Blood Flower (A second prose sestina)

Blood Flower is a milkweed and contains a white milky poisonous sap that exudes from the foliage when cut or damaged.

Extract of the root is used as an emetic and laxative. A decoction of the plant is used as an abortifacient (a substance that causes abortion).

*****

I feel sick and I wonder how long I’ve been bleeding into my stomach. Surely I have an ulcer by now – perforating, as I sit here – leaking stomach contents into my body, letting them float free around my other organs.

It seems like a mediocre lesson: Everything has its place. Letting things out where they don’t belong is dangerous. I imagine blood mixing with acid and leaching out into the rest of me.

I am sitting in the library, in a corner, near windows, at a desk. The window frames touch each other at the corner, coming to a wooden-cornice meeting point that rounds off the edge with three gentle, relieved stripes running sill to ceiling. They were obviously planned as a pair, not jumbled in like some corner-to-corner windows. One of them is secured by ADT.

I can see everything from here. I’m facing the window that looks out onto the back entrance of the library, the entrance everyone uses, and I can see through it to the airlock double set of double doors, the people (patrons) coming and going; as it grows darker, I see also everything behind me reflected in my twin windows. I can see the two desk carrels behind me, one twentysomething man at each, and the Dr Pepper bottle one of them has placed, illegally, by his study materials. I pull out my glass bottle of diet peach-mango green tea (with caffeine) and put it on the sill next to me.

My stomach still feels empty, hollow, and I wonder what happened to the dinner I just ate: Are black beans and jalapenos and cheese and tortilla running in tiny winding rivers down to my feet? If they were, would my feet swell? Would I be able to remove my shoes?

My feet feel fine.

It’s my stomach; it’s my heart. Maybe I’ve had too much caffeine.

I’m wearing my headphones so that no one will try to speak to me. It’s like I’m invisible with these on. It’s like I’m a panopticon operator.

One twentysomething boy runs past me, behind, and appears ten seconds later outside, at the back entrance. He’s on his cell phone. I can’t hear him because he’s outside, but I pretend it’s because I have my headphones on.

I might stay here forever.

What a scary thought.

The boy with the Dr Pepper is still behind me, pretending to study.

I look up and stare at the reflection in the window, the soda’s yellow cap and maroon label, and something moves – I realize I’ve also been staring at a person, outside, a woman who looks like a man or vice versa, who shifts, looks at me, goes inside. I don’t know her. Or him.

I can see myself floating in both windows, face-to-face and in profile, wearing the headphones, putting my chin in my hand, leaning into the desk. I pretend to study my computer.

Maybe I need more caffeine.

I want to listen to something, but I can’t decide what. I want to listen to everything at once – I want to hear all the good songs I know at the same time, to pile comfort on comfort until it feels like sinking into a giant, white down comforter. Maybe every song blends, like every color, into nothing, into white; maybe all the noises together turn into silence. I am listening to silence now, but I wish it were louder.

The cell-phone twentysomething comes back inside.

“How long are you going to stay here?” he asks his Dr Pepper friend.

“Probably til nine,” Dr Pepper guy says.

“Til it closes?” Cell-phone guy asks. “My dad’s going to come pick me up so I can go check into the hotel. Do you want me to bring my tools here?”

I’m glad I’m not listening to music.

“It feels like high school,” Dr Pepper guy says.

“Yeah.” Cell-phone guy. “Keep seeing double?”

Dr Pepper guy nods.

I think I’m getting a headache. It’s creeping in from my ears like the taste of a copper penny or a nine-volt battery, or blood. It’s thin and wiry, and I imagine the nerves stretching from my ears across my scalp, firing tiny pins of pain across my head, criss-crossing like a net. Cell-phone guy gets another call and is outside again.

When he returns, I catch only part of the conversation.

“You’re a caffeine drinker,” he says to the Dr Pepper guy, who says something I can’t hear.

“I’m getting a car from Fairfield – they’re putting me in the system,” cell-phone guy continues. Dr Pepper guy gets up and they leave. I look down the skinny stack I’m next to – Mystery, MCD-REU – to the librarian at the end, her blue shirt and white-white hair a shocking contrast, and watch cell-phone guy, his back to me, check something out and leave. Two people walk around the corner outside, passing both my windows, and come in.

There is nothing in my stomach. There won’t be for a long time.

I put on “Blood Flower” by Tilly and the Wall.

You'd better watch where you're walking
There might be somebody's blood flower growing
You'd better watch what you're doing
Don't go fucking around in the garden

It’s darker and darker outside. I have nothing else to do.

My hands smell like pennies.

I might stay here til they close.