The Decanting

Spenser bleeding out in the white room, thinking about his father’s funeral. Nine years ago, to the very day. All the curious echoes and vague symmetries that make up a life.

And all the different shades lurking within. When the lab technician pricked the end of his middle finger with folkloric precision in the small grey room to test his hemoglobin, the bead of blood was electric red. She daubed the blood with a cotton ball and tossed the cotton ball in a waste basket. In the basket was a heap of the day’s castings, which all appeared gibbous to Spenser’s eye, the old blood dark as loam and crusty. But now that he is pierced and hooked up, the plastic bag leeching away below his right elbow is the richest of purples. Not storybook red but the colour of abattoirs and switchblades to the throat in midnight alleyways. The unctuous liquor of my body. The claret satchel looks impossibly cold as it slowly fills, sucking at him with tender rapacity.

The needlebite vanished even as Spenser became fully alert to it, like birdsong at midnight. Something about the needle’s sting amplifies the syrupy slackness that oozes through his body as he settles into the oversized recliner. Dreamy lassitude as his lifeforce drains away. A completely new sensation. He is drifting. Is this the siren’s caress that the addict hunts?