War Paint

This morning around 1 am I woke up sick to my stomach. I felt nauseated, there was a sharp pain there. Also I was having trouble breathing, there was a kind of wheezing gurgle. There was something in my throat blocking my air too. My face felt warm and weird and when I touched it it felt slippery. There was something on it, something slippery and sticky.

I rolled out of bed and stumbled up the stairs to the bathroom clutching my stomach as pain stabbed me with every step. I knew this feeling well.

In front of the mirror I flipped the light on. Blood was splashed all over my face and arms and hands. When I opened my mouth my teeth were pink with coagulated blood between them like little burgundy popsicles. And when I opened my jaw strings of saliva and blood stretched across my lips like crystalline columns. It wasn’t my blood though.

Just kidding. It was. And it came from my nose. It had started a while ago while I was asleep and my unconscious self brushed the tickle away from my face for a long time while I dreamed of swimming through a submerged maze of iron fillings and rust.

The pressure difference, the heat and the dryness of where I live really bothers my nose to the point it just cracks and bleeds. I stood there looking at myself in the mirror at 1:37am and let the blood run down my face and drip into the sink making a “plink” sound.

It could have been war paint.

I felt the warm blood roll down my upper lip like a slow tear until it met the blood coagulating between my closed lips and was absorbed and releases on the left corner of my mouth were it oozed down my chin slowing, reaching the end and then stopping just before falling away into the sink, hanging there like a liquid-ruby stalactite. And there it stayed. Another drop followed the same path and collected at the same point. It isn’t like water or ice. It doesn’t flow over or around, it flows into, flows through and the liquid-ruby swelled like a tiny balloon.

If I don’t move for awhile it starts to harden on my face, contorting it into a grimace as the red rivulets harden into jagged collections of red spider strands holding my cheeks back. Slowly they darken, and harden, pulling tight across my face. Then they break like parts of tectonic plates, unable to hold my face back any longer.

The severed places look like clean breaks of crystal strands or ice. I hook a finger nail under an edge of darkened blood and lift, loosening long sheets of thin glass that clink when they fall into the sink. After they are all off and piled up like glass shards my face has a thin layer of smeared blood from when I was asleep--now the color of ancient rust.

Clean flesh shines from beneath the war paint like jagged lightning bolts the color of my skin, in this light the color of humus.

Then I washed my face off and went back to bed.