’ Because what? Because I’m shedding womb lining? Because blood is gushing from my vagina? Even the period pad people couldn’t bring themselves to say ‘period’.
That’s all my mother ever told me about periods: wash it away, throw it away. She didn’t tell me that at first it would look like I had shat myself. She didn’t tell me it could be ropey or mucousy or come out of me in clots. She didn’t tell me that my cramps would feel like there was an enormous pepper grinder, slow with rust, twisting inside me. She didn’t tell me it would smell like raw steak or like old pennies or like rotten eggs. Just: get rid of it, and don’t let anyone know.
She didn’t need to tell me why, because I already knew. I knew who – what – wanted young girls’ blood. I’d read plenty of books where the girls wanted to give it to them, too. And there’s only one way to give someone a lot of your blood without hurting yourself. The books didn’t say the vampires liked periods in particular, because no one ever says that word. But I knew. ‘… Because.’
I didn’t have a tissue to wipe my blood off the desk, and I didn’t want to get it on the library books or my school uniform. I thought about licking it up, or using my hair, but Thessaly and Milagro were watching me. I remembered the morning and wondered if I’d shit out that little crystal deer whole, or if it would shatter inside me, or my body would absorb it entirely.
‘Come on,’ I said, and picked up my books without touching the blood. ‘We’ll miss the bus.’
That night my period was in full flow and she sucked the blood from me over and over and over and over and over and over. She whispered things to me, about how I was her slut, her toy, her doll, how she owned me, how I was just a thing to her, how I made her want to hurt me; she whispered it all in my ear, voice thick as cream and dense with love. Afterwards she crawled up my body and held me until I stopped shaking.
In English we were reading Dracula , because of course we were. Girl gangs dress to theme, so Thessaly was in a red veil stitched with tiny black seed pearls, Milagro had walked down the corridor holding a lit candle so the wax spilled and hardened on her hand, and under my uniform I was wearing a belt of rose thorns (plastic, sadly, but it still pricked). Obviously Miss St Cyr made them put the veil and candle in their bags, and also Milagro had to go and run her hands under the cold tap and take a detention for having an open flame in school, and that’s why I’m smarter than Thessaly and Milagro, because no one knew I had my thorns on.
Keir Byrne-Burke, with the same pale eyes and underbite as his twin Kerensa, was reading. His seat was beside mine and I could smell him: feet, washing powder, cum. It was the bit with the vampire brides and he’d already read ‘wicked burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips’ and he’d even managed ‘deliberate voluptuousness’, but ‘languorous ecstasy’ was obviously too much for him, and he stumbled over the words, and I didn’t notice because I’d read on ahead and was thinking about my own languorous ecstasy, tilting my hips so my labia pressed my clit against the hard plastic chair, and I brought my thumb to my mouth and pressed my teeth down on it, ripping off a loose edge of skin, and the tiniest salt of blood burst on my tongue and I must have made a sound then because Keir Byrne-Burke was on his feet, his back to the rest of the class so only I could see the hard-on carbuncle in his trousers.
‘Fuck you laughing at, fucking cunt,’ he said, big man, big tough man, leaning over my desk and getting his spit on my book.
‘Keir,’ said Miss St Cyr, and I wish I could say it was in a warning tone, but she mostly just sounded tired. ‘Sit back down. The word is pronounced languorous .’
‘Your brother,’ said Keir, bringing his face close to mine, his voice low, almost a growl, like a motor trying to start, ‘your fucking brother fucked filth and now he’s fucking dead. That’s what you get. Because –’
And he didn’t get any further, because I girlishly tilted my head up towards him, or I suppose not so much a tilt as a very hard nod, a headbutt, some might say, and his nose burst into blood and so did mine, and the surprise of it made me laugh and the blood on my lips sprayed right into Keir’s face.
‘Fuck!’ he was shouting, backing away from me, bumping into desks, frantically swiping my blood off his face. ‘Fuck! Help! Fuck!’
I turned to Milagro, who had been toying with her gold thumbscrews necklace, and I expected her to laugh too but she scraped back her desk and moved away from me, still holding the tiny thumbscrews like she was warding back a demon.
