Blood Magic
I
t starts in the crook of a spiral of stones. The grass is green, and the sky is blue. The path is worn to dirt by a thousand feet before mine. I wind through the circle, my love watching from just outside the entrance.
“Leave something,” says our guide. He watches from a little ways off in the glen. “Something eco-friendly, preferably. We want this place to last long after us.”
My momentum tightens, turns in on itself. In the middle of the Faerie circle, coins glitter in the sun. Their cold shimmer catches the light between pound notes and carved wood. The bones of some unknown creature grin from the offering pile.
“Leave something good,” says our guide. “Something for a wish. A strand of your hair.”
A thousand feet have packed this earth bare before mine. A sky blue enough to break your heart glows overhead; the hills are vibrant green.
I comb through my copper hair and choose a strand the shade of autumn. I clutch it to my chest, shaking with cold, willing the wind not to take it. It’s February and beautiful in the kind of way that the world stops turning for.
“Please,” I think/pray/beg/wish. “Let me believe in magic again.”
The hair leaves my fingers and drifts down to the other offerings. My love purses her lips. I trace it out again; I’ll not break the circle. A thousand feet have packed this earth bare before mine. A sky blue enough to break your heart glows overhead; the hills are vibrant green.
It starts in the crook of a spiral of stones, this story that no one believes.
It starts in the crook of my stomach, the wicked curve of my spine, on a day that’s too green to stay inside.
I am barely eleven, and if I felt like myself, I’d be out in the sunlight running amok on the grounds of our rented farmhouse. I’d be catching minnows from the shallow creek, or jumping from the farmer’s hay bales in the far fields where I’m not supposed to wander. I’d be scrambling up onto the lowest rung of the abandoned silo, looking into the black soup brewing at the bottom and howling into the emptiness. It would echo and swell and fall back to me.
Instead:
I am crooked into a wretched spiral on the living room floor, concentrating on the feel of the stiff blue carpet against my cheek. Something is rubbing pebbles of peppercorn through my gut. I’m uncomfortable, but it’s just bearable. I’m hurting, but I don’t know what pain is yet.
In the afternoon, a rust-colored stripe appears in the valley of my underwear. I stare at it for far too long and slip them off. I pad to my mom’s room and hold them up.
My mom smiles. Says, “It came.”
“Congrats,” I say, embracing my love. “We’re finally here.”
A week’s worth of seconds has pulled us away from the Faerie Glen and into the arms of another harbor. We’re holding each other in the wooden kitchen of our Airbnb. We’re an island out, in a little village called Tolsta Chaolais, a freckle on the map of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
My love’s face is the sun, warming this little place hidden under cumulous clouds and winter chill. Our stuff is barely out of our hands, sprawled all over the floor of The Old Post Office, before we’re re-lacing our boots and tucking chins into scarves.
“Come on,” my love says, grinning. “Our host said the dead are always buried with a view.”
My landscape is brown tile. They swim and contort, and the floor smells like bleach. Out of the bathroom, down the hall, my mom and a hundred other women cut family photos into palatable shapes and place them into scrapbooks. They court nostalgia with collected smiles while I count the seconds between pain and nothing. Pain, and nothing. Pain, and
It’s only been a few months. Four months, if that, since I started bleeding. I don’t know this body anymore.
Another wave of pain hits. Gravel and grit rub my abdomen raw. A searing pain from hip to hip presses me into the floor. I’m sweating. I’m freezing. Is this what dying feels like? I could laugh, if I could breathe. Was any death more pathetic than this one?
My friends at school say they’ve gotten their periods once, maybe twice so far. Nothing to count on. My lips can’t form the right shapes to tell them that I can count on mine like morbid clockwork. Twenty-eight days. Always twenty-eight days until I’m spiraling again.
A drop of sweat slides from my hairline down my nose. The backs of my hands belong to someone else, and they’re leaving humid handprints on the tile. Chicken noodle soup threatens to come rushing back up my throat.
