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Lifeblood Drainaway Chronicle
By S. Jayant
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Fear lances at his schoolboy bighead as he runs, sobbing, down the corridor, his shoelaces flailing. His head wobbles and his unlaced shoes pound the linoleum flooring. He bays like a wounded wolf as the doors to the classrooms flash past. God, but this corridor is long and it encourages the feral to run.
Taillamps everywhere. A sea of them. A one-way street to the inevitable conclusion that pain is his birthright. That his hands must bleed and his mouth must fill with blood. I look at him from my elevated vantage point with a sense of inevitability. He must bleed to death, and nothing can be done for him.
He runs. His shoelaces flail like mad flagellating tentacles. The corridor is interminable. Warm red splotches, almost as bright as the sea of taillamps, mark his passage. His head wobbles.
---------Perhaps I will spend some time trying to illustrate his mouth. His mouth is closed, and I must draw it as such, but I must still convey the impression that it is heavy with blood. Let's see; it will require some skill to illustrate.
How do you represent blood without painting it explicitly ?---------Fear causes ripples of pain in his big head. No one else in this corridor. Just that sea of blood that is now splashing up to his ankles. His clothes are spattered by the taillamp blood, thrown up by his unlaced self-flagellating shoes. The blood washes against the walls of the corridor, leaving red stains. He is panting now, releasing great gouts of warm blood from his mouth that dribble down his shirtfront. The blood in the corridor has inexorably risen up to his neck,
He tries to keep his head above the red taillamp sea, even as tires scream around him and stoplights come on, adding bright arterial scarlet to the sea of blood. I look at him, knowing that the end is near. Sure enough, I hear a sickening, crunching thud. A huge red pickup truck has hit him from the rear. He stumbles, and disappears in his own blood, presumably to drown shortly thereafter. -------------------------------------------------------