In the toilets I ran my hands under the cold tap. There wasn’t actually that much blood. It had dried in a row of drips from my nose, round the curve of my mouth and down my throat. A row of rubies. What a waste that we only put jewels on our ears and throat; the colour looked so pretty there.
I heard the door open and Milagro came in. I didn’t turn to look at her; just at her reflection in the spit-smeared mirror. She looked ugly, reflected. Her hands were scalded red from the candle wax.
‘Keir is such a dick,’ she said. ‘He deserved that. I wasn’t on his side or anything, I just got a shock. You’d think I’d be used to the sight of blood by now, you’d think all girls would be, isn’t it weird that we’re meant to be like these delicate –’
‘I don’t have anything,’ I said to her reflection. ‘In my blood.’
‘I know, God, I know, it’s just, the other day, what Thessaly said. About that’s how you get diseases. It was on my mind, and I – Faith, I’m trying to apologise, are you even listening?’
I handed her the wet paper towel, blood still smeared down my throat. She stood there, mouth open, until it dawned on her. For a second I thought she was going to clean me up, but she mumbled something about being late for French, and dropped the paper towel in the bin on her way out.
She came to me again that night and she said to me: ‘Shall I tell you that I love you?’ She leaned in and pressed her nose to my throat, a slow inhale, and I felt a part of me go inside her. ‘No. That’s not it. You want me to say: I hate you.’ She pulled the blood from me then, a little from my nose and a little from my thumb and then it was my cunt, my cunt, my cunt, and though her mouth was full I still heard her words in my head, her voice deep inside me, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, and I came so hard I scraped my throat raw. That morning I had put my tiny crystal rabbit in my mouth and rolled it around. It fit perfectly between my upper teeth. I had a deer, a rabbit, a turtle, a mouse, a sparrow. I had only just noticed that all my crystal animals were prey.
I lay there under her and I wondered what would happen if you could gather all your dark things. If you could bring all the shadows in you together, crush them all in your hands. What would you get? A blank space, a compressed nothingness? Or would it be better and richer, the best and most delicious parts of you, the boiled-down essence?
A few days later my period finished. I told myself I could wait. My period would come again – that’s what they did, they were known for it. Every single month, the pepper-grinder wretchedness, the judder of the dry tampon, watching the blood pool and pink around your feet in the shower. Worrying that you smell like past-its-sell-by mince. Worrying that you actually quite like that smell.
In the library with all the lights gone to dark except mine, I read about night terrors. I read about a man who tried to be rid of his night terrors by bleeding himself regularly. It didn’t say what he did with the blood, whether he ate it or threw it away or what. It did say that the bleeding had the opposite effect, the incubus being ‘aggravated rather than abated’, so he doubled the amount of the blood-draw. I wondered if two incubi came to him then, and if he was tempted to triple it to call three, or if he was scared of losing too much blood, and dying.
I lingered on the description of being ridden by the night hag, the sinister figure made of shadows, the sensation of being suffocated, the feeling of being pinned down, the impossibility of escape, and I felt my stomach twist like a period cramp and my clit throbbed and I pressed against the seam of my jeans and with tiny movements I made myself come in silence at my desk.
The next morning I got up and rinsed the crusts from my eyes with icy water. Pulled my hair into a ponytail. Clenched my teeth until I felt a back one squeal and almost crack. Applied my SPF and my acne gel. Punched myself in the mouth. Tasted blood.
I never asked her to come to me. I never consented. Boys make you say yes but you don’t know what you’re saying yes to, and once you’ve said it then it’s too late. You consent to their grubby hands on you, their hangnails scratching your vaginal walls. You consent to a cheesy pissy cock in your mouth. You consent to it going inside you, squishy and solid at the same time, like a hard-boiled egg. You say you want to because that’s what they want to hear. You don’t get to actually want things, you only get to say the word.
With her, I agreed to nothing, and got exactly what I wanted.
My period came back early, two weeks later, as if it couldn’t wait. The soft clock of my body, losing time. It happened suddenly, in a way it didn’t usually, like a plug had been yanked out. I was in the shower and a clot plopped out of me and nuzzled into the arch of my foot. Usually I’d rinse it away without looking, but this time I squatted down and poked at it. It was viscous, substantial, somewhere between jam and egg yolk. I squatted there in the shower, the steam rising up around me, and I felt my body open and release, and I felt alive, like the animal I was.
