My blood ran down the rust-stinking fire escape along with the rain. The cheap metal, whatever it was, had split me wide open from the fall. All sorts of places from the many stinging slots in my skin. Elbows, check. Chin, check. Wow, both eyebrows, check. Hip, both knees, a shin, both ankles. Really, wholesale self destruction. I’d damaged the whole lot of me. The slivers on every hard spot of my body wept that bright, angry red.

”Why, always, does it take blood, huh?” I hated asking myself, I did. Truth was, I’d wondered those words before. Same kind of wondering I was doing now. Had to, really, since it kept on happening like this. My life, my blood, all of it’d been done before. I was living a rerun of my own better days, in a world that no longer knew the meaning of “rerun.”

I see a girl, my tummy flips, yada yada for a few days, then I trip and fall. Every time. This was a little different, though: I’d just tacked on “drench a fire escape with me sauce” to freshen up the flavor.

The “me sauce” pouring out of me, that stuff the sketchy clinic wouldn’t even buy, since I took too many psych meds. That stuff the government didn’t want to pay me for because my eye sight was so bad; embarrassing day at the recruiters when the guy won’t even talk to you anymore because you can’t do more than three pull-ups and can’t make out the big, bold letters on the brochure.

The “sauce of me” was mostly unwanted, in exchange for currency, stated clearly by my lack of a full-time, part-time, or anytime job. Side-gig companies even stayed away, like, I was actively trying to not be ashamed of myself, but it was hard to smile when your teeth look like a white picket fence assembled by a narwhal in summer heatwave. Insinuating he rushed and did the job poorly, for the unimaginative.

”You okay,” she asked. “We’re trying to find a way down!” She could have used the fire escape, but that would have taken sense, and she was also flirting with me on a roof top during a deluge. Sense wasn’t likely her strong suit, like existing in any kind of harmony with anything wasn’t mine.

Yet seeing her scramble in that costume, bravely as a human could with all her curves and bends bared, I felt love. Not kid valentine’s day stuff, not grown-up blurry channel stuff, no. The blood rolling out of me with the rain was hot, infected, boiling any sane thoughts in the sharp vinegar of self-destruction to make those “forever” kind of memories. The vinegar smell leaking out from inside my brain bucket told me what to expect next: I’d take a pass at the ER to see if my new, clueless beloved was any good with a First Aid kit.

I guessed she wasn’t. She’d never mentioned how she’d gotten all the way through nursing school only to double back towards busking plastic romance at downtown folks.

”With stolen poems and more stolen flowers, I pay my fifth of the rent,” she’d said. Right before I fell off the roof, struck by love, maybe the stiff punch from the party.

”Fifth of the rent” meaning she lived with lots of other folks. The building where the party was, well, it didn’t have lots of nice spaces for rent. I tried to stand, guessing just how many people would watch her try to patch me up. How many people’s homes would be violated by me walking ten feet in, bleeding all over the floor. Hopefully, hard wood. Hopefully, no area rugs. Hopefully, no pets to harass me, but she seemed like an animal lover. She seemed to have lots of love. That was a good sign, at least, if I managed to live past all the blood loss.

Not that it mattered, none of it. It was love.

From Upcoming Work ”Broken Bait”

-Me