coming soon

my submission for the soon-to-be-brilliant anthology Coming Soon, edited by kimi, egay, and chingbee. sana matanggap. heh heh.



Some Facts You Remember From Ten Years Ago
674 words

Everyone knows blood is a fluid that’s 55% plasma. That is, it’s water—with a lot of proteins, salts and other stuff dissolved in it. Hence, the lipsmacking salty taste much loved by vampires. The other 45% is made up of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets floating around merrily in that clear plasma. What gives blood its iconic bright red color is the hemoglobin, which being iron-rich also explains that surprising metallic tang you detect when your tongue seeks out a tiny ragged cut on your lower lip, slightly left of center, in the fleshy part where he bit you.

The whole thing actually took less time (6 minutes, 48 seconds) than you thought (an hour at the very least). And it hurt so much more than you’d expected. But of course you knew about the pain involved—never mind what romance novels say about hearing violins and/or trumpets and/or the music of the spheres in the background—you’re not that dumb. You know that when something fairly large and rigid and bent slightly to the right forces itself into a space too tight even for a cute pink Playtex tampon with the diameter of a #2 Mongol pencil, something’s gotta give.

And that something is called a hymen. It’s a fold of mucous membrane much like the inside of your cheek. Said fold partly covers the external vaginal covering, sort of like your vagina’s way of playing peekaboo. In many cultures, it is physical evidence of chastity, the body’s rather flimsy way of keeping the enemy at the gate. Your gynecologist can tell you that hymens come in three popular shapes: (a) crescentic, with the widest part at the bottom and nothing on top; (b) annular, or ring-around-the-opening; and (c) redundant, with folds which may cause it to protrude like a third set of labia. In rare cases, the hymen is imperforate, stretched like a drum across and perfectly sealing the opening, requiring surgery to allow the menses to flow out. But you don’t have a gynecologist because you never actually needed one. Whatever form your hymen had been is now immaterial.

What’s clear is that it got torn at the exact moment that he was holding you down, both your thin bony wrists held above your head by his right hand and you were saying no no no no nnnmmfff muffled against his left palm, which smelled like those Marlboro Reds he chainsmoked at the rate of two packs a day. You tried to kick and/or push him off you but you just couldn’t move. Then again, he was significantly heavier at 168 lb to your 94. And besides, even your legs were pinned down and stretched wide open. And even if you could scream, there was no one else to hear you that night in his dark apartment along Esteban Abada in Katipunan. There really was nothing you could do.

But enough of that. Let’s talk about viscosity. Smart people say it is a fluid’s measure of resistance to being deformed by either shear or extensional stress, or resistance to flow. Normal people, however, percieve it simply as the thickness or thinness of a fluid. Either way, it’s not always easy to measure viscosity because some fluids are Newtonian (viscosity dependent on temperature but not on shear rate or time), some are not (opposite of previous).

Viscosity is measured in centipoise (cps), with water as the standard at 1 cps. Pork lard is between one to two million cps (extremely thick, almost solid) while honey is around 3,000 cps (quite oozy). Blood is, yes, thicker than water but not by much at only 10 cps. And so you wonder at the rate the blood is flowing from the inside of your thigh, down to your leg and onto the yellow tile floor of the shower. For a few seconds, you watch as your blood mixes with water: how the bright red spreads in slow wispy circles into the clear, into the wet. How it flows away from you. How it disappears.