In bed I rolled out the red carpet for her. I thought about making a joke about that but that would involve speaking and I don’t think she wants me to speak. I made a noise once, a feral grunt that could have been more or no or why , I don’t even know, I wasn’t thinking in words at that point, and she slipped her cold dry fingers into my mouth to silence me.
‘When you die,’ she said to me that night, ‘I will fuck you one more time then feed you to wolves,’ and I think where the hell is she going to find wolves, and then I think about how I heard about rewilding, about wolves being reintroduced in the north of Scotland, and I think about a wolf snout parting my labia, fur against my fur, a wolf tooth sliding against my clit, the smell of blood and meat, the death of something weaker than me, and I came again.
I thought about how when I die, she will take her sharp pinkie nail and slice me open from my throat to my cunt and spread me wide. She will take out all my glistening purple innards and put them in their own individual dishes. Perhaps the dishes will be crystal. I think they will gleam.
My period came and went and came and went and it wasn’t enough, it was never enough.
I peeled off scabs and she came to me.
I ripped off hangnails and she came to me.
I violently waxed my pubic hair and she came to me.
I cut lines into my thighs with a razor and she came to me.
I jabbed a compass into the soft flesh behind my ear and she came to me.
I called her, and she came, and so did I, over and over and over, and she kissed me with her tongue hot and bloody and I tasted myself, and I was held and I was cleansed and I was still.
One day after school I went to M?dchen’s house, because I love M?dchen’s house. She’s Milagro’s mum and so Milagro is there too and that’s fine, even though things are weird between us kind of, she never said anything about that day in the school toilets and neither did I, but we can still sprawl on the mauve inflatable chairs in her room and tip sugar into our mouths and use her magenta lips phone to call boys, because what else is there to do?
M?dchen’s kitchen is like a witch’s kitchen, steaming warm, herbs and copper pots everywhere. I was very pale by then, and I felt hungry and sick all the time, and the heat in the kitchen made my head spin. Black curtains seemed to swoop in at the edge of my vision like I was on a theatre stage and the show was over, it was time to go, but then the blackness receded like they had changed their mind and I had to do an encore.
In the kitchen M?dchen was stirring batter in a bowl with a wooden spoon, with all these ornate glasses set out, full of something dark. Milagro dumped her bag and coat on the floor, then picked up a glass and sniffed it.
‘I wouldn’t drink that,’ said M?dchen lightly. ‘It’s blood.’
‘Gross, Mum, ugh! Why?’
‘For the brownies.’
‘Blood brownies? Grossness. Where did you even get it?’
‘You’ve eaten these many times, my pet, and have never complained. The blood gives it the perfect texture. Crumbly and fudgy.’
‘I wish I didn’t know what was in them. I can’t eat them now.’
‘Can I?’ I asked. The glasses were so beautiful, tiny and all different colours, etched with stars. They were probably vintage. They were probably from some really cool shop that only M?dchen knew about.
She smiled. ‘Of course you can. The iron will be good for you. Are you menstruating? Milagro just finished.’
‘Mum, God, can you not?’
‘You girls need to pay attention to your iron. I know all about it. Oh, how I bled!’
Milagro flounced out of the room, her steps thud-thud-thudding up the stairs, and with a grin M?dchen offered me the spoon to lick. She was right; the blood really did make it syrupy. I pressed the batter to the roof of my mouth with my tongue, feeling the crystals of sugar dissolve.
‘I had fibroids and I bled through everything! Pads as thick as steaks – two of them – and still I bled through,’ said M?dchen. She winked at me and then licked the spoon herself. If she’d taken care not to lick the same part I had, she didn’t make it obvious. But I noticed she put it in the sink after, and took a fresh spoon to her batter. ‘Need something bigger,’ she said, and I don’t know if she meant the spoon or her pads. ‘I left trails of blood on the floor, on the furniture. I felt, all the time, as if I’d just stood up from a very hot bath. Everything had a sort of light mist through it, the edges fuzzy. Like being in a dream all the time.’
‘Do you miss it?’ My voice was quiet, muffled by the gooey batter.
