On one level, Diana Clarke‘s “Blood Ties” (from our Fall 2014 Issue) is a coming-of-age story about an adolescent Jewish girl in New York City. But bubbling below the surface there’s also darkness and mystery and sex– and, of course, blood– all rushing headlong toward an unforgettable conclusion.

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I CRUMPLE MY FINGERS AS THE CLERK APPROACHES, hiding the red crusted in my nail beds. I can smell the iron, but the clerk doesn’t even turn her head. She’s too focused on an errant coat three rows away. Its unrumpledness signals that it does not belong in the sale room, any more than I belong on the main floor. She approaches the coat, barcode scanner already raised like a torch or a gun, then tags the thick green fabric and drags it away, sedated. Without the weight and darkness of the coat, the retired summer clothes that are past shopping season but still appropriate for the weather outside seem to list from their hangers toward the light. They are a swarm of fireflies, they are road dust rising, they are a dandelion head diffused.

​I rub my palms together, pinch my fingertips, watch my menstrual blood flake to the floor where it becomes invisible. I can never bring myself to wash it off, not when I know they’ll refuse to touch me later for the fear of it. In my neighborhood, Yiddish is like a curtain we draw between us and the rest of the world—keeps us warm in winter, and dark the rest of the year. My mother doesn’t even speak it well, but her gestures are so Jewish that from far away you wouldn’t know it. We moved here three years ago, and in one more year I’m leaving, but for the meantime what I have is not to wash. Rebellion comes in all kinds.

​When I was a child, my mother’s friend Julia would sit at the kitchen table, hair piled on her head and bare shoulders shaking with laughter, remembering how the two of them used to ride the subways, how their bodies learned to bleed together, and how when they did neither one of them wore anything to stop it. “It was the eighties,” Julia would say, turning to me. Years of sun had turned her brown in the deepest part of her chest. “The subways were just us and the homeless people, and even the homeless people sat at the other end of the car.” My mother always shushed her with half a heart.

​I would go back to my room after and imagine the wetness between their legs, how it slicked them then dried till it stuck, how they would have to peel their pants away or shower still wearing them. Continue reading “Blood Ties” – Fiction by Diana Clarke →