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Hemorrhage

by Cyrus Amelia Fisher

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It’s a dumb fight to pick, but I only learn that later. By the time they drag me out the back door of the bar, my face feels the way a Picasso painting looks. All rearranged, and probably the wrong colors.

Brit swears like a sneezing fit. Her fingers hover over the swollen mass where my face ought to be, as if she can squeeze the swelling out and find me underneath. They’re the last words she says before leaving me propped against the alley wall to make sure that she isn’t banned for life from the only dyke bar in town. They’ve been banning me from the joint for years. It’s the best place in town to rustle up some skin on skin, whether it’s a girl who doesn’t ask me about my boyfriend or a brisk upper-cut to the jaw. On a good night it might be both. I’m beginning to suspect that tonight is not a good night.

I pluck my last smoke from my breast pocket, leaving bloody streaks on my clothes as I dig out a lighter my swollen fingers can’t even flip open. I sit there for a long time after that, unlit cigarette squeezed between my lips. I’m not thinking or feeling anything in particular when I realize I’m not alone.

Without turning my head, I size up the figure at the end of the alley. Tangled hair, ill-fitting clothes, probably female. She has the look of someone whose body has started to eat itself. Smiling, and that’s the worst of it.

“If you’re here to mug me,” I say around the cigarette, “you’re about to be disappointed.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Good. I’m very broke.”

Her eyes flick over my swollen face. “Broke, or broken?”

“Funny.” I wiggle the cigarette like a tongue. “Mind giving me a light?”

She crouches at my side and takes the lighter from my hands. The brush of her skin is hot, almost feverish, but maybe I’m just freezing. The flame clicks to life and licks my cigarette cherry-red. I don’t offer her one. Mostly because I’m not sure when I’ll get my next pack, but also because I’m an asshole.

“Thanks,” I say, with no depth of feeling. The smoke is bitter on my tongue. I gingerly take the cigarette out of my mouth to spit some more blood on the bricks. Most of it ends up on my jacket. My new friend watches the spectacle, crouched too close at my side.

“I don’t feel so good,” I announce. “50-50 chance my brain is bleeding out.”

“Sounds like a problem.”

“Only because it’s taking so long.”

She tilts her head. “I might be able to help with that.”

From the way she says it, I know she’s not offering medical attention. She’s hovering just on the edge of my vision, and I can’t turn my sore neck to face her. She looks strange from this angle, like that old optical illusion. Look at it one way and you see the maiden, look at it the other and the hag’s mouth slits her throat. I always saw the hag first.

I try to remember if I’ve taken something tonight already, the name washed down with Jack and beer and half a bottle of wine, a baking soda volcano just waiting for the vinegar. I already know this can only end two ways—I can follow this down to the bottom, or I can call my brother and let him help me. He always knows what to do, what to say, how to get me “back on track.” But the thing about being off the rails is that you never know where you’re going to end up. No such thing as the end of the line.

“My place is just down the street,” I say.

Her smile widens. I see teeth.

---

It’s a long drop through a dark place before I wake up feeling no pain at all. That in itself is terrifying.

On impulse alone, I reach for the nightstand where I keep the painkillers. My hand stops halfway, trailing listless intention. I can’t remember opening my eyes without feeling the walls of my mind falling in, cultivating hangovers because they’re less toxic than the thoughts that swarm over the inside of my skull like greasy black cockroaches. My family inheritance, passed down for generations. We eat roach poison. We don’t call the exterminator.

This morning, the thoughts are still.

On reflex my brain begins to pick its way through the detritus of the night before, trying to prop up an explanation. I’d rather just lie here in the debris field. No hangover. No wounds (or no pain, which is what matters). No feeling like I’m wrapped so tightly around my bones they might break.

Thin arms slip around my shoulders from behind. “You’re awake.”

I lie still with my eyes locked on the opposite wall. My flimsy memories of the night before are suddenly a lot more interesting. “Thought you’d have cleared out already,” I say to the cracking paint.

“I’m still here.”

“I’m getting that impression.” We’re both still wearing our clothes, which gives me some idea of what we _didn’t_ do. I remember her offering me my next hit, going back to the apartment. Then, absence.

“I feel good,” I say, hardly believing the words as I say them. “Better than good. What did you give me?”

Her chuckle stirs the hair on the back of my neck. She smells old and unwholesome, mildew and dust, but if that’s the price of feeling this good I’ll roll over and breathe in deep.

“Do you want me to tell you,” she asks, “or show you?”

“Can I afford to have you show me?”