I swallow. I breathe. I brace. I am only this pain, in this moment. Nothing more.
My mom’s voice, mingling with a friend’s, approaches the bathroom door.
“…and yeah. Some girls just have a rough time of it, right?” she asks cautiously. Her friend’s earrings click as they nod.
“Brave little thing.”
I close my eyes and press my head, nose, lips to the ground. What if this isn’t death, and life’s just like this?
The dead watch my love, and I approach. The path is gravel and grass until it subsides into the moorland. Around a hill, a view of the inlet opens up. A cold, scorodite ocean hugs the cliffs, and on one of them, a graveyard sits. I wonder briefly if whales ever pass this place, waving their great tails to the people who have passed.
My love pulls out her phone to capture the way it escapes the dark shelf of clouds. The beams catch every worn indent on the tombstones.
My love dances to the open gate. It’s older than time; the walls are built of stacked, mossy stones. An old buoy lies cattywompus near the entrance. Farther in, two ends of a broken shovel lean up against a wall.
The sun seems too precious to take for granted here. My love pulls out her phone to capture the way it escapes the dark shelf of clouds. The beams catch every worn indent on the tombstones.
I’m smiling until she frowns. The wind is alive; it carries her words away from us. “What?” I ask, bending to her ear.
“I said, ‘that’s weird—my phone just died.’ It was fully charged.”
“That’s bizarre,” I say, pulling out my phone to slip into her hands.
Minutes may be passing, but I’ve got a feeling time moves different here. A lot feels different here. My love takes care to find all the right angles between stone and light and sky. She ventures a little further in, careful to not step on anyone.
The sun is setting. That’s all the sun does in Scotland, in February. I could swear only a minute passed, but the sun is setting, and it’s time to leave. I take the phone back from my love and raise it to catch this moment of her joy. Her eyes are hazel, and her brow is turned up like she’s asking the land something.
The moment my finger touches the shutter, my phone dies, sudden and quiet. My love sees my face, sees the phone, and shakes her head.
“This can’t be the new normal, Morgie.” My mom stands over me. I am gasping on the couch, turning inside out from another stretch of pain. I’m missing another day of school. Sweat dribbles down my temple; I’m sticking to our ratty pleather couch. My clothes have become a second skin, they’re so soaked through. I can’t stop shaking. She says, “It can’t.”
“I know,” I moan. Only a year. It’s only been a year, since this beast came to live inside me. For the barest of seconds there’s a gap in the pain, and I gasp. It waits a beat, then it’s back, and my vision splits into three. All three of my moms press their lips together. They’re dressed up for work and running late.
She’s saying, “You can’t keep missing school.”
“I know.”
“I’m gonna get a letter in the mail. We’ll get fined.”
“I know.”
“Is there something happening?”
My brain bubbles, trying to grasp what she’s implying. “What?”
“Is there something happening at school?”
The pain is so great I’m biting through my lip. It’s more than stones and peppercorn—it’s a poker from the woodstove—carving a line between uterus and ovaries and back again. Mom’s face gets tighter with worry. Six eyes blink.
“No,” I snarl. I am venomous with agony. I could spit. I could bite. “Nothing is happening at school. My body just—hates me.”
My sight’s going fuzzy at the sides. Far away, my mom’s voice says hesitantly, “If it really is this bad, and it keeps being this bad, we’ll have to take you to the doctor.”
Soul shuddering, a tear slips down my cheek. I’m in middle school, and there are whispers in the locker rooms during gym class about the girl-doctors we’ll have to see one day. Whispers of cold fingers, men’s hands reaching into women’s bodies, peeling their legs apart like too ripe fruit.
Women’s health, they call it.
I close my eyes.
My eyes flutter open to grey light coming in through the curtains of the Old Post Office. There’s a skylight above the bed and it’s heavy with gloomy dawn. My love sleeps beside me, and the smell of heather-scented soap hangs in the morning chill.
