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Photo by Shivansh Sethi on Unsplash

“What do you mean, the beginning?” Dara asked.

“Pretend you never told me anything.” Reaching across to touch Dara’s hand, Alledria said, “I was a stupid teenager then a distracted adult. I tried to solve the issue, but I never properly listened. Not really and I am sorry, but I am listening now. Go ahead.”

Wayne squirmed in his seat, but Alledria was his wife and nothing ever stops her once she gets in her mind to do something. When the server dropped off the refills, he whispered to her, “No more beer for me after this, but if you could drop off a water or two.” The server nodded, she also touched the console on the table, turning it toward him to indicate it was ready whenever they were.

Noticing the exchange, Dara pulled out her credit card and pushed it to the server. When Wayne opened his mouth, she immediately said, “Who asked who out? It is a book birthday party.”

Wayne shook his head and used Dara’s credit card to process the payment before the lunch-dinner shift-change.

“Stop stalling.”

“Alright.” Dara whipped her face with her hand, then used the same hand to tap the notebook in front of her. “I don’t remember the first time I had a random bleeding hole in me, but I remember the first time I realized I had a chronic problem. It was sixth grade, Mr. D’s math, you remember him?”

“He threw erasers way too accurately.”

“Never hit a student but woke you up every time when it hit the desk. Yeah, well, I was bleeding from the wrist and it was making a mess on the assignment, so I reached for my purse where I kept the band-aids. While wrapping my wrists I was thinking how nice it was not to go down to the nurse for band-aids anymore now that I got the purse.”

Wayne held up a finger. “About that, why were you carrying a purse in the middle of middle school? I mean a backpack should be enough.”

“Period supplies. The purses were absolutely necessary during the ‘must be clear’ backpack stage. Duh.” Dara responded.

“I feel dumb.” Wayne scooted down on his side of the booth. “All the girls start carrying purses in fifth or sixth grade, and all the guys are like what is that about?”

“It’s okay. I still love you.” Alledria bumped her husband’s shoulder. “Now back to you, Dara.”

“Where was I?” she stalled.

“Mr. D’s class.”

“Yeah, well, I realized that no one else needed to keep band-aids on hand for random bleeding. I mean I could hit you up for a tampon if I ran out, but you didn’t carry band-aids. If I didn’t want a lecture about scratching leading to blood poisoning every nurse’s visit, I had to bring my own. Or visit the Mrs. Marshall and have to go over whether everything was good at home and self-mutilations isn’t the answer.” Dara tapped her notebook. “Health said to document our periods to figure out the cycle and I thought, why not document this other bleeding, to figure out if there is a cycle there. So I started.”

“What did you find?”

“Well, after nearly twenty years, there is and there is not a cycle.”

Wayne hummed a question mark inquiry. As a high school math teacher, that last statement interested him.

“I’m getting to it. So not much else happened in school, not until college. I kept having small holes between three and eight millimeters in size appearing somewhere on my body every four to nine days. I gave up wearing white anything because I never knew when or where a stigmata would happen. It was really annoying on my back or on the back of my legs where I couldn’t see it, but people would notice a patch of blood. Black, burgundy, and brown became my color choices to hide the blood spots. Ally would poke at me to branch out fashion-wise, and after four years of data, I would borrow a shirt or wear a skirt if it was day two or three after the last hole. By senior year, I thought I knew everything. Then I went to college.”

“What happened?” Alledria asked.

“Nothing the first month. No holes, no blood, other than the normal period, for thirty-six days. I thought going away to college, crossing state lines, maybe I had been allergic to something back home. But I was cured.”

“I caught that,” said the writer. “What happened after thirty-six days.”

“I got a hole every two days for three weeks.”

“Until you were back to your average,” Wayne speculated. “Whatever the schedule was.”

“That is my best guess, yeah.” Dara agreed.

“Hmm.”

“And when I went home for Christmas, no holes until the tenth day. Return to college after winter break, only twenty days before they restarted. The second year, the window continued to shrink as I bounced between the locations, but always took at least seven days if I moved more than one hundred miles, like doing one of the college service projects. Then I met Kase and dropped out Junior year. Since that hadn’t been in the planning for getting all the right classes, I didn’t even qualify for an Associates of Business Administration. Two and a half years of college for nothing.” Dara shook her head in disgust at her younger naïve self before continuing. “No holes during the honeymoon, but then most of it was moving out of the dorm room into his place. I had been ecstatic when I had a hole the day before the wedding, which meant I wouldn’t bleed on the white gown. After the honeymoon, I’ve never gone on a trip longer than four days away from home.”

“Any other anomalies?” Wayne asked.

“Time-wise? There was a seven-week hold which overlapped with a skipped period our second year of marriage. I think it was a failed pregnancy. The stigmata restarted three hours following my period restarting with a very heavy bleed.”

“Interesting. If they, for whatever ‘they’ are, assuming intelligence, don’t take blood samples during pregnancy.”

“Yeah, I thought of that. The stop really does seem like intelligence.” Dara shuddered.

“Oh,” Alledria reached across and held onto Dara’s hand, “I’m a so sorry for not listening better.”

Dara shook her head. “I wasn’t living near you when I was married to Kase. By the time we got back in touch properly, I was dealing with other issues and I don’t think I ever mentioned this link to anyone before now.”

