The Necessity of Blood

You must not bleed.

You learn this first of all. Before love, before knowledge, before faith. You must not bleed.

To bruise is unideal but sometimes a blow must be dealt and a weed will flower in return. Though a bruise can be concealed. In fact a bruise may even, kindly, turn to black or grey. It’s the yellow tinge, the purple spots you have to watch out for. But a bruise will not stain. It will not bloom and grow and sink into all you own. It does not demand attention.

Blood always calls for it. All eyes turn to the arrival. It can begin as a grain of salt and within a blink have swollen to a rusty coin. Before you know it you are draped in crimson silk and everybody is wishing enough had spilt to kill you. It would be quicker and easier than what follows.

So you avoid danger at all costs. All edges are dulled, points blunted, roughness smoothed to nothing. There is no shortage of work for a Safe Guarder. The world seems intent on creating ways in which to spill claret across it the black soil. Perhaps that should mean something. It doesn't anymore.

And for us. For a woman. We cannot hide completely. They tried, years and years ago, when the world was first bleached and rubbed raw. When law was surely a distant memory and the sky seemed a great flat prism, intent on saturating the lands in pigmentation. One of the first Overhauls they made, when they tempered the fires and quelled the hordes, was the "Solution."

A pill, or a coil. Swallowed or injected or sliced and sewn into the flesh. The residual and unavoidable red immediately washed away, so diluted in clear liquid that it didn’t even gleam pink. And then no more red. No more pink. Not unless skin was split. And you should take every care to ensure that did not happen.

At first it seemed foolproof. All procreation controlled by the law, phenotypes carefully selected, traits bred out, genomes tampered with; all in an effort to create only those of undoubtable shades.

I heard once, that some of the very things they now hunger for, now deem as good, are qualities that were once reviled. I imagine that way of living was just as bad as well. To centre the orbit of one's principles around what one sees, is to drown in a very small and clear pond indeed.

The darkest or palest of skin is most desired, although both have their flaws; one inclined to glow blue under the moon and the other at even further risk of flushing, therefore colouring.

Eyes should be as dark as possible, so brown they could be black. Grey is acceptable. Anything else will be removed with a scoop and taken to the left, tossed into the incinerator; the luminous green or blue or hazel melting into the amber flames that no one is allowed to look upon. It will be a better life in this one without those eyes anyway.

I often wonder if the Blinded are kinder because they do not fear. They will never chance upon a wild flower erupting from the concrete. Will not be tempted by a flash of light the colour of ancient grass. They do not look down upon those with shaven heads, any sign of copper strands burnt to ash by bleach. All they know is the dark. Or so they say. Sometimes I wonder if they see more colour than any of us could know. There is only one way to find out. But I was born with nearly black eyes. They cooed over my wriggling form and sent me to the cribs on the right.

In the end, all of the meddling with nature took its course upon the bodies that were born from unnatural behaviour. Weakness of muscle, fragility of bone. Drier brains and bluer veins. They were breeding for perfection but we have never grown so linear. Not even since we were not human as we are now. Women especially found themselves fading earlier, weakened by the maturity they were never truly allowed to know. It was when the rate of miscarriages and stillbirths rose above the healthy birthrate that they began to allow us to grow again. If there is no one left to control then there is no longer a need for fear. And it took them an awfully long time to burn the courage out of us. To ensure the scorch marks would not weep anything other than the clarified understanding of new order.

So once a month for a week, we must go into the dark, and bleed in colour we are not allowed to see. And we must not talk about it. We must never linger. We cross the threshold of the Facility, stomach tightening, a corkscrew twisting into our forbidden rind. And then we exit, days later, drained and pale, just how they like it. I am never as clean as I am when I leave the Facility. But we must not scrub too hard, especially those who are of the lighter complexions. That more natural of evils, the unavoidable peril may rise to the surface, may colour the skin.

I resent the pain that comes once a month. But I would hate it less if I were at least allowed to see myself in bloom. To understand the foul red that humanity cannot escape, no matter how often they shower chemicals upon the earth. They already took the sky, years before I was born, now an eternal wash of cloud through which boiled sunlight trickles like the whites of the yolk-less eggs we must swallow daily. I think I would have liked it. The blue. Always there, aside from storm days and starry nights.

They say the stars, when viewed through powerful lenses, are explosions of the richest colour you could ever know. Or they were. They are long dead. We only see their ghosts. I know the law wish they would die out sooner, leaving us with a pure black night. Though we do not see the forbidden luminosity the celestial corpses bled out in their death, even knowing it is there could be enough to spark thought. A thought is a rush of electricity through the brain. A spark glows. There is colour in energy, in light. You must be careful.

Just as you must not bleed. You must not think. Or else you will begin to wonder. Was this the only way to live a life free of violence. Of terror. To flatten everything back to the undeniable palette of black and white. To tolerate grey. To dislike even the most mundane of differing tones. To despise anything that dare be a colour rather than a shade. They say you cannot hide wrongness against white, they say nothing is cleaner than black.

It is wrong. They say. Colour. It always was and that is why they washed it away. To start again. A clean canvas upon which only what is exactly correct will be written. So now it is sacrilegious to stand out against the simplest, plainest of hues. To be pure is to be at one with this world they have mutilated into lines of stone and steel; to be seen as a pillar upholding their laws, all of us keeping their institution on high, through our own blanched agony.

You must never imagine a rainbow. Ever.

But every time I feel the pangs deep within my core, I am reminded of what is happening inside me. I am reminded of the colours within. We were meant to bleed. We can’t live without it. All the chromaticity we are woven from, we breathe because of it. We can exist to be so cold because we are so warm within.

I think that one day, a lot of blood will have to be spilt. Somehow, I think, that despite what that means, we will be free again. The streets will run red but perhaps the sun that shines upon the chaos - turning it all to glimmering tangerine - will be golden, cascading from the open blue sky.