Back in high school\u2014what was her name? Alisha? Ashley? \u2014all the guys on the track team\u2014at least those of us who ran the long relay\u2014we used to call her the Queen of Nosebleeds. I\u2019m pretty sure everyone on the team fucked her at least twice. She really liked to party, and\u2014back then\u2014she really loved cocaine. Wasn\u2019t a cheerleader or athlete. Not in band or theatre either. Just a party-girl.<\/p>\n
Of course, I\u2019m sure Ashley, I think her name was Ashley, had her own issues. Mom gone, an older sister as beautiful and bulimic as her who also liked to party, and a short, soft-spoken dad with a mustache and quite little eyes rumored to be both too strict and too lenient. I never met him, but he went to my mom\u2019s church, I think. I definitely met her older sister\u2014I think she\u2019s the one named Alisha\u2014at a party, walking around with a plastic bottle of vodka in one hand and a bottle of Tabasco sauce in the other. She kept taking long pulls on the vodka, then chasing it with the Tabasco sauce. I remember her looking at me as a group of us sat on the roof smoking grass and her saying with a lilting melody\u2014and through a wide happy-seeming grin\u2014 \u201cWanna take a hot shot?\u201d<\/p>\n
One night, after my senior year of high school, I snorted a couple lines of cocaine with the Queen of Nosebleeds in Chuck Cheek\u2019s bathroom. It was the standard sort of party\u2014Chuck\u2019s parents were away, down in Florida. The Queen of Nosebleeds grabbed my shorts as we stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and when I yanked her jeans to the floor and pressed myself into her from behind, she asked me to pull her hair. So, what did I do? I pulled her hair\u2014not too hard\u2014but from the roots, and until her face was parallel to mine. Only, as she leaned into the sink counter, I looked up into the bathroom mirror and could see blood trickling down her right nostril. It streamed down her lips. Pooled in her cleft chin. Spread like cracks in broken glass down her neck in bright red streaks. And there was a funny rumbling in her throat too\u2014something near a purr\u2014what I took at the time as a sign of pleasure. Now though\u2014when I think about it\u2014I can\u2019t help but be reminded of the noise electrical devices at the hospital make when on the verge of overheating.<\/p>\n
The funny thing is: That night, after seeing her reflection, I couldn\u2019t look at us together in the mirror. I didn\u2019t want to see me inside her like that\u2014with her lips and neck streaked red with all that blood.<\/p>\n
Of course, the other guys on the track team used to say she was a terrible lay, if reliable, but me\u2014I thought she was pretty okay. But what did I, or any of us know? I was 18, and her\u2014what? 17 at most?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I thought of this queen of bygone era after waking this morning to the taste of blood on my own lips. I went to the bathroom, flicked on the light over the sink, and saw my own nose was bleeding\u2014what I learned, in medical school, to call epistaxis. The Queen of Nosebleeds died a year after I left for college, and while riding passenger in Pickle\u2019s pickup. Pickle didn\u2019t run track, but he\u2019d ran a red light, and his truck got broadsided on the passenger-side by an 18-wheeler. Sam Black\u2014whose dad was a cop\u2014said the two of them had been shooting up right before Pickle drove into incoming traffic. Sam\u2019s dad told him the Queen of Nosebleeds still had the elastic tied around her arm, and fresh vials and syringes lay scattered in what remained of the truck\u2019s floorboard.<\/p>\n
Staring into the mirror this morning, I saw most of the blood on my own face had already crusted over or congealed\u2014so what was I supposed to do but clean it off with water and a Kleenex, then toss the Kleenex in the toilet? Hours later, before my shift work at the hospital began, my nose was fine. Probably just this recent cold front.<\/p>\n
Still, I\u2019ve felt sort of down all day.<\/p>\n
You see, I wasn\u2019t very nice to her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I could see blood trickling down her right nostril. It streamed down her lips. Pooled in her cleft chin. Spread like cracks in broken glass down her neck in bright red streaks. And there was a funny rumbling in her throat too\u2014something near a purr\u2014what I took at the time as a sign of pleasure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-j-s-khan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23214"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25073,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23214\/revisions\/25073"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}