Squeezing her friend’s hand, Alledria asked, “And were there any anomalies which weren’t time-cycle related?”

“Not in body placement.” Dara gave Alledria a squeeze of reassurance, then let go her hand. She removed the pen from the spiral spine of the small notebook and opened it up to a half-filled page. “I write the notes like this.” She drew a line. “First the date and time. And before you ask, it seems to happen at any time, even while asleep. All the little blood dots on the bedsheets annoyed Kase to no end. I write the size if I am in a position to measure it. Then write left or right side – it does happen more on the right side, but that could just be happening because I notice it more on the right, since I am right-handed – and the body part. Next I draw,” she drew a hand and forearm, “and mark where it occurred. I wasn’t consistent about that at first, but I did better in college. And it occurs anywhere on the body except, and this gets weird, no nose bleeds and nothing in hairy areas. Even though hair covers the area, I’m positive no blood on the scalp and…other areas…no clotting.”

“Well, little holes don’t produce much blood,” Wayne commented.

“You would think. But here is the other anomaly. These holes have prolonged bleeding time. Like between seven and ten minutes before clotting, unless I bandage them. But after the clotting occurs, they just bleed the normal two to three minutes before stopping if the wound gets reopened. So I drop a lot of blood out of the holes initially. It just wells and wells and wells.”

“That sounds like something out of one of my horror books.”

“Yep.”

“Anything else we should know?”

“Well, other big things. Kase never believe me.”

Alledria jumped in, “Again, I am so sorry.”

Dara gave her a look of, I am going to forgive you unless you keep on asking for forgiveness, so shut up now.

“Shutting up now.” Alledria responded aloud to the facial expression.

“He never believed me until, while we were having make-up sex one night and he was staring at my face for once, one of the holes opened on a cheekbone. He was looking right here.” She touched the bone line under her left eye. “And bam-oo, bleeding. Freaked him out and he moved out of the bedroom that weekend. He didn’t want to catch whatever it was I had.”

“What a douchebag,” Wayne said.

“After everything you did for him, all those hoops he made you jump through, giving up your degree to support his dreams, draining your funds, everything. He dumped you when he finally thought you were ill?” Alledria closed her hands into fists. “I’m gonna kill him.”

“He isn’t worth it.” Dara said, years of emotional exhaustion weighed the words down like cement shoes. “Back to this. I finally got a doctor to believe me by going on a trip over 100 miles away for ten days, lost all my vacation time to do it, but I had them put me in a room, stripped and recorded it. Within four hours of returning to town, a hole appeared two inches above the right-side butt cheek dimple. They were able to test the bleeding time and confirm something temporarily impacted bleeding time. That doctor is the one who gave me the official diagnosis for all the good it did me. Now I have a permanent medical condition which keeps me from qualifying for health insurance. Yipee.” She closed the notebook and moved to thread the pen through the spiral spine.

“Hey, can I see that?” Wayne held out a hand, and Dara passed it over. He started flipping through it, stopping at some of the entries, turning the book to see some of the drawings.

“Wow,” Alledria leaned forward on her elbows. “That is something. If this was one of my horror stories, you would have invisible leeches or lice. Something whose saliva prolonged bleeding. Patient zero, slowly infecting everyone around you. Except invisible fauna doesn’t make sense if it disappears when you leave the area, but only temporarily.”

“Thank you for that thought.” Dara said.

“Another option is a fantasy or science fiction, where … a demon is drawing your blood invisible or maybe a time traveler? But why you? Are you famous, of a special lineage?”

“Not to my knowledge, and I did put this out there a couple times in social media to see if anyone responded. The internet has been great to connect people with unusual problems together, but all I got was crickets.”

“So, really, as near as you can tell, it is just you.”

“Best guess.”

“It happened just now. We didn’t see anyone touch you. You didn’t touch your arm either. I’m sorry to accuse you…”

Dara gave her the look again.

“Anyway, in an intimate moment, even on camera. Whatever is doing it cannot be seen or felt, able to enter closed rooms.” Alledria considered fictional options. “Multi-dimensional scientific research?”

“Did you do more than track the days?” Wayne asked.

“What do you mean?” Dara replied.

“Like maybe the reason there is no clear tracking on time is the sampling is happening on a schedule of, say, shoulder every 20 days, arm every sixteen, etc.”

Dara boggled at him. “No. That would take like some serious medical programming.”

“Just statistical, and I got a classroom of students needing to work on statical programming.” He waved the notebook in the air. “Do you got more of these? This one started October of last year.”

“I have a box of about fifteen back at home.”

“I would love to see if we can work out anything statistically significant out of this data. It might give us a hint.”

With a crooked smile, Dara finished his statement, “Of finding what’s wrong with me.”

“Maybe. I doubt it, because this is some weird shit, but we can try.”

Dara look at her best friend and her husband. “Yes. Let’s try.”

(words 2,110; first published 4/11/2026 – Finally, if you put all the pieces together, you have the story I was trying to tell. Problem is, even after all that chatting, there still isn’t an ending. What should happen next?)

Anniversary Dinner Series
Chapter One: Anniversary Dinner (9/11/2022)
Chapter Two: What’s Wrong (9/8/2024)
Chapter Three: What’s Wrong with Me? (12/29/2024)