“Oh, not at all.” Her fingers are drawing circles on the back of my neck now. I stare at the clock: not yet ten thirty. I know from experience that dragging the party from night into morning never ends well. And I’m feeling much better now; feeling almost normal. I don’t need it. I should send her on her way, get myself cleaned up, do something productive so that when Michael gets back at the end of the week he won’t look at me like I’m everything he expected.

“Do it anyway,” I say, and she does.

I feel something crawling over my neck, on my scalp. Her fingers lace into my hair and then deeper. The questions of what she’s doing, of whether I should be scared, drain out of my mind and leave nothing behind. I bleed out the back of my head and into her hand, a warm wet trickle, a rush of joy. I don’t even feel a needle.

“Oh my god,” I breathe a long time later. “What was that?”

She folds me in her thin arms like the curled legs of a dead spider. “Your mind,” she says.

“Come again?” I think about reaching up to feel for an injection mark.

“Thoughts, memories, sensations.” The curve of her smile is a knife against my neck. “They’ve been bothering you, haven’t they?”

“Mmm. Runs in the family. My mom to drink, my dad to chewing on a handgun. Left my brother and me to find the mess, too.” I stop. Frown. “I don’t talk about that,” I remind myself.

“It’s okay,” she says. She sounds very kind, but I can’t see her face. “You can’t lie to me anymore—I took that away. So keep talking.”

I open my mouth to tell her to fuck off—or at least, that’s what I mean to do. I mean to roll over, slide out of bed, walk to the door and order her out. But I’m still there, in bed beside her, feeling warm and comfortable and a little bit afraid. Her fingers curl into my hair like she’s grabbing the scruff of a dog.

“This apartment is my brother’s,” I find myself saying. “He found me at rock bottom, living in some basement with a bunch of people whose names I didn’t know, messing myself up as badly as I could. He gave me a place to stay, said he’d help me get back on my feet. That was three years ago. He pays for groceries. He pays the rent. Sometimes I take money out of his wallet, and he lets me, and I fucking hate him for that.” By the end, my face is burning in shame. I’m shaking, but I can’t stop the words from spilling out of my mouth.

“Thank you.” Her voice is so kind. I feel her fingers slip away from the back of my head, and just like that I have a body again.

I dive out of bed, stumbling on my hands and knees until I can haul myself to my feet. My legs feel like the tendons have been slashed, but it’s just fear making my movements stupid. I think I’m whole. I think I’m myself.

“What the fuck did you give me?” My back is to the wall, all instinct. It’s dark in here. The blackout curtains let in only a gash of sunlight. I can see the outline of the bed, a jumble of shapes in the grimy darkness. Something flickers. The sound of slithering—movement over the sheets. My breath comes fast and high in my chest as the woman in bed sits up. Her shadow moves against the light, shriveled flesh on bone.

“Don’t be scared, Kara.”

A flutter of terror disguised as a laugh. “How do you know my—”

“You told me. You might not remember—I took a lot last night. But you’ll come to understand. We have plenty of time.”

The smell is stronger now, like stagnant water, thick and murky. I take a shaky breath through my mouth. “I’m calling the cops.”

“You’re not going to do that.”

“Fuck you I’m not.” For a long time I stand there, unmoving, staring at her. The phone is in my pocket. All I have to do is reach for it, press the numbers, let the call ring. They’ll show up even if I don’t say anything, won’t they? If I can’t say anything?

My hand doesn’t budge. It’s dark, but I know the woman is smiling.

“It’s okay,” she says with that same empty grin. “I can explain.” Then she’s moving, out of the bed, right in front of me. So fast. Her hand catches my wrist as I lunge for the doorknob.

“Get the fuck away from me.” Years of bad living have washed my muscles out, and the grip she has on my arm feels strong enough to break bone. I shout, lash out with my nails, but her other hand slides up around the back of my skull, and I—

—blink.

“There,” she says. Her fingers are still in my hair, rubbing small circles into the back of my head. I feel strange. As if I’ve fallen over without moving, except she’s holding me up against the wall. I taste something earthy and sour, but my mouth is empty, and so very dry.

“What did you do.” It’s not really a question. I close my eyes again, trying to find my way.

“You were just saying how I was welcome to stay with you,” she replies. Her words don’t drag up any arguments, so I figure they must be true; but it’s strange, isn’t it, the way she’s petting my hair? I should ask her to stop. But then her fingers twist again, and the words slip away and scatter. It feels nice, actually. Like a limb slowly falling asleep, her fingers trailing over the bones of my skull.

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“Michael.”

“And when will Michael be back?”

