Free Bleeder by Shelby Smoak

bag from the can and ponder the AZT bottle one last time before hauling it to the dumpster. Outside, a cool breeze blows the stink of trash toward me, and I again feel nauseous as I hurl the bag over the container’s top. The bag flies up and hovers momentarily before descending and crashing against the metal inside. When I hear the heavy thud of it settling, the crackling of glass, the woofing exhale of foul air—I cross my fingers and wish for strength and health immeasurable. I need a miracle now. A Merlin to save me.
     
     
    April. Friday night, Ana and I attend a keg party in a house off Walker Street in Greensboro, and our spirits are lifted with drink. We laugh heavily as we hold hands and totter our way back to Ana’s dorm where we have sex like two drunk lovers having sex. We slur I love you until intoxication sends us dreams. We sleep until, several hours later, daylight brightens her room and wakes us. Ana rises to close her blinds and returns with glasses of cold water. I drink. She drinks. Then we adjust her covers and sleep more.
     
    We wake in the late afternoon, order burgers from a local grill, and watch a matinee at the nearby cinema, and when we return to her dorm, we are both still tired from the night before. Ana rests her arms across my chest as her room darkens with night. She is almost asleep.
     
    “I’ve quit it, Ana,” I say to her sleeping face. She opens her eyes, lifts her head from her pillow.
     
    “Quit what?”
     
    “The AZT.”
     
    She stills her hand over my heart.
     
    “I’m so scared,” she says.
     
    “I am, too.”
     
    “What will you do? Isn’t there anything else? Isn’t there any way to take it? Is it really making you that sick?”
     
    “It’s done. There is nothing else to do but wait.”
     
    She lays her face against my cheek. “Oh, I hate this,” she says. “I hate this.”
     
    I hear the patter of footsteps along the corridor outside, the giggle of girls, and then this fades. Ana turns back to me.
     
    “It’s your decision,” she says softly. “I guess I have to trust you.”
     
    She squeezes against me, trails her finger against my backbone. We fumble our hands together and press hope against our palms. We kiss in the dark.
     
    When I return to Wilmington on Sunday, a lifting storm lets the sun poke through the clouds, warming the earth, and, not ready to return to school and its many demands, I head to the beach. I drive past the azaleas blooming along Airlie Road and crest the bridge over the Atlantic waterway to descend into a landscape of estuaries, sea grass, and vacation homes constructed where land allows. Parking near the Trolley Stop, I buy two of their mustard and cheese Surfer dogs and eat these outside where gulls wing around me in a white flutter.
     
    Later I walk along the beach. The gulls escort me, cawing to and fro, and, rooted to nothing, they are borne aloft by the sea’s constant breeze. I follow the sands north to Mercer’s Pier and spend money on a rusty pinball machine. I feed the game quarters, trying to keep the ball alive, but I lose quickly. The fishermen and their long poles come and go, and a few drag vines of sea bass with them. A ball slips past my flipper, the lights stop flashing, the pinball’s siren quiets, and another game ends. I count my change and consider breaking a few more dollars, but instead I pocket those not yet spent.
     
    Outside, clouds balance upon the marine-blue sea, and beside the pier, I gaze out to an ocean bleeding into a vermillion sky. A woman and her dog jog past: he breathing hard, tongue slapping out his open mouth; intent upon moving forward, they are immune to the view.
     
    The sea washes my feet as the waves spread foam across a slick of sand. The wooden pilings labor to hold up a blood-red sky. Night descends.
     
     
    June. In the blood-drawing lab, the phlebotomist plumps my arm with her tourniquet, and soon my stout veins run in vague blue streams from my elbow to my