extract one

g.


Cal'd wondered about the validity of the stranger's claim and felt almost as though he should ask her to cite her references. She had said it with such conviction and her colleagues had looked at each other and at her and back and had nodded with their whole torsos and expressed their agreements with raised eyebrows and bilabial nasals in a range of enthusiastic pitches. One had even clapped a little, he'd noticed, another slapped the table and the cups had rattled and a little bit of her coffee had spilled over the rim, through the foam and the foam held firm. The wonder of liquids in their many states. The wonder of coffee. Of cappuccino.

He had later, on researching, discovered that blood referred to only a specific collection of substances in very specific state at a very specific temperature and with a very specific viscosity – four or five times that of water, in fact, just as the woman had implied. Blood really is thicker than water. Blood really is thicker. Blood really is. It had moved him, this, and he had washed his hands and cried and watched them turn red as blood rose to the surface, sharply and yet ecstatically aware of the process beneath his skin and muscle tissue. He had dreamt that night of tiny men inside his veins, stirring and regulating the transfer of oxygen to his limbs from his heart and back again in the great warmth of plasma and cells and had awoken with sweat on his brow and a dense stickiness between his thighs.

That was how it began, he tells her.