“Next Sunday.” My skin crawls off my bones, everywhere except where her hand is anchored to my scalp. I feel heavy, tired, a happiness that taps like ants over my veins. “What is this?”

“I’m just clearing out the things you don’t need anymore.” Something in my skull shifts, rearranges. My mind flows away with nothing to replace it, like the water in a funnel, and this woman, this thing, is waiting at the other end.

“Why am I not afraid?” Hoarse. Low. I sound afraid.

“I’m taking that away too.” She smiles. “You can call me Nameh.” Her hand slides over to cup my cheek, her thumb stroking my skin. I think I feel something on it, movement like tiny hairs, cilia. “We’re going to know each other very well, Kara.”

I try to scream: she plucks it from my mind before it can reach my lips. I stand there with my mouth limp and packed with silence, and for a while she drains me dry.

---

. “Bonsai. I prune away the thoughts that lead in the wrong direction, until there’s only one direction left.”

Nameh tilts her head to stare at me indulgently through her lashes, her eyes like two lamps in the dark hollows of her skull. “It’s your memories that will sustain me the longest, Kara. Surely there are some you wouldn’t mind getting rid of.”

I’m frozen in my chair, in my body, my mind. Watching Nameh get out of her chair is like watching a spider slowly uncurl its legs. She saunters around the table to me, her fingers trailing over its surface until they slide up my wrist, my arm, my neck. My chest rises and falls like a bicycle pump, building pressure with nowhere to go. I don’t know whether I can’t move because of something she’s done to me, or whether it’s fear alone.

“Let’s find out,” she whispers in my ear, and then she’s inside me again.

The first time I ever shot up. My hands shake as I try to help guide the needle into a vein, my first girlfriend too high to push the plunger. Then I’m throwing up against a wall five years later, the wall I only realize is outside Michael’s building when he comments on it later. I’m selling the necklace he gave me for my eighteenth birthday, the pendant shaped like the boots of Hermes: finally, you are free. With the money I buy a hit that dissipates before the end of the night. Michael notices it’s gone, and says nothing.

I feel Nameh in my memories like fingers trailing over the spines of some awful and unreadable library. When the fingers withdraw, part of me is gone. There’s a vast glowing contentment in its wake, swelling like rot inside of me. I can’t help but sink into it, to cling to what feels good even though I know it’s poison.

“You see?” Nameh says against my hair. I find myself leaning into the touch even as I begin to understand what she’s going to do to me.

Her hands slide down to my shoulders, grip tight. “How many nights have you lain awake, trapped in your own head?” Nameh whispers. “Your dreams, your memories, your thoughts, all turning against you? How long have you looked for the one thing that could take it all away?” I feel her breath behind my ear, curling in the shape of a smile. “It was me, Kara. It always was.”

I close my eyes hard. The tears burn my eyes like gasoline. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

“No. But it’s what you’ve been reaching for.”

She leaves me alone after that, slipping into Michael’s room. Through the open door out the corner of my eyes I can see her flipping through his books, examining his clothes. As soon as I’m able, I haul myself out of the chair and stumble into my room, dragging the sheet off my bed and heading for the bathroom. I climb into the tub with it wrapped around me, shivering, exhausted even though it’s day. My eyes are riveted on the door, which Michael took the lock off after the time I nearly drowned in my own vomit in here. I wait for it to swing open so I can fight or run or just face what’s coming—but darkness pushes in from whichever corner I’m not looking, and before long it swallows me whole.

---

Time sloughs off me like a layer of dead skin.

I sleep in the bathtub; Nameh takes up residence in Michael’s room like mold colonizing the walls. She strips the numbers off the telephone, takes the handles off the doors—makes them meaningless to my pillaged brain. I’m surrounded by material ghosts, things I can see but not touch or understand. When I’m not exhausted and exuberant with the void Nameh’s fingers leave behind, I pace the apartment with one hand on the wall. I’ve spent hours with my hand on the door knob, willing myself to turn it. I can’t even feel it under my fingers.

Much worse is knowing what will happen when the door does open, as soon as Michael gets home. I can see myself standing across the room, a vacant grin fixed on my face where Nameh has left it, watching him shut the door behind him. I know I have to avoid that no matter what.

The trick is to stop her from realizing what I have planned. And so I offer pieces of myself more freely, before she can root around in my head. I lay back on the couch with my head in her lap and close my eyes, quell the way my skin prickles pleasantly as her fingers slide over it. I offer up the shocking cold as I jumped through the neighbor’s sprinklers as a kid; the burn of Jack Daniels and the sour tang of bile as I drank myself into new stupidity behind the high school gym. She takes it all. I think I could give her anything and she’d swallow it whole. There’s something almost comforting in knowing there’s no part of me she finds unpalatable. Who else could say the same? In those moments I can almost forget why I shouldn’t want to feed her—that each bite I offer is of my own flesh.