I snuggle down again and drift. I won’t fall back asleep, but I can pretend it will happen. I’m too high strung for it. I’ll need some Advil soon. I’m breathing easy and deep when the sound starts up. A whistling, like breath. Then melody.
My ears are rushing. The sound matches my heart and leaves it racing. I am home alone, packing my bedroom on the second floor. Mom says we’re leaving the farmhouse, the creek, the hay bales, the silo, for a little apartment on the other side of town that we can actually afford.
I’m a freshman in high school. I am hardly fifteen. I am bleeding like a stuck pig because that’s what happens every twenty-eight days. My friends’ periods come in candy-coloured tampon wrappers and little waves of discomfort that a Tylenol can placate. Mine gut me dry.
Everything feels distant as I sway down the hallway, manage the first set of stairs. My vision flickers on the landing, and my heart revs with the panic of it.
The pain hits to the rhythm of my thundering ears. It leaves lunch simmering in my stomach, and I grip a cardboard box for support.
Go downstairs. Get some water.
I watch my hand drop a folded tank top to the floor. Everything feels distant as I sway down the hallway, manage the first set of stairs. My vision flickers on the landing, and my heart revs with the panic of it. I start running. The black presses in. I don’t think I’m actually in trouble until the next wave hits and I’m three steps up from the ground floor. It rushes to meet me, and I hear it when my head hits the thin carpet. The feeling’s gone by that point, except for the cramping. Black bubbles burst and consume my sight.
When I come to again, the clock on the TV stand has jumped ahead a few minutes. Sweat slides freely from every pore and carpet dust sticks to my face. My limbs aren’t working right; I can’t find my legs much less get them under me. So, I crawl to the couch and pull myself up. I picture Mom here, a year ago, asking me kindly to get it together.
No one is home when it happens. No one sees me pass out. Maybe it never actually happened.
There’s a whisper. A melody, bent on rising. My eyes open again, and I look to our phones on the nightstand. Their screens are dark.
The sound is too airy for them, anyhow. This music—it sounds like pan flutes whistling. I consider the chimney in the living room, the hollow-piped gates of our surrounding neighbours. That’s all it can be. Like breath over a bottle. Until really, it can’t be.
The notes follow a singular melody. It’s not familiar, and a little off. It does something to my chest and leaves it aching. So, I still and listen. That’s when the drums start, and I’m up and batting my love awake, already talking.
“Do you hear that?”
“Wha—?”
“Shh. Listen. Listen.”
Everything quiets the moment she wakes. There’s nothing left but the grey, grey light. My love’s faces crinkles in annoyance.
“What am I listening for?”
“It’s gone,” I whisper wildly. “It’s gone now. But please tell me you heard it.”
“Heard what?”
I explain, feeling a bit unhinged. At the end, she pats my hand and uses it to wrap herself into my chest. She sighs, “There, there.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“I think you’re creative.” Her eyes wink at the corners. “Dreams seem so real sometimes.”
“It feels like something’s carving me down the middle,” I finally whisper to my high school teachers, the nurse, my mom when they call her in.
That’s when she takes me to the doctor. His name’s Dr. Brown, and he’s the pediatrician I’m growing out of. I tell him my symptoms, and he scribbles and ponders on his clipboard. His pen has an even tooth mark on the cap, like he bites the same place each time.
Say something, I urge. Tell me what will stop this.
When he looks up, his smile is boyish, and he looks at my mom when he’s talking to me. “Morgan, a lot of kids your age are stressed out beyond belief, and they don’t even realize it. Get some more sleep. Eat better foods. Your period will ease up if you cater to it a bit.”
My mom visibly relaxes. My voice won’t come.
It is 2013. I am a junior in high school. It’s been six years of this, there will be six more. Twelve weeks of every year I am out of commission. 504 days of passing out puking worrying bleeding through clothes popping painkillers being sad and a bitch and miserable because I don’t feel well I don’t feel well I don’t feel well I don’t—
Tolsta Chaolais is a five mile walk from the Calanais Stones. Another five back again. My love and I are out of shape but eager. The entire morning, as we walk, I hear faint snippets of music. They disappear the moment I open my mouth.
