RED DRUM

Its steely ventricles clank and spill coppered blood against cool metal knife.

Shadowed sap pools and puddles, viscous sop, crude-oil slick. On the grime-tiled floor, meat-thick eager tongues lick.

The pulsing storm begins to clot, slowing from taut purple veins. As the body heaves, gasping bloodlines beat out regal stains.

Under its skin-scraped scales, sweet flesh is scooped from hollowed husk: gutted, lips puckered, clouded eyes bulging, the drum slumps limp-finned into dusk.

RAW and red

If I hadn’t taken the photographs, I never would’ve believed it. If you crop them just right, they look beautiful: your face haloed in silver moonlight by the astigmatic lens, your lips red, your eyes that rich, cavernous brown.

You have no idea how badly I wanted to slink away with my polaroids and leave you to your work.

My father was a postman. I never told you about it, but he was a postman who had wanted to be a poet all his life until he turned out to be a lousy poet. My memory fails me when I try to recall that much about him. I remember that he was out a lot and that he had black hair that faded at the top of his thin, scaphocephalic skull (which he told me was all a result of his mother having narrow hips). He had a wiry mustache and pale eyes that were chronically twitching and damp.

In the early 50s, he was fired for stealing love letters the girl next door wrote. The photocopies he made wore out over the years from repeat readings. They’d cost him so much—his job, his marriage, his dignity—and at the end of it all, it was all fine with him because he had his photocopies and her words forever. Whatever they meant to him.

I liked poetry, but I was cynical enough to know I’d never be good at it. I left it to Donne and Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans. I’ve always liked that period in history, and come to think of it, that may be why I liked you so much upon meeting you when your long, pale hand crept into my vision at the desk beside me, and I asked you for a pencil.

“I only have pens.” You produced one. The ink that came from it was runny, cheap.

“Thanks.” My voice cracked when I said that. Do you remember? You didn’t even look at me, and I don’t think you remember the interaction at all, but I remem- bered your curls and your long, straight nose for weeks afterward. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl as thoroughly out of place as you. You belong in portraits painted with copper and smalt, in illuminated manuscripts, in sketches drawn in quillpoint. You were only born in 1965 because God wanted to play a cruel joke on us.

I hope you didn’t take any of the above as an insult. If I know you at all, you agree with me. If you don’t, feel free to write back and tell me.

I made a concerted effort to sit next to you in the hall after that. I traced your face in my mind until I could feel your skull under my fingertips. You and I spoke here and there, your voice too low and raspy for your face, and I hung supplicant on every word. All that considered, I’m sure you knew I was lying when I approached you in front of the student union.

“It’s a photojournalism project. About women.”

“About women.” You raised a dark, arched brow. “That’s it?”

“Yes. Sure. Listen, all my other friends have said no, and I’m running up on the deadline.”

You looked at me then, tilted your head, balanced my mind on the edge of your finger.

“I’ve never asked—can you cook?”

“Yeah.” I really could—it was my only domestic skill.

“Make me a steak,” you said. “A nice one. And I’ll be over tonight at eight.”

So I did. Ribeye, with fresh bread, with mushrooms and rosemary. I ate my steak with a pale pink center and gray edges, and you ate yours rare and cool to the touch, savoring each bite. You laughed at me, your white chalcedony teeth tearing at the meat as I told you stories of cooking for my mother during the summer when she slept until four in the afternoon, of breaking my nose chasing a stray cat into a ditch. Late in the evening, you sat in my open window and let me take picture after picture in the warm light of a November moon, your white-blonde hair catching a southern wind.

You took my virginity. You left—slipped out of my room in the early morning, took one of my tired old tees like a hunting trophy, and vanished. It was over the instant I woke up, that you moved from one night to the next like an odd dream. I had the bruises your thumb left on my collar and the taste of blood and skin in my mouth—nothing permanent. Nothing real.

I saw you on campus a lot in those next few weeks. Other people, too, but you were the only repeated figure in my memory. I saw you shimmering in the morning light outside Debnath Hall, eyes turned directly to the sun, scrawling feverish notes on the back of your hand across our one shared lecture hall, hovering phantasmal in the warm brick shade of the cafeteria. You didn’t look at me once, but I used that little mint-green Polaroid every single time, and I knew you could feel me taking them.

Something inside me cracked over the winter holidays. Maybe I realized that the odds of us having another class together were zilch to none; maybe I was just walking the empty bones of that campus too long, hiding in my dorm like a rabbit at the slightest murmur of thunder. I inherited a suicidal idea of romance from my father.

