It all began when I found myself lying alongside a ditch on some god-forsaken stretch of dirt road somewhere north of usual. I must have come to, because I didn't know where I was, nor that I was prone on my side, outstretched, riddled with scratches and patches of scoured skin, stinging with recency. A metallic taste in my mouth, I briefly wondered if I had drank some foul concoction which had laid me out, but how would that explain the scratches? But clearly the main problem was the blood.
Although it seemed to have nothing whatever to do with me, I saw that my arm - my lower arm, the left - was jutting out at an unnatural angle over the trench. The salient fact was that a copious river of blood was coursing along its length, spilling over the sides on its way to pouring itself more substantially over the wrist. It was a captivating sight - the blood an astonishingly deep and saturated red, the volume seemingly impossible - and it first it didn't occur to me either that the arm was mine, nor do take any action regarding it.
As I was wondering at the full volume of the flow, I was noticing an unusual scent at the back of my nose and throat; I imagined that I heard the flow of blood, and from that moment I remember nothing until awakening in the pool.
The atmosphere could hardly have been more different. Everywhere there was blue: blue sky, blue water, figures I could hazily make out on the periphery in blue: robes? towels? clothing? I felt barely awake, and was unable to become more so; teetering on the edge of sleep, or unconsciousness, I vaguely ascertained that I was floating, my head, lolling side to side, fixed somehow above the water.
A sudden turbulence in the water startled me, and I felt myself beginning to spin, round and round, with increasing speed, while the surrounding blues all darkened towards purple and then into increasingly deep shades of red; and, as the speed became intolerable, red was everywhere: both deep and bright, and again I tasted the strange scent. I realized I was flowing down my own arm in the river of blood, splashing over the wrist. descending towards the trench far below; and a word fixed itself in my mind, as if it explained everything; "Nerve".
It doesn't make any sense to me either. But that's what happened.
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