Then the stones rise up like little sentries around us. We separate and wander for better angles and lighting. The wind is cutting. Moorland and blue inlets intertwine in the surrounding view.
This place is alive, I think, standing in the centre circle. The main standing stone dwarfs me twice over. I stare up into it and imagine placing it there, how heavy it must have been to carry.
“Mo,” my love calls. It quiet and far, so I rewrap my scarf to go searching. A hand touches my shoulder a moment later. My heart all but stops and I spin to find her just behind me. Her brows are curious; she’s biting her lip.
“Hey, jumpy.”
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“You sounded so far away.”
She shrugs and blinks a little too slowly. “I was right behind you this whole time. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No. I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”
She bites her lip deeper. Her eyes flick to my hair whipping with the current of the wind. She says, “Sound must carry different here.”
College is different in terms of pain. I am alone for the first time in life. No one knows about it but me, so I try to keep it that way.
I schedule my sleep to the minute. I rotate between ibuprofen, Advil, Tylenol, so my body doesn’t build a tolerance. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I hide it from roommates and friends and professors and classmates. I keep it together. I have to. Some days, I wake up and nothing is wrong. Others, I wake enflamed in that crooked spiral, already gasping. I ask for death like begging a favour.
I meet my love in college.
She’s in a lot of my classes, and she’s quiet and kind. The first time I slip up and run out of painkillers, I’m in our shared dorm. She takes my sweaty forehead and rests it in her lap.
“Is it centralized? The pain?”
I gesture vaguely downward.
“Honestly, Mo.”
I think about it. Today, it’s the left ovary. I touch it tenderly. Joke, “Is that where the appendix is?”
My love frowns, shakes her head, and holds me.
College passes. The pain stays, but so does my love.
My love and I throw on our packs and zip up our coats. We venture into the grey light of the next morning and walk the single street down past the other cottages. We’re heading to Dun Broch. There’s a map on our phones, if they stay alive. When we get to a fork just outside of the village, we take the footpath to the left. The sky is so bleak it leaches into the trodden grass and drinks the colour.
We tread farther from life. Cottages disappear between hills and rocky crags. We follow the path between them, into the moorland. It’s a half hour of this eerie silence, when we reach a metal gate. My love looks to me, so I reach for the handle, and it pulls open with a shriek loud enough to wake whatever sleeps here.
The path stretches out a mile straight ahead of us. The copper moors extend outwards and make a mini valley when it meets the hills on either side. It is such a lonely country, but I do not feel alone.
I cross through the gate. The grass is soft and spongey beneath my boots. Heather springs up in twisted coils on either side. I hear the gate latch, though the wind is whipping. I walk, and I walk.
Then the drums start.
If it was loud before, it’s all consuming out here. My heart spasms with it; I close my eyes, concentrate. The flute melody takes a moment, then joins the tempo. They play together, and rise. Over hill, over dale. It’s haunting, this strange, beautiful moment.
The words are on my tongue as I turn, My love, can you hear it? The music?
But I don’t have to ask. Her face is paler than death, her eyes round like moons. Her lips are parted in consideration. She hears it. She hears it. She hears it.
My parents don’t hear me calling. I’m retching. The room’s spinning. My knees hit the floor, my chest, then my head. The first time I black out it’s God sent. When I wake, I’m collapsing inward.
It’s a night in December. I am twenty-two.
This is what dying feels like.
I’m bleeding, because if there’s one friend that won’t leave me to suffer alone, it’s my period. It’s blood magic.
God help the smaller version of me that fell at the first wave of pain on that brown-tiled floor of the church. She knew what it meant to hurt, and it wasn’t a fraction of this.
My vision goes again.
I come to calling for my parents down the hall. My brother in his bedroom. The dog in the hallway. No one comes. They can’t hear me. Maybe this isn’t happening at all.
