Throat Bleeder

A horror story.

She wasn’t used to this type of screaming.

She had screamed before, of course. She was a human. She would scream when her brother would sneak up on her when they were kids. She would scream when she found the exact dress she had been looking for at Nordstrom's. Until now, the loudest she had ever screamed is when she sliced her foot open on a sharp rock while going hiking when she was thirteen. 

But these screams were different. They were horror like, ones that could make a throat bleed. They weren’t even like the ones you would hear in slasher movies, premeditated via a script written in 12 point Courier. No, these were the type of shrieks that didn’t even sound like a noise that could be omitted from a human, like when you repeat a word over and over again so it loses its meaning. They were the loudest sounds that Raven had ever made.

His blood tasted sweeter than hers. Perhaps he had the habit in indulging himself in some sugary snacks on the regular. She knew it wasn’t her own blood, because she would taste it herself when she would peel the skin off her lip, or get one of her chronic nose bleeds. She was too familiar with the taste of her own blood. Bitter, and when swallowed, it would tingle the sides of her tongue. She recognized instantly when this blood entered her mouth that it wasn’t hers. It was as if it had it’s own DNA.

Raven had never considered herself a bad driver. When she took her test at age sixteen, she only had five points taken off due to a slightly wide turn. She managed to get into only two fender benders in the subsequent ten years, neither of which were particularly her fault. But having an unconscious man halfway through her windshield proved otherwise. She was too afraid to reach out and touch him, her fingers could already predict how cold he would feel in an hour or two. She felt that coldness in her fingertips via her mind only, and it soon spread out through her entire body like a parasite, digging its way into her brain and organs. 

A large shard of glass made it into her leg an inch deep, but she couldn’t feel the pain due to her shell shock. Had she put on her favorite pair of jeans this morning (like she originally planned) instead of running shorts, her thighs would have remained scar free. But her mind wasn’t occupied by such thoughts, the blaring of nearby sirens were too loud to let Raven have thoughts at all. An ambulance sent for the man, a cop car sent for her.

She had never realized how thick body bags were. She supposed they had to be sturdy enough to carry heavier people and to be resistant against unpredictable weather. Today Raven realized body bags were more for just covering corpses. She managed to sneak a glimpse of the man’s face before he disappeared behind the oddly bright silver zipper. All she could make out was straw black hair and olive skin before he was carried off. Someone had already taken the liberty of closing his eyes, to Raven’s distaste. She wished she could figure out what color they were at least, because eyes, in her opinion, are the most important and most telling a feature a human could have.

However, his hair and skin would be the subject and muse behind her paintings for the rest of her days.

Reviews

[Viv Wade]

Well written story, paints a very vivid picture. The last line made me wonder if Raven had hit the guy accidentally, or had done it deliberately to provide herself with material for her paintings? Scary thought! Well done.