Boys Don’t Bleed
Trigger/content warnings: blood (including menstrual blood), oral sex, transphobia
written by Aqdas Aftab
CHARACTERS
Vampire – a young trans man in his twenties.
SCENE
A single chair with a menstrual cup placed under the chair. The cup is filled with any
edible red/purple liquid.
VAMPIRE
(sitting on the chair and looking at the audience; no fourth wall)
Being a kid is hard. For everyone. But for me . . . well, I always felt different from the other kids. I
always felt like everyone saw a ghost when they looked at me, a dead thing I couldn’t
recognize. I finally learned who I am, what I am, during puberty. When my body started to
bleed unexpectedly. Puberty felt . . . really good.
Ironic, right, for someone who looks like me? I’m sure you expect sad sob stories of puberty
from all trans guys, right? Not me though.
You see, when I got my first period as a kid, I didn’t feel dysphoric at all. I felt hungry. I
remember sitting on the toilet, staring at the inky pool of red in the underwear suspended
between my ankles. Mmmm.
(closes eyes to reminisce)
I remember drooling. Its smell pulled me until I impulsively ran my fingers through the
blood and licked them clean. Nothing had ever smelled more enticing. It was like . . . probably
like how you feel around chocolate cake. If you saw chocolate cake as a kid, what would you
do? You would impulsively dip your fingers in the frosting to lick it, right? So that’s what I did.
I impulsively ran my fingers through my blood and licked them clean. And then I licked
some more. And more.
(licks lips)
Who knew Aunt Flo could be so sexy? I kept licking the crimson until my tongue was
scraping the last remnants of my metallic flavor from the cotton of my underwear, until I was
reaching inside myself to find some more of my jelly. Yum!
(beat)
When Mom found my stained underwear in the laundry, she told me I was part of a secret
world now. She told me to maintain the secrets of this world. I’m sure many of you get that
right? The monthly secret. The fear of getting a red stain on your pants. Hiding pads in your
backpack’s back pocket so other people wouldn’t see them. Making sure your pad’s outline
wasn’t visible through your jeans. Being restrained, elusive . . . Now that’s what made me
dysphoric. Secrets were for girls. Not for boys. Boys didn’t hide their bodies. They stood up
erect and sprayed the smells of their insides freely. Boys flaunted their desires. So I decided
to be loud and proud about mine.
And so, I came out as a vampire.
(beat)
But the world couldn’t handle it. And it’s not like I was naive. When I came out I knew there
would be backlash. But I was expecting the kind of scolding my brother got after he left
yellow droplets on the toilet seat, not what actually happened.
When I came out, Mom and Dad sat me down and told me I was disgusting and unnatural.
That my desires were terrifying. And when I started crying, they said they were okay with me
being a trans boy but not with my vampirism (they lied, they were never really okay with my
transness either). They made me promise I would never lick blood again, and when I didn’t
listen to them, they took me to a big-name doctor, who got so terrified of me that she shut
down the blood banks in her hospital and prohibited any blood donations. Things were the
worst in school though. My English teacher, who had been the only queer adult around me,
started telling other students not to touch me. She made me sit at the back of the class by
myself for the whole school year so I wouldn’t bite anyone. Clearly, the old hag got all her
knowledge from bad Victorian novels! She became so obsessed with her fantasy of me
biting that she took the issue to the school principal who instituted a new rule: every
morning after assembly, all students had to get blood tests. If any kid was found to be
anemic, for whatever reason, they blamed me for it. And they punished me. Really badly.
So would you blame me for going back in the closet when I started college? It just got too
unsafe.
(beat)
But you remember what it was like to be nineteen right? How infatuation got the best of us?
It happened to me when I was sitting next to a gorgeous girl in a geology classroom. I fell for
her, the moment I smelled her blood leaking through her tampon. When she realized she
was leaking, she ran to the bathroom, leaving a small stain on her chair. Lovestruck, I trailed
behind her. I followed her to the bathroom and offered to help. As I washed her skirt in the
sink, she told me about how heavily she bled every month, and how stressful the whole
thing was. I listened patiently. But when I caught her staring at my lips, I decided to be bold
and ask her if I could have her soaked tampon. I told her it smelled delicious, that I wanted
to suck on it. And guess what? She agreed! She didn’t even bat an eyelash at my request. I
guess I was the first person to desire something about her she had always been ashamed of.
