BLOOD

Blood.

The last time, they’d pressed the sharpened points of their sheath-knives into the flesh of their thumbs, and let their blood mingle, and smeared it on each other’s foreheads till it looked like burning embers. They were brothers for sure then, bound fast as any natural born siblings. But embers turn to ashes, and blood doesn’t

always take. And look at them now. One is still alive, but barely; the other wishes he had never been born. And look at all that blood. Planning a murder in advance doesn’t guarantee that you cut down on blood, although it can help. But when it just happens, in the heat of rage and with the available means to hand – a wrench that can smash a mouthful of teeth, open up an eye socket, splinter a check bone; a screwdriver that will gouge through gristle and nerve, puncture liver and spleen, sluice blood from a torn throat – when murder just happens, you wouldn’t believe how much blood there can be.

The forensic scientist classify bloodstains under sis separate headings: - drops, splashes, spurts, trails, smears and pools. And they’re all here: drops on the stone, splashes on the walls, spurts on the strip light and across the ceiling, trails as the dying man tries to evade his killer, smears on the car bonnet and the garage door, and at the end of it all, the wine dark pool of blood seeping out beneath the dead man.

The murderer cries, weeps at what he has done: involuntary tears, a spasm, not of remorse, but of shock, of relief, of exhilaration at the brave new world he has wrought, a world he has wrought, a world with a man fewer living in it. He wipes the tears with the backs of his hands, the sweat from his brow, the snot from his streaming nose. His breath still comes in sharp, shuddering gusts, like sobs. He sinks to his knees, leans his head back, shut his eyes.

Look at him now. Look at his face: blood matted around his hairline, in his eyebrows, in his moustache; blood collecting in the folds of his neck and in his ears; blood anointing him the chosen one, the first murderer, his brother’s killer. Look at the happy savage, who’s discovered the fatal flaw in God’s creation: if Cain could rise up against Abel and slay him, what’s to stop the rest of us?

Exerpt from A WRONG KIND OF BLOOD