This story is by Daejewel and was part of our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
White glossy walls stretched along the clinic’s narrow corridor, the fluorescent glare relentless. The scent of antiseptic pressed on her, as if every surface wanted to erase the past—crisp and inescapable. Her badge glinted against pastel scrubs, chart in hand, moving with that uncanny poise: a nurse born out of rupture, almost spectral in aura.
A sudden burst of laughter cracked from the surroundings—quick and then gone. She drifted through the halls, the clinic’s rhythm of technical care in twenty-twenty-five pulsing around her. She breathed competence into the fragile calm.
She moved from room to room, attuned to breath, pulse, need. The rhythm of tending lives centered her—for a moment, the air hushed—her presence quiet and electric, not fully human, unsettled by something of before.
Then: a man staggered into the light, blood blooming on his summer shirt, panic in his voice, raw and jagged.
That color—sudden and sticky—snapped her backward across years. Childhood fear surged, the shock of blood echoing vampire stories.
The front door of memory creaked open.
May, 1969—3:46 p.m. Mumbai rain pelting, umbrella fully protective.
Rain drapes the city in silvered threads, cobblestone running slick, boxwood hedges glistening. She is vigorous, happy, and young as she steps from the bus, walking home from work with her paperback open, walking in rhythm with each line of R.K. Narayan’s The Guide. Umbrella held high to shield precious words from water. Her heart floats, naïve, suspended in the small miracle of being safe and dry—ordinary magic.
Her fashionable patent shoes splash quietly, drumming on cracked pavement, whispering in the adjacent boxwood hedges. Three minutes from home, imagined popcorn and siblings’ laughter call her forward, the nearby church-bells muffled. The umbrella is her shield, the story in her hands—a private world.
Then: the boxwood rustles as a shadow enters the rain mist—unremarkable, thought friendly neighbor, until close enough to lunge. Her page tore mid-sentence.
Suddenly, strong hands seized her arms—unyielding, speaking the language of possession—beating her relentlessly and yanking her from sidewalk’s safety. Her world narrowed: as her book dropped into a pool of rainwater tinged with her fresh young blood, the umbrella became something to brandish. She twisted, rage uncoiling beneath her panic, shoving the metal ribs at his face. “No,” clear and strong, erupted from her—a plea, a curse, a demand for intervention or retreat. The stranger’s grip tightened, wrenching her clothing, his arched palm against the bridge of her nose propelling her a foot backwards as she passed out and slammed onto the hard wet cement, the slap of water, broken metal of umbrella atop her, rain pelting, as she faded, his laughter sharp as a blade.
Then: As he dragged her by the hair to his nearby parked car and she offered her handbag still wrapped around her waist, he hissed, “It’s something worth more that I want.” And again, she fought, screamed—a voice aimed at both heaven and neighborhood as her belief system crashed down while every window stayed indifferent. As she was thrown against the backseat of leather, ether with rags, blood pulsing, she screamed louder— “Why won’t you see me anyone? Why won’t you hear? Why God? Why This?” Fury then burned through shock as, drugged, she passed out, knowing prayer and screams were futile—anger set in—dark vampire blood overtook her.
When she blinked awake, it was the cement gravel in her torn knees that jolted her into her new reality, her new persona. She crawled for the first time since toddlerhood, biting back sobs, clutching vengeance, and knowing he had lost his car keys. The pavement shimmered red, droplets spattering and running. Anger brought her to gouge the license plate into memory and then run the three minutes home to safety at marathon speed—he pursued—she won—a survivor, forever changed, soaked in the knowledge that innocence does not guarantee safety.
For years, faith was a wound—mute, unyielding. But meaning shifted, as did time. The same word—bleeding—would someday mean something else.
The clinic returned. The man’s voice was frantic: “It won’t stop—please.”
She pressed gauze against his nose, steadying her breath with his. Beneath fluorescent lights, through shallow, hurried air, her pulse found the clinic’s rhythm again. Her healing hands moved to staunch the bleeding; for a moment, in the hush before alarms—time itself seemed to stutter.
Sunlight fractured through high windows as a bell pinged on her electronic health record. AI’s soft chime predicted the nosebleed’s end—a reminder that twenty twenty-five’s medicine missed more than it mended.
The next five minutes, unexpected and precious, shimmered between realities. For a heartbeat, she was nowhere in the clinic.
She drifted: Mumbai’s dusk, temple bells deep in the distance, human tides shifting past ancient stone.
For a moment she wondered if the difference between cities a matter of light was only.
Then Palm Beach: insistent light across mosaic tiles, her bare feet cool against its patterned chill, body at rest in the improbable luxury of longing.
The squeak of pink nitrile gloves snapped her back—the scene clinical and clear once more. Yet something lingered: a part of her remained in Mumbai’s shadow, another in Palm Beach’s light, even as the rhythm of tending lives resumed.
His outstretched hand, now clean and free of blood, pulled her gently from the memory’s grip to the present—his gratitude evident in his streaked, ruddy face. Under her touch, his apprehension faded; pink, watery mucus replaced panic.
She wondered, with quiet curiosity rather than bitterness, if stopping the bleeding was faith returning—by another name.
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