‘Oh, it’s not over for me! Not, at least –’ and here she came close to me and whispered theatrically in my ear, even though no one except the cat and the blood could hear us, ‘– at least as far as my husband is concerned. I put a tiny bit of raw liver in my panties every month. Can’t have him thinking I’m old!’
‘I thought men didn’t like periods. The boys at school say it’s disgusting. They say they can smell our pads.’
‘That is just boys. A real man appreciates that a woman is most sacred when she is bleeding.’
M?dchen is a midwife. She spends every day literally looking at vaginas and the things that come out of them. She told me once that when pregnant women call to say stuff has come out of them, she gets them to bring the stuff in, even if it’s messy or it smells. The midwives put on white gloves and examine the stuff with their fingers, discussing the colour and texture, the give and collapse of it. They stretch it out and rub it between finger and thumb. She said they smell it. I wanted to ask if they ever taste it, but I thought even for M?dchen that was too far. That was before I saw her little glasses of blood. I don’t think they’re from her work, though I didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell.
M?dchen stopped and looked at me. She tucked my hair behind my ear and gently, so gently, stroked the scabbed-over cuts. She cupped my face in her hands, her wrist bones on my collarbones, her fingertips over my ears, and she kissed me on the forehead.
‘Faith,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t let anyone hurt you.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said.
‘I know,’ said M?dchen. ‘I know.’
I helped her bake the brownies and, later, despite what she’d said, Milagro did eat them. They were delicious.
In the library all the lights were off except the one on me. I was wearing my pear of anguish and my belt of rose thorns and reading about the signs someone has been visited by a vampire: fatigue, lethargy, loss of appetite or extreme hunger, insomnia or hypersomnia, excessive passion or listlessness, unexpected bloodstains. Common symptoms of menstruation: fatigue, lethargy, loss of appetite or extreme hunger …
We used to play a game, Thessaly and Milagro and me. One girl would put her hands around another girl’s throat and find the biggest vein, then press on it. The blood would start to pound, you could hear it throb in your ears, like being underwater in a storm, and you’d have to look her in the eye until you passed out. We thought some kind of truth would be caught there in our eyes, like crystal balls. I can’t remember when we stopped playing that game.
I feel bad about this story. About all of it. Shouldn’t it be a girl-power narrative? Isn’t it all about girl power now? Shouldn’t I be empowered and strong and good and sort of relatable too, with a minor adorable flaw like a bad singing voice or always being late?
But it’s my choice. It’s my power. If it’s my choice, then how can it be damage? If it gets me what I want, then isn’t that power?
M?dchen was only trying to be kind. But she should have known that a bit of liver in her knickers could solve her problems, but it wouldn’t do shit for mine.
I spread myself on my crimson velvet bed and I opened my best vein as wide as I could. I knew she would come to me, lie on me and take from me – but it wasn’t like before.
She was inside me. All the way.
Wrapping around my bones, ribboning through my muscles and sinew. It was agony.
I gasped out and came harder than I ever had – than I ever have, to this day, despite the attempts of many lovers and professionals – and I felt her come with me.
And I think I died. I really think I died.
That was the last time.
I woke to a paramedic’s mouth pressed to mine. The lights were very bright. I was freezing cold and very white, and there was no blood anywhere. The cut on my wrist looked puffy and puckered, like I’d been underwater for a long time.
My mother held my hand tight. When I opened my eyes and looked at her, she raised my hand and kissed it so hard I felt her teeth through her lips.
‘Faith,’ she said, and pulled me close to her. ‘Oh, Faith.’
She held me like that for maybe thirty seconds, her heart beating against mine, her nose pressed to my hair, and then the paramedic had me sit up so she could check my blood pressure and my mother never touched me again.
I turned eighteen and I wasn’t dead, and neither was Christian, so I went to live with him. Plenty of people hurt me, including me, but no one ever did it as carefully as she did.
It’s been many years since she came to me. I’m not a girl now and I have made another body inside mine and birthed it in a wave of agony and blood and then a few years later I did it all again and I pushed so hard that it felt like all my glistening innards fell right out and every drop of blood in me was gone and even then, even then, she never came back. She never came back to me.
I still have the scars, soft and silver, touchable and tender, the most beautiful part of me; a reminder that once, once, I was loved.