just sing the song for heaven's sake

“Looks like you’ve got a little blood there, Pete.”

He does; it is splashed out on the white cuff of his shirt like a punctuation mark. In the tall grass Phil pats his pockets as if for that blue handkerchief he always carries, but Peter draws back to get a better look at the wound. The skin of his naked palm is rucked up in a broad red gash — ragged-edged as if torn with teeth and bleeding freely, running down to the shallow ledge of his wrist. A scarlet valley in the flesh. He’s forgotten his gloves.

Peter presses the wound to his mouth, letting the wet inside of his lip fit against it; he scarcely tastes the blood, but feels it, feels the rough edge of torn flesh against the pad of his tongue. A dog licks his wounds only to relieve the irritation he experiences — he has no way of knowing about sepsis. Peter has set his eye to the microscope and seen the thronging micro-organisms scraped from a friend’s cheek — it had added a strange frisson to it all.

He sucks the blood, letting his eyes fall closed, until Phil calls his name – Phil is looking at him now with that awful intelligence in his face. He would touch him if he could, he would take him up and devour him. Instead he is testing him: one of a thousand small tests.

Peter looks him in the eye. “It’s nothing.”

The handkerchief is immaculately white and folded in the same tight square as the day he received it. He unfurls it with one hand, from eighths to halves, and presses the doubled-up cloth to the wound. He’ll wash it later under the pitted silver taps in the kitchen and watch the edges of the cut turn pale.