 

---

There’s a thick matted silence behind Michael’s door, the room that has become Nameh’s own. Nameh had been taking food in until she says it isn’t worth it, there isn’t enough left. After that she eats nothing but my mind, and I eat the rotting banana peels at the bottom of the garbage. She strokes my hair as I do.

 

---

I’m chasing the false hope of half-eaten candy bars abandoned in the back of the coat closet, when I find the mirrors.

I never questioned why Nameh took them all down; hardly even noticed. And yet here they are, leaning against the back of the closet with their faces turned to the wall. I push the coats away like clearing the branches in a forest. The mirror is as tall as I am, wood-backed and leaning on the wall. My muscles are weak, but I find the strength to turn it around. That’s when I see the monster.

I stare at the body for a long time, my body, the new thing that I wear—jutting bones and dark patches and bruises that will never heal, my dead hand held against my chest. Panic flares in my eyes like a match to gasoline. I watch it start to consume everything.

“Kara.” She stands in the doorway, watching me. Clinical. Interested.

“Please,” I whisper. I can’t take my eyes off the reflection, watching in horror as its lips move to parrot my words. “Please, don’t take any more—I’ll give you anything, just stop—”

“What do you have left to offer me?”

My mouth opens and closes like I’m gnawing on a gamey question—but it’s a question I’ve answered before. I’m good at getting what I want, especially when I have nothing to trade for it. I’ve stolen and pawned and borrowed and cheated for so much less than my life.

“I could bring you someone else.” My voice shakes as I say it, and I can’t meet her eyes or my own. “Someone to take my place.”

Nameh steps up behind me, a shadow hanging over my reflection’s shoulder. “You know I can’t let you leave.”

The mirror calls me back. The thing inside it, waiting to become me. I’m on the edge of something terrible, opening up on every side. God, I don’t want to die. I want this to stop more than I want anything in my life, and I’ve offered worse for less. I remember a face in a dark doorway, disappearing into a glittering darkness. Who was he to me? What do I owe him? A number, a word, but what do they mean? I know I love him but I don’t know why.

“I wouldn’t have to leave,” I whisper. “Michael is coming back.”

I hate the words as they leave my mouth, but their taste is familiar. Michael is strong; I saved him so many times, he owes me this much. I just need more time. I can still save us both. A memory I can’t reach throbs behind my eyes.

“Oh, Kara. Don’t you remember?” Nameh watches my face, tasting the thoughts which move across it like storm clouds. I offer nothing but silent incomprehension. “He got back three weeks ago.”

Slowly, inevitably, my mind turns towards the door in the apartment that Nameh never lets me open. The one that leads to his room. I clutch my dead hand closer to my chest and think about a brain bled dry. Have I heard something moving inside: shuffling, breathing, an empty, animal sound? Can I hear it even now?

“How many times do you think we’ve had this conversation? And afterwards, each time, you begged me to forget.”

“You’re lying.” It’s the only thing I can say.

She takes my good hand in hers and leads me to his door. Her hand touches the handle; it’s not even locked. Inside the darkness is close and snarled and dense, and the smell, God, the smell. Urine and sweat and body, stale air left to ferment. I’m back in the house, in the basement where Michael found me, the one I meant to die in. Nameh reaches over to flip on the light, and all at once the mound of clothes piled on the bed, the stains running down the mattress, the arm (so thin) twisted at an odd angle on the covers. A single fly walks up the skin and stops just below the elbow.

I’m not sure when I fall to my knees. There’s nothing left in my stomach to drag up. I can’t stare at the thing that was my brother; the person I sold, piece by piece, in an effort to save myself. Instead, I look at Nameh. She stares down at me, her fingers playing with my hair. I reach up to tangle them with my own, and slowly guide them to the place at the back of my head.

Looking away is unthinkable. Her eyes are already devouring me. With her other hand she cups my cheek, and I can’t help but lean into the touch.

“Take the rest,” I whisper.

Her breath should smell like fetid meat, but when she lowers her lips over mine I taste the mint of my own toothpaste. She takes away my tongue. It’s a heavy lump in my mouth as she kisses me, as limp and dead as my hand. My legs go next, sagging where I kneel—she holds me up and takes my eyes, leaving me in the darkness. Every last piece of me unravels into her. Just one last fragment, a memory that flares from nothing like a photograph taking the flame. My body locks up, lightning-strike agony and the smell of fallen leaves, the first tentative brush of true cold on that autumn afternoon—

When she takes the rest, it’s a benediction.

