ABSTRACT
A father stands on the threshold of a comfortable farmhouse. He is a man of the law, and his uniform is caked in dried blood from hundreds of violent attacks. He brings a hand to his face and smears fresh blood across his forehead; a friend approaches with a handkerchief and wipes the blood away. The father sees the blood on the handkerchief—the blood of his young son, it turns out—and collapses, weeping. Two men labor to remove an enormous pool of blood from a large home; the blood drips through the floorboards and into the basement. Sweating, they scrub at the stain and carry away buckets of gore to be flushed into the sewer. One of the men, having inherited the house from his aunt, complains that he can no longer live there because of the smell. A woman struggles to decide between two potential lovers, despite the fact that both are prone to extreme violence and are avowedly obsessed with the very taste of her “sweet,” pure blood. A girl pricks her finger and holds it over a piece of paper. She looks upon her own blood and suspects she is not her father's daughter.