I moan. I’m bleeding, because if there’s one friend that won’t leave me to suffer alone, it’s my period. It’s blood magic.
I think I’m gasping. I’m not sure.
Something’s carving a wicked smile from ovary to ovary with a hot, dull knife.
The door’s locked. I don’t have my phone. I’m out again.
Back awake. Still spiralling. I think I’m dying.
I don’t want to die alone. I crawl and collapse, crawl and collapse. The bathroom door is open—did I do that? Black out. Come to. The carpet in the hallway is soft. The dog’s licking my forehead.
I make it to my parents’ room. Their fan is going; they still can’t hear me. I get to all fours, my knees, my unsteady feet. The darkness is thick enough to lean against. I flick on the light.
My mom’s awake in an instant, blinking, rising. “What? What?”
I wretch. “Take me to the hospital.”
My love and I look at each other, then around us. The music is coming from everywhere. Nowhere. We cannot grasp it. Or it cannot be grasped. I lean into her, and she leans into me, and we look into each other’s faces like we’ve just met again.
The music stops dead.
When we look back to the path ahead, my arms are crawling. There was nothing for miles. All around us, we could see for miles, and there was nothing. Now, to the left of the path, wait three sheep. They’re massive. The kind with the white bodies and black heads. I hardly breathe. They are so still it’s unsettling. A minute passes like a thousand years, and the one in front, the biggest, finally moves and regards us with one diamond eye.
I hold out my hand. There aren’t any words to say. So, I gesture that this path is theirs to walk on. The sheep looks at us a moment and bows its neck to the earth in a sickle-shaped curtesy.
It strides onto our path. The other two follow it. They don’t make any sound. No bleating, no baaing, no hooves on the stones. We let them gain a few strides, then I take my love’s hand. We’re going the same way. Not following. Not being led. Not being stolen away.
Not yet. Maybe, just a bit.
They walk in a straight line, these sheep that don’t feel like sheep. The envoy travels half a mile with us, maybe more. My love and I don’t speak. Not when the sheep and the hills and the moors and the music are silent.
Eventually, the leader veers. They flank to the right of the path and step into the heathery grass. The big one stalls. His companions go by. We have stopped on the path, creatures watching creatures watching creatures.
The sheep looks over his shoulder, and he waits.
No one moves. Then, I shake my head very slowly, very politely. No.
The sheep considers this, then joins his companions farther on in the heather. My love watches them leave and dares a step forward. I follow suit. We nervously take our eyes back to the path. We walk for only a minute, when the music starts again. We stop and study each other. My chest aches like it will always be yearning for this moment again.
When we look behind us, the valley is empty. The envoy is gone.
“Endometriosis,” says the surgeon, scribbling onto her clipboard.
“What?” I’m still high from the anesthesia, so sore from three neat little laparoscopic incisions across my stomach. The glue’s dyed purple, and I’m too squeamish to touch them. My love and my mom perch on the other side of my hospital bed, chewing their nails and twisting their hair. They echo my question.
“Endometriosis. It’s when your uterus essentially grows endometrial tissue—what you bleed out during your period—on the outside of the uterus. That tissue sheds too but has nowhere to go. So, it sheds into your abdominal cavity over and over again. Have you always had painful periods?”
I nod wordlessly.
“Well. Your whole abdomen was filled with it—years and years of old, congealed blood. It’s been coined ‘chocolate blood’ in the field because—well, you can guess. Anyway. That’s why your periods have always been painful. The old blood agitates the other organs it touches. That’s what irritated your ovaries, which led to the cysts. You had one the size of a baseball in there. Did you know that?”
My head bobs, neither confirming nor denying. I think, ten years. Ten years of this.
The surgeon pokes a post-surgery present on the nose—a plush dragon, sleepy and soft in my arms.
“So good news, you didn’t lose an ovary. And those intense bursts of pain? Those were the cysts bursting. I’ve heard, personally, it’s so painful that it rivals childbirth. In fact, we couldn’t even remove your other cyst. The moment we touched it, it burst. The size of a baseball. Can you imagine?”
