FINAL WARNING

The first time she bled: moths.

They poured from the wound: legs, wings, powder puffs. Hundreds, thousands, and not one drop of blood. It was beautiful, the way we froze, shock forming a ring of us. No discomfort poppied her face. She didn’t stem the flow. She simply let herself become a cocoon, a human flower, eyelashes petalling. A brittle hurricane glittered between us.

We’d been dating for two months. She was the window I saw my future through. She smiled, cried, and laughed with consuming passion, yet I hadn’t seen this coming. Not a hint in her mother’s frown or her father’s indifferent shrug. There was no family history. No familiar pain.

A monstrosity of dust with the face of a lamb landed on my palm. It beat, spilled, ran through my fingers. I tried to be statue-still, but at my touch, it withered like flame-singed wool.

The flock diminished. They battered me upon departure, soft as a kitten’s paw.

I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.

She wrapped her coat around me and patted my shoulders, insisting she didn’t want to talk about it. She peeled a single blue Elastoplast from her purse and fitted the adhesive over the wound. A missing jigsaw piece.

She proclaimed herself whole.

I hardly listened as she pivoted to takeout, a new lightness to her. Relief from a supernatural lancing.

Wings seeped from beneath the plaster.

She tore them off, grinned nervously and kissed my knuckles. I should have questioned it, but it’s not every day you see your love defy nature. I was only consumed by love-blind queries: Did moths career through her veins? Did they occupy her heart? Did they beat for me? I dared not voice them. If anyone discovered her biology, they would turn her into a specimen. Or a weapon.

She squeezed my hand and beamed, rocking us back and forth, our bodies tidal. I expected snow to fall from her lips or flowers to spring from her pores. I no longer knew where I stood, except beside her.

To the Earth, I cast a silent promise: I would navigate these dark, cruel days with her. I would keep her secrets. I was hers and she was mine. Could anything be more romantic than that?

A ladybird landed on my hand, fizzed its wings, and screamed.

She laughed, promising it would never happen again.

#

The second time she bled: bees.

As I swelled, my skin stretched thin across my bones. How I longed for the moths, for their tiny, innocent faces, for their blessed warning. She ran for water, insisting I would be fine, acting the amateur arsonist to my flashpoint chest. No bucket could save me. No serpentine hose. I jumped into her red-tiled pool (her father’s taste was in land value, not in style) and submerged. I wish I could say I saw them buzzing above the surface, waiting, but chlorine pricked my eyes into a blue blood blur.

I held my breath for a slice of eternity then broke the surface, gasping. My name was on her tongue. Nectar in the air.

“The bees are gone! The bees are gone!”

She told me to grab the inflatable flamingo. It was like looking in a mirror, we were the same neon pink. Her family clattered out: parents, two dogs, and her younger sister, whose head stayed buried in her phone until it was clear I’d almost died. She smiled flatly, took a picture for societal requirements, then went back inside.

“Did you trip?” my not yet other mother asked.

I showed her the punctures in each hand, oozing yellow gunk. My lips were as dense as sausage meat.

“No, I didn’t trip,” I wanted to shout into her soft, tanned face. It was your daughter. Her bees attacked me. But we had been dating for three years. I was infatuated. It was her scent, mainly, something I couldn’t put a finger on, but wanted my hands all over. I’d heard of pheromones but didn’t believe in them, the way one doesn’t believe in oxygen until it runs out.

I had a ring in my pocket.

It had been there for two weeks, digging a box-shaped hole into the soil of my thigh. I’d been praying for the perfect moment.

I dropped to one knee, squashing an ant. Collateral damage, I told myself.

“Yes!” she squealed before I could ask.

She gripped my hands until they became stalks of white asparagus with melted butter.

“I do. I shall. And this will never happen again. Never ever. I love you to the moon and back. My star, my ocean, my love!”

She pressed her oath into my bulbous forehead. Her parents clapped; the dogs barked. The sister liked a picture of a cat in a tuxedo. Normality restored.

I cried from the pain and from believing her. I’d say it was a 70/30 split.

#

The third time she bled: scorpions.