(no subject)
The girl in the room across the hall from mine was throwing up after getting herself more drunk than she'd ever been before, slumped over, leaning against her door frame, making horrible noises. But I was the closest one, so I heard and saw her first. Her roommate was either passed out in the room behind her or out - I never saw her.
The girl's vomit was red with blood, and I ran to get the RA, and then ran to my room, shut the door, and threw up myself in my ceramic toilet bowl. I kept picturing her throwing up what looked like sheep lining to me. It was all I could think about - sheep lining soaked crimson with blood, smelling like vomit and alcohol and iron - and in my mind, curiously like a barnyard animal.
The smell of blood has always sickened me. I was squeamish when I was 7, watching girls at school get papercuts and suck their fingers dry and overdo it so much, their tips became pruny and morbidly old.
When I was 16, a girl in my algebra class liked to eat paper and blood instead of her paperbag lunch - I don't know why. She was a nice girl, but skinnier than the children you see with Sally Struthers on TV, and she tore up bits of math homework every once in a while and ate it in our third period class, because she was hungry. And once, I don't remember why, we had a conversation - the four of us, in our algebra group - about the starnge things we like to eat, and while the others brought up the normal elementary school guilty pleasures like glue, Lisa talked of sucking the gaping holes in her mouth when her teeth fell out as a child. I remembered choking and desperately spitting every few seconds after violently losing a tooth - and I let subsequent teeth fall out much more gently. I remember opening my mouth after jaw surgery in the 10th grade, and smelling the horrible iron stench of the blood I knew was in my mouth - but I could not spit properly because my mouth was still numb, and I could not taste it either. But the smell alone made me ill, and I feared I'd throw up all the medicine they gave me so that I'd be calm and relatively pain-free.
I saw the girl from across the hall from me this morning, and I saw Lisa somehow, in red stains seeping from her doorway to the ugly carpeting of the hall, already dirty, but now putridly stained. She wanted to say thank you, I suppose, if she remembered me as the one who gave her the horrified look and went away to find the RA, but truthfully, I doubt she did. She looked sick and pale, paler than usual, and her mouth was slightly open. Maybe she was going to say something, but I caught the sight of the stain, and shut my door again, so that the smell couldn't seep in here.
The girl's vomit was red with blood, and I ran to get the RA, and then ran to my room, shut the door, and threw up myself in my ceramic toilet bowl. I kept picturing her throwing up what looked like sheep lining to me. It was all I could think about - sheep lining soaked crimson with blood, smelling like vomit and alcohol and iron - and in my mind, curiously like a barnyard animal.
The smell of blood has always sickened me. I was squeamish when I was 7, watching girls at school get papercuts and suck their fingers dry and overdo it so much, their tips became pruny and morbidly old.
When I was 16, a girl in my algebra class liked to eat paper and blood instead of her paperbag lunch - I don't know why. She was a nice girl, but skinnier than the children you see with Sally Struthers on TV, and she tore up bits of math homework every once in a while and ate it in our third period class, because she was hungry. And once, I don't remember why, we had a conversation - the four of us, in our algebra group - about the starnge things we like to eat, and while the others brought up the normal elementary school guilty pleasures like glue, Lisa talked of sucking the gaping holes in her mouth when her teeth fell out as a child. I remembered choking and desperately spitting every few seconds after violently losing a tooth - and I let subsequent teeth fall out much more gently. I remember opening my mouth after jaw surgery in the 10th grade, and smelling the horrible iron stench of the blood I knew was in my mouth - but I could not spit properly because my mouth was still numb, and I could not taste it either. But the smell alone made me ill, and I feared I'd throw up all the medicine they gave me so that I'd be calm and relatively pain-free.
I saw the girl from across the hall from me this morning, and I saw Lisa somehow, in red stains seeping from her doorway to the ugly carpeting of the hall, already dirty, but now putridly stained. She wanted to say thank you, I suppose, if she remembered me as the one who gave her the horrified look and went away to find the RA, but truthfully, I doubt she did. She looked sick and pale, paler than usual, and her mouth was slightly open. Maybe she was going to say something, but I caught the sight of the stain, and shut my door again, so that the smell couldn't seep in here.