It isn’t hard to.
My mom asks, squeezing my hand without the IVs, “So this means…?”
The surgeon hesitates. She pulls up a chair and looks at me for a good moment. She meets my eyes when she says, “There’s no cure for it. As long as you have your uterus, you’ll continue bleeding, outside and in. Even a hysterectomy is no guarantee that the pain will stop. Ex-endo patients complain of phantom endo pain even without a uterus. Sometimes it spreads to other organs. You have to realize, Morgan, your whole abdomen is covered in scar tissue. There might never be a fix to this.”
I nod again. What else can I do?
The surgeon pokes a post-surgery present on the nose—a plush dragon, sleepy and soft in my arms. Her voice is straightforward, but in a kind sort of way. She looks at me—actually looks at me—and I am validated.
She says, “But we have a word, and that’s a start.”
It’s a start and an end.
The music follows my love and I to Dun Broch. Afterward, we climb the hill behind it and watch the Atlantic beat against rocky outcroppings. The rain comes in. We retreat to the Airbnb. Our steps keep time to the drums. The pan flute carries us onward.
I feel so beckoned, so strange, so seen.
I dream a lot in the hospital, after my surgery. People and places come like ghosts, distorted by morphine and fluorescent lights. I dream of Dr. Brown. I’m perched on the corner of an examination table, and he’s asking, what seems to be the problem? And I’m bleeding, because I’m always bleeding. But when I open my mouth, I’m telling him about the music.
There are no words to describe the melody that haunted my love and I through that weekend. No words for the phones dying the wind swelling the music rising the drumbeats sounding the sheep bowing and the pan flute calling. But it’s dream logic, hushed over and hazy.
I am the collision of magic and blood, the intersection of suffering and silence. This bleeding, bloody body means nothing more than a faerie story inside a freckle on a map of the Outer Hebrides.
I tell him, and I tell him, and I tell him, because it doesn’t matter what story I spin, in what language I say it. If it’s too extraordinary, no one will believe it, because magic is dead and for children. If it’s too painful, no one will believe it, because I am a child a teenager a woman. I am the collision of magic and blood, the intersection of suffering and silence. This bleeding, bloody body means nothing more than a faerie story inside a freckle on a map of the Outer Hebrides.
Both split like too ripe fruit under scrutiny.
When I’m finished, the whole room goes glossy like it does when I’m about to wake. The doctor smiles. He cups my chin in his hands and studies my pupils. He says, “Morgan, you need more sleep.”
Our last night in Tolsta Chaolais, my love and I are in the wooden kitchen with the lights off. Another couldn’t fit between us if they tried.
The music starts again, drum and flute, as my love lights the gas stove and sets a copper pot to boil. We both stand there listening, and I hang my head for a moment to focus. It’s unspoken, that this won’t follow us home. This melody was formed of moors and peat and hills—it won’t leave this place for us.
Outside the single window, a fair way off, the sun is setting gold behind the hill. Pink clouds meet it as they settle into the horizon line.
Something watches back.
A little black silhouette, triangular and no taller than an ankle, rises from the other side of hill and stops at its crest. I don’t say anything, just reach wordlessly for my love. She joins me at the window, and we watch as twenty other silhouettes bob up to the hilltop and join the first. We watch them, and they watch us, and the sun is the most brilliant thing I have ever seen.
“Sheep?” I ask quietly.
My love shakes her head.
“Birds?”
Again, she shrugs.
My love and I and the silhouettes watch each other as the sun spirals down to sleep. Only when the light disappears do they fade into the night, unseen. The music goes, softly, sadly. I squeeze my love’s hand. The water is boiling over in the pan we forgot about.
We sway to those last few notes, turning circles as the kitchen’s going dark. I’ll flip the light on in a second. I just need a moment to whisper this story to myself, my love, to this hauntingly beautiful place—this story that few believe.
