I don’t remember when the bleeding started. 

It had been a few weeks since she moved in, at least.  Maybe a few months.  It was hard to keep track.  She bought one of those geraniums that come in green plastic pots, and it was sitting on the kitchen windowsill, still covered with its greenhouse blooms.  So maybe it hadn’t been that long. 

I remember that geranium because it was the only thing Gena ever brought to the kitchen.  This wasn’t like other relationships I’d had, where the girl’s things start to infest your house, like mice, surprising you with their unfamiliar shapes when you open drawers and cabinets.  And then the messy disentanglement when the break-up comes, sorting out the stacks of books and towels and music collections, not sure what belongs to whom. 

With each ending, I got a little surer about who I was, what I wanted to keep, what I wouldn’t let anyone walk away with.  That’s part of what made life with Gena so easy.  She brought almost nothing.  She could take almost nothing away. 

 #

We were in the kitchen when I noticed it for the first time.  There was an hour to go before I had to be at work, and we were sitting on either side of the little wooden table, the Help Wanted section spread out between us, facing her.  Gena’s hands were wrapped around her coffee mug, and when she lifted it to her mouth, I saw the red streaks of four distinct fingerprints.  Another dark blot stared up at me from the margin of the newspaper. 

I grabbed her wrist before she could pull it away.

Once I caught her, Gena didn’t resist.  Her face remained as blank and smooth as it had been while she gazed at the classifieds.  That was all I could ever remember about Gena’s face: that it reminded me of an empty canvas, or one of those carved bone cameos with their pale, almost featureless heads.  I couldn’t have described her to anyone. 

“What did you do to your hand?” I asked.

 “It’s nothing,” she said.  “It just happens.”

 Her eyes flicked up to mine.  They were hazel, a color that could turn into practically anything. 

 I looked back down at her hand, the cracked fingertips embedded with thin streaks of red.  One droplet welled into a dark pearl that slid down into her wrinkled white palm.  Her hand was cold.

 “Jesus, Gena,” I said.  “Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”

 She shrugged lightly.  “It’s just me,” she said.  “I’m not worried about it.”

 “Well, maybe you should be.”

 I got up from the table and went into the bathroom to dig through the medicine cabinet, where a box of bandages stood on the top shelf, unopened.  I brought them to the kitchen.  Gena hadn’t left her chair, but I could see a small streak of red on her cheek where she had brushed away a strand of her thin brown hair. 

 “Don’t make any calls today,” I told her, folding up the classifieds.  “You couldn’t go in for an interview anyway, with your hands looking like this.”

 I left her sitting at the kitchen table with a fresh cup of coffee and the bandage box, and I thought about her all the way to the end of the block, until the first intersecting street sliced through my visions.

#

When I got home, she was sitting on the couch, her hands wrapped around a paperback book.  Pale light pushed through the leaded glass window, rippled by the ivy that moved with the breeze, outlining her in ivory.  She smiled up at me.  She had just taken a shower; her hair hung wet and dark against her neck, and her too-large clothes dragged around her, damp and wrinkled, like a moth’s new wings. 

Each of her fingertips was wrapped with a band-aid, saturated with shower water.  They were loosening, sliding down, folding in on themselves.

I sat down on the coffee table’s edge, facing her.  “How are your hands?”

“They’re fine.  The same.”

I pulled her right hand toward me and began peeling the bandages off of her fingers.  “You know, you really shouldn’t shower with these on.”

“I guess not,” she said.  She didn’t flinch, even when the adhesive tugged at the wounds.

Beneath the soggy band-aids, her skin was white and cold.  Fresh blood rose up through the cracked skin.  If anything, the cracks looked worse, deeper and wider.  I brought ointment from the bathroom and the bandages from the kitchen, and I began to rewrap her fingertips.

Gena watched me silently.  “You’re good at taking care of people,” she said at last.

I didn’t look up.  “I’ve had a lot of practice.” 

There was blood on the tips of my fingers now; her blood.  I dabbed ointment across her smallest finger, sealing it with the littlest bandage in the box.  Then I turned her hand over and kissed the back of it, where the skin was thin above the fragile bones.  It was the temperature of rain. 

 #

The next day, and the next and the next, I thought about Gena all the way to work.  I thought about her again afterward.  On the way home I stopped in drugstores to buy medicinal lotions, extra strength hand creams, lip balm; bottles and bottles of water, juice and herbal tea, in case the bleeding should dehydrate her.  But Gena seemed to get worse instead of better.  Her hands continued to crack and bleed, and her lips, which had always looked chapped, became ragged, red and torn, like a rosebud rolled back and forth beneath the sole of someone’s shoe. 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to the doctor?” I asked for the fifth or sixth time.

Gena just shook her head, smiling.  Maybe it was the fading color in her face, but her eyes seemed to be growing brighter.  When I stopped caring for her hands and looked up, they were always looking back at me, their strange yellow-green reminding me of something I couldn’t place. 

“It’s just me,” she would say, turning up her peeling palms.  “This is just how I was made, I guess.”

Spots of her blood turned up everywhere.  On the clothes she wore, on the bathroom towels, on the glasses she left beside the sink.  I began to look for them, smiling when they turned up in unexpected places.  They were like flowers, little gifts scattered for me to find. 

 #

Soon her feet began to bleed. 