Things were wrong when you came back to campus.

I wasn’t content to catch you on occasion. I sought you out. I drank coffee after coffee at the café on Solomon Street, waiting for you to come in. I sat in the awning of the fire exit across from your dormitory to watch you walk inside. You didn’t know I could see you this time. I waited until dusk, I lurked, I starved. It was a sickness.

But if I hadn’t, would I have found you there?

I set out on that final walk at one in the morning, wandering aimlessly toward your residence hall. You were already outside, waiting for the late bus, shadows heavy under your eyes. A boy stepped off and into your arms—you drowned in that long, suede coat he wore.

My throat was dry. I froze in the January morning as I followed the two of you, feet soft in the powder snow. You took him off campus and into the part of town where old posters skitter into gutters. I lost sight of you.

I went into a bar after that. I’ve never been able to tell you this part.

“You alright?” a woman asked.

I nodded, my head listing toward the bar. The bartender was pretty, maybe even beautiful. And unlike you, she was thoroughly modern, fit for this day and age, with sleek brown hair and tan skin and coffee-ground freckles.

“You look cold.” She slid a glass of water to me without ice and waited for me to take a sip, and I did. Feeling returned to my lips, and after a few minutes, I gave her a wan little smile to assuage her worries.

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.” I held my drink in a clammy hand. “I’ve had…a night.”

“A night, huh? Yeah, I get that.” She placed her elbows on the bar and regarded me in my flimsy powder-blue sweater, eyes grazing the chill-cracked skin of my knuckles.

“Do you?” My next smile was wider. She snorted and placed a straw in my drink for me, her pink nails clicking the rim.

I made up a story about being ditched after a fraternity party when the cops arrived. She loved it. We talked for almost an hour, alone in that little spot of yellow warmth in an arctic January winter. In a moment of silence, I caught her eye. It was a bright candy-coated brown that glinted in the filament bulbs.

I felt more like a real person in that moment than I had in months.

I was suddenly afraid.

I left without another word. In my last glance of her, her lips are barely parted, and she’s about to call something after me that will be lost in the wind outside. I had to find you. I started back toward your dorm with my head down and the front of my sweater pulled up over my nose.

So that’s how I found you in the alley.

You may not believe me, but it really did take me a moment to realize what you were doing. I saw your eyes first, the lightless abyssal brown, the white of your sclera and the flush pink of your retinal veins. I raised my camera with numb fingers, reeling with the distant realization that I was only five feet from you, and clicked the shutter.

You stilled. I let the camera drift from my face.

Under your January-pale hands, already half-submerged in snow, was your friend. Your boy. You kneeled over him, one palm on his sternum, the other wrapped all the way around the exposed red-brown tip of his spine.

“Hello,” you said, or it might have been the wind.

I didn’t reply. I was holding the moment in my mind, wondering where to place it among all of the others, among the images of you studying and sipping tea and letting the sun wash over your face. I set it next to the picture of you eating steak, raw and red. I opened my mouth to ask you a question. But you’d already misread me by then. You read my hesitance as fear; you read my silence as the glottal panic of a prey animal. I barely felt your fist hit my chest. The crack of my head against the brick sent a wave of pain through my bones and skin and the jelly of my eyes.

I fought you with broad, baffled swings. When I was young, my mother showed me a video of a pitbull trying to kill a horse. You were the dog.

I was just going to ask you a question.

The first man came right after you split my left cheek to the ear. I’d screamed without realizing it. More people came after that, saw your white teeth and the blurry, clotted red stain all along your chest, the half of your date you hadn’t already picked to the bone.

I don’t know what you did to them. I was already asleep, dreaming about letters.

They found my camera and the photo with it at the scene, took it as evidence, scraped the genetic clutter of dried blood from the lens and dropped it in tubes. My injury left me unable to speak for weeks, but they’d still like me to testify.

I don’t think I’m up for it.

All I wanted to ask you was why you hadn’t eaten me. Why you’d eaten steak, raw and red, watching me stammer and stutter, and you did not lunge for my throat. Why you hadn’t asked for a kidney, a finger, a cut of my thigh. Please write back. I don’t know if they let you read these. I need you to know. I won’t be angry, no matter what the answer is. If it’s that if you liked me too much, I’m honored. I don’t know what you are or why you did it or if you’re even human.

And hey, maybe the boy in the suede coat deserved it. If it’s that you weren’t sure about me—that I was an innocent, warm body and nothing more—know that I would have welcomed it from you and only from you. I would have watched while you ate my heart in the marketplace.