It was weighing on her again. For as long as she could remember, there was some kind of ailment. something evil in her blood, aching to get out. Late at night, she'd see the shadows dance around her bed, whispering, and on the inside the moans and groans and begging to be let out.

When it got to be too much she'd pull the kitchen knife out from under her bed and drag it across her skin a few times, watching herself bleed until she was satisfied that she had bled enough to get the evil out for the night. She'd then move with mechanical precision to stop the bleeding and bandage the cuts. She tried to do it in places where no one would notice.

She couldn't remember if it had all started after her father died or if it had always been there. She couldn't remember much from before, everything was a blur, and then after, everything had just been spinning out of control. She could only remember her life in flashes. Like an ordinary day interrupted by a few glimmers of a picture inside her head, and then forgotten and she resumed going about her business. The business itself was really nothing and mundane. Wake up. Shiver, father warms me with his big hands. Walk to school. Riding on his shoulders around the park. Walk home. How sick he looked. Homework. He was emaciated, and bed-ridden. Vegetate in front of the television until bedtime. Oh, and this whole bloodletting before sleep business was becoming a routine as well.

But not everything was routine. Sometimes she'd suddenly feel as though she'd "come to" after being gone for while, and people would tell her she'd done funny things, or they'd be angry at her and she wouldn't know why. Indeed, it was an awful existance. She felt like she was wading through something thick and dark, like a cloud only hard to move through, and everything was slow and swampy, and she just kept pushing on in one direction but never getting anywhere, and she couldn't see anything because of the thick fog. That was how her entire life felt and it scared her. Except for those few moments when she could watch herself bleed. Everything was clear then, and oh such beautiful shades of red. And the beads of red shining. Nothing was gray then, but the thick gray soon settled back into her head, and she sighed, partly relieved, partly dissapointed.

Everything was so little and not real, just like a picture. That was the way her town was. All the houses were in perfect rows like a movie star's teethe and it was like the whole town was giving this huge fake movie-style grin. Everyday as she walked to school she looked at how beautiful everything was and tried to convince herself she was lucky to live in a place like this. So why the hell feel bad?

In school, the teachers droned on, spewing the same boring lessons over and over. History, English, Math, they all seemed the same and blurred into eachother... just class after class of "blah blah blah blah". Words that stopped being words and were just sounds. She knew this is what it must be like to be a foreigner and not speak the language. Everywhere she went she felt this way. Like an alien, or posessed maybe.

The day she knew she really was posessed, she was walking home and a man was walking his dog. When he passed her, the dog suddenly turned towards her and bared his teeth. he began barking like crazy. "Just let him smell your hand" the man instructed her. She reached out her hand and the dog cringed back and hid behind his owner, growling all the while. "I don't understand, he usually loves people." the man said. The dog jumped out again, barking and lunging at her. She had a creeping feeling in her stomach that the dog could detect something evil in her and that was what he was barking at. As the man tried to drag him away, the dog lunged so hard he tore the leash from the man's grip and jumped on her.

"Just a minor dog bite, nothing to worry about. We're just gonna run some tests and see if you have rabies or any other blood born diseases." the doctor said. She watched the needle penetrate her skin, wanting, aching.

The test results. No rabies. Just HIV. HIV, the same thing her father had. the same thing her father had had. the doctor was sorry. he said he was sorry. she ran.

The next morning, she was still in shock when she got up to go to school. There was no one to make her, but she knew she had to go. If she didn't, her whole routine would be thrown off, and everything would be even more insane than it already was, her life would feel even more like it was falling apart. In Math (or was it Social Studies? Science class?) she heard someone whisper "Alice has AIDS! ugh! diseased!" and it finally hit her. The evil was in her blood. it was in her blood, infecting her. How had it gotten there? She had to bleed it out. She had to bleed and bleed and bleed. She jumped up and ran to the bathroom, frantically fumbling to find the razor she hid inside her text book.

"What the hell?" some girls said, finding her body and her blood and things scattered on the bathroom tiles. She looked up, not seeing anything. Seeing only red. She'd ran out of invisible places to do it and had resorted to striping her arms with slashes. The puddle of blood was huge. "Oh. My. God. Is that the chick who has cancer?" one of the girls squealed. "You mean AIDs, and yea it IS!!!" screeched the other. "OH, how horrible. get away!" they ran off, and must have told, because the janitor and the nurse came in. they both put on layers of gloves, and face masks, and stared her down with contempt.

Her mother had to interrupt work to pick her up... "Alice, you have AIDs. what part of that do you not understand?" she stared at her mother, blankly. "AIDs is spread through blood, how could you cut yourself and bleed all over the school like that? What were you thinking? Now, they're considering not allowing you to come back. the other children are terrified, the nurse who had to clean your wounds, and the janitor who had to clean the bathroom, they're all terrified."

When they got home, she ran off to hide in her tree house. Her and her dad had built it together. At first, she'd been terrified to climb up the wooden steps that were nailed to the tree, but he'd liften her up and said "See, sweety? It's not that scary." She only came here when she needed a solace, even more than usual. Something about it terrified her, and yet comforted her at the same time. Her and her father had spent so much time in this tree house together, laying on the wooden floor together, him on top of her sometimes.

She fumbled in the roof for the knife she had hidden. She held it to her skin. How much? How much would she need to bleed to get all the demons out? There seemed to be so many, an endless supply. She knew she would need to bleed so much that there was way more blood outside her body than inside. She wondered if there would be enough blood for her to drown in. The same thing her father had, the same evil in her blood.