She wore thick socks, sometimes two or three pairs, and still the blood seeped through in patches.  She left faint red tracks across the hardwood floors.  While I was gone, she paced the apartment, leaving coiled red trails behind her.  Each time I left, I locked the door and imagined that I was holding Gena in, sealing her safe inside a glass jar where she could flit from wall to wall.  I thought about buying an external bolt.

When we touched, I was cautious, slow, gentler than I’d ever been.  But Gena didn’t seem concerned for herself.  Suddenly, she was the one who pulled me to the bed, leaving streaks of blood like ribbons around my wrist, she was the one who quietly peeled away the layers of her own loose clothes.  Beneath them, her skin was fragile and white, so thin that I could read the map of her veins.  It looked as if it would tear, like paper. 

Her mouth was as soft as ripped petals.  In the morning, there would be artworks of blood sketched across my back, the blind designs of the night before. 

One morning as we lay in bed, her back pressed against my chest, I noticed that a crack had appeared in her elbow. 

“I’m worried about you,” I whispered into her hair.

Gena sighed.  Then she rolled over, smiling at me, and pressed her fingers against my lips.  I could taste the rust of her blood.  “It’s just me,” she said again.  “The bleeding will stop on its own.  It’s about to get better, I can tell.”

She tucked her head under my chin, and I looked down at the sheen on her skin, at the faint marble of colors underneath.  I could almost see them darkening and fading with her pulse.  I tried to imagine the skin suddenly healing, its cracks sealing up, like an earthquake in reverse. 

That evening I mixed lemon juice into the ointment.  I rubbed it into her fingertips, her soles, her elbows, the new cracks that had appeared on her knees.  I kept glancing up at her face, waiting to see what she would do.  What she would say.  But Gena only gazed at me, her face that same smooth carving in bone, with its ragged petal lips and firefly eyes. 

“Thank you,” she said, when I was done.

Later I would put fine sand in the lotion, salt in the medicated cream. I needed the blood to keep flowing.  I needed to find it blossoming everyplace, proof that Gena was still there.  And each night, no matter what I had done, Gena merely watched me while I rubbed the salt or sand or acid into her wounds.  Then she would thank me.

I dreamed of wrapping her whole body in gauze.  Holding her in. 

#

A week later, in spite of everything I’d done to stop it, the cracks in her fingertips finally dried.  They were there, deep, but sealed along the sides, like slices someone had made in a stale cake.  At the bottom of each crack were dark, glimmering flashes, a strange hue that didn’t quite belong.  Where you’d expect to see more red, the color of cut flesh, there was a soft glinting greenish-brown, like emerald overlaid on mother-of-pearl.  Gena watched me studying her, turning her hands back and forth to prod the dry cuts, a small smile hovering on her torn lips.  

Meanwhile, new cracks appeared in her palms.  Her lifeline seeped a constant thin stream.  Little red jewels formed along the edge of her lip.  Wherever she kissed me she left a stain. 

I wasn’t sure what these changes meant, if this was really Gena getting worse before she got better, if this was the darkness before the dawn, like people say.  Something was about to happen; I could feel it, like a low frequency sound wave humming in the air.  She would break free.  She would stop needing me. Underneath the table, I rubbed my knee against hers so that her torn skin would leave marks on my jeans.  I licked the blood from her palm.

“What can I do for you?” I would ask, and it sounded like I was the one begging for help.  “Tell me what I can do.”

She would glance down at me, her green eyes barely touching my face before they soared off in another direction. 

All day, she paced from corner to corner, wearing nothing but socks to soak up the blood.  Fabric only stuck to her bleeding sores.  In bed at night, she kicked off the covers.  When I rolled against her, holding her down in my arms, she felt feverish, smoldering inside her radiant skin. 

I called in sick to work.  I thought about quitting.  I didn’t leave the apartment for three days.  I sat on a chair while Gena flitted from window to window, her skin peeling and cracking, glowing like paper wrapped around a lightbulb.

#

Just as I expected, she took nothing with her.

 Her clothes hung limp and empty in the closet. 

 The geranium dropped its petals on the windowsill.

 Her shoes lay on the floor, unworn for days – blood would have pooled in them, seeped over their sides.

The last red prints and streaks decorated my apartment for a while, and sometimes, alone at night, I still kissed them, or got down on my knees to try to catch her scent, soaked into the floor, the memory of how much she needed me.

But she wasn’t there.

God, I searched and searched for her empty skin.  It must have gone somewhere, that skin I bandaged and cleaned and kissed: under the bed, wedged like a winter coat on a high shelf, dropped in a pile onto the weeds below the window.  I looked for weeks.  I never found it. 

The last glimpse she gave me, glancing back over her shoulder as she walked out the bedroom door, her body winged and bare and distinct as flame…it wasn’t really Gena anymore.  It wasn’t my Gena.  That was what I told myself.  It was worse to think that it had all been a mask, a disguise.  That she just wouldn’t let me see. 

That morning, when she left me behind, if it hadn’t been for the color of her eyes, I don’t think I would even have known her.  No.  I wouldn’t have known.  I wouldn’t have believed. 

-------

Jacqueline West's work has appeared in journals including Ideomancer, Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Reflection's Edge, and flashquake.  She currently lives and writes in Red Wing, Minnesota.  More about her work can be found at www.jacquelinewest.net.