Blood

I was at a mall. I think it was the Gateway Mall in nearby Springfield, but it's hard to tell malls apart. It was tiled and dimly lit, and it was making me tired.

I had just been to the dollar store. I felt happy, because I had some new cheap junk. I had a very nice pair of scissors. They were fabric scissors with comfortable plastic handles. They cut very well and made a noise that was satisfying, but not the kind of high-pitched squeal that makes me stick my fingers in my ears and start cursing.

High-pitched squeals make me tense up, squirm, and eventually start cursing at whomever is making them. People in my family like to use forks to dish noodles out of metal pots and colanders. They cheerfully scrape, scrape, scrape the fork against the container. If I knew any deadly and impressive martial art, I would use it against people who scrape pieces of metal against other pieces of metal. But I digress.

I was sitting on a bench at the mystery mall, playing with my scissors. A small blonde child, about three or four, wandered over and asked me to give it a haircut. I was not sure of the child's sex, due to its young age.

I agreed and started cutting. I took my comb out of my back pocket and used that as well. I gave the child a nice haircut. I hope it was a male child, because that's the kind of haircut I did.

Once I was done, the child and the hair clippings vanished. I woke up.

At least, I thought I woke up. I woke up and I was in my dorm room, in bed. The lights were on. Something felt sticky. I looked down.

My bed was completely soaked in blood. Dark, semi-clotted blood. There was a spreading puddle of blood on the floor. The room was humid and smelled of iron.

I wasn't terribly worried. More annoyed, really. I tend to experience the miracle of womanhood like a stuck pig anyway, so I just figured that was what was going on.

I wondered briefly if the main desk downstairs had a carpet shampoo machine to rent. The dorms in Corvallis did when my friend Sean lived there.

Then I really woke up, and everything was fine so I wrote this down and went back to sleep.