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 962 for February 14th, 2025.

Hemorrhage by Cyrus Amelia Fisher

Narrated by A.J. Fitzwater; hosted by Kat Day audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. Happy Valentine’s Day! I’m Kat, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have Hemorrhage, by Cyrus Amelia Fisher. This story was originally published in the Book of Queer Saints Volume 2

Author bio:
Cyrus Amelia Fisher writes queer tales of shipwrecks, mycelium, and horrors of the flesh. After years of driving around the United States in a beat-up minivan, they finally returned to the mossy fens of their birth in the Pacific Northwest. Now they while away the hours communing with their fungal hivemind and writing about cannibalism. Naturally, they also love to cook.

Narrator bio:
AJ Fitzwater is a glittery lava lamp from Christchurch, New Zealand. Their books are the World War 2 land girls shapeshifter novella “No Man’s Land” and the lesbian capybara pirate collection “The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper”. They like bow ties and soft pillows, and they tweet @AJFitzwater.

Before we start, a warning: obviously we are a horror podcast, but this week’s episode contains especially strong horror scenes. It also references self-harm, drug abuse, addiction, physical abuse and coercive control. Basically, this one’s pretty tough. It’s a brilliant story, but it’s also tough. If you’re not up to it, maybe give this one a miss. We’ll be back next week.

Now that’s been said, we have a story for you…

… and we promise you, it’s true.

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ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of Hemorrhage, by Cyrus Amelia Fisher? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

 

I think about vampires a lot.

Not specific vampires. Not Dracula or Mina Harker or the Lost Boys’ David or Buffy’s Drusilla or Spike… actually maybe I sometimes think about Spike. I mean. Spike… er, where was I? Oh yes. Right. Not SPECIFIC vampires, but rather what they represent. Why we have, why we love, this very particular kind of monster.

Beautiful. Powerful. Charming and hypnotic. Selfish, uncaring and, this is the terrible bit, capable of stealing a part of you and of making you just like them.

It is a metaphor. It is a warning. And the warning, or part of it, anyway, is this: beware the alluring, seductive person – or thing – that draws you in and sucks you dry and then either turns you into something just like them or, more often, leaves you in the gutter like so much detritus.

Here, Nameh (He-Man backwards? Is that deliberate? I have no idea) doesn’t drink blood but rather memories, thoughts and feelings. She leaves Kara feeling so much better because she’s no longer suffocating under the weight of the contents of her own head. Kara realises right from the first time just how dangerous that is and…

… and she accepts it anyway. Because mental peace is one helluva drug.

The gift of being human is the ability to think. The curse of being human is… not being able to stop thinking.

“This isn’t what I wanted.”

“No. But it’s what you’ve been reaching for.”

Oh gods. How many times have we heard that you don’t always get what you want, but you often get what you need? And here, HERE, this is horror and because it is, it’s reversed: Kara gets what she wants and it IS NOT what she needs and she KNOWS that but she can’t stop.

She can’t stop. It’s too hard to stop. She gives up everything to whatever Nemeh is because it’s so, so much easier to sink down than fight up.

Addiction does this to people. People do this to other people. Pick your metaphor. It doesn’t matter. This is horror and there is no happy ending. Kara’s fate was sealed from the opening paragraphs.

One fairly well established theory of storytelling is that it allows us to explore dangerous and difficult situations and work out how we might cope with them. Or how we might avoid them. I don’t know. But I know we’re all here now, listening to this, and there will be another day tomorrow and another day after that. Stay with us. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep going forwards. Keep fighting up.

An incredible story that I’ve been thinking about ever since I first read it. Thank you, Cyrus Amelia Fisher.

---

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

Those of you that already support us: thank you! We literally couldn’t do it without you! Anyone who’s thinking about singing up, there’s something to be aware of: Apple have changed the way charging works through App Store apps. Long story short: sign up through a browser – including one on actually ON your phone – and it’ll be cheaper than if you go through the official Patreon app. This doesn’t affect existing subscribers – don’t worry! – it’s just for new members.

And, if you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t resist the allure of this week. Mind it doesn’t eat your soul, now. Haha. Anyway, we have a Bluesky account! We’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying things from the Escape Artists’ Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our latest social media posts.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

Next week we have… Mavka, by A.D. Sui.

 

And finally, PseudoPod, and Henry David Thoreau, know….

“Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.”

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.