That’s how I got my first girlfriend. Pretty cool, right? She was right about being a heavy
bleeder. Every month, she would bleed and cramp constantly for ten straight days. She
would change her tampon every other hour, put it in a clean ziplock, and save it in her
minifridge for me to suck on at the end of the day. Mmmm. Yum! The relationship was
perfect.
(beat)
But despite the consistent supply of her menstrual blood, it was hard to see her in pain. Her
cramps were bad. Like, really really bad. So like any good boyfriend, I took her to see a
doctor about the heavy bleeding. She told the doctor she was sure she had endometriosis
but the doctor said she was totally fine. He didn’t even run any tests. He said that she
shouldn’t diagnose herself based on WebMD. Asshole, right? At least he wrote her a
prescription for her cramps. The prescription was for ibuprofen.
(shakes head)
Anyway, that was the day she asked me to go down on her while she was bleeding. She said
the only thing that helped her cramps was an orgasm. You can imagine my response, right? I
devoured her. I savored every sweet squishy blood clot I could find inside her legs. I let her
thick purple blood marinate in my mouth, my tongue tracing its stringy texture. Mmm. I was
so ecstatic slurping her up that I lost track of time and my roommate walked in on us. At first
my roommate giggled, but then she looked at my lips and started screaming. She screamed
and screamed, and outed me to the whole dorm.
Things got particularly bad then. The girls in my dorm started hating me. They complained
to the college administration, saying they were uncomfortable sharing the bathroom with
me. Can you believe they said they were scared I would pounce on them if I smelled their
pads? As if I would want their bland basic blood!
You can guess what happened afterward, right? I got expelled. The college administration
said I was creating a threatening environment for the other students. But what hurt the most
was the breakup. My girlfriend couldn’t handle the glares and stares she got from others. I
don’t blame her though. It made sense from her perspective, I guess. She was already
getting judged for dating a trans guy; she couldn’t deal with my vampirism on top of that. To
her, nothing was worth the jibes from other women. Not even the orgasms. Not even the
relief from cramping.
(beat)
I know it’s been a long time, but I still think about her sometimes. And I still wonder what
would have happened if my roommate hadn’t walked in that day, if I hadn’t been outed to
the whole world.
(looks lost in thought, and then laughs suddenly)
You know, it’s actually funny now that I think about it, because the same girls who outed me
in college are probably being forced to take birth control, while I sit here sipping from my
new menstrual cup. You probably haven’t seen the latest news, have you? They passed the
anti-menstruation bill today as part of their war against vampirism. It’s terrifying, what they’re
doing, trying to control vampirism by curbing menstruation.
And I know, I know, I shouldn’t laugh. I mean, things are bad. Really bad. I never thought it
would come to this, you know? I mean I knew the government would be scared of vampires,
but I never thought they would start injecting women with hormones just to starve others
like me. But I guess this is right out of the government’s playbook. Cis women are just the
new collateral damage in the war against vampires. Before this, it was patients in hospitals
who needed blood transfusions but couldn’t get them because the state shut down blood
banks. So many people died then. The president said it was necessary for the greater good.
And now, he is saying the same thing, doing the same thing. Forcing women to take birth
control pills, arresting them for bleeding. For “the greater good.”
(beat)
Don’t worry though, they won’t come for me.
(smiles)
They don’t know boys can bleed too.
(beat)
Anyway, don’t you love my new menstrual cup?
(holds up the cup and looks at it admiringly)
I finally learned to insert it, though it did take me a while to figure it out. I wasted a lot of
blood as I practiced pulling it out with balance to avoid spillage, but it was worth it to finally
have a tiny goblet to drink out of. And while I still occasionally enjoy the slow diffuse
pleasure of sucking on a tampon, nothing compares to gulping down my potion in one
luxurious shot.
(takes a shot from the cup and lets some of the liquid drip down his lips)
Yum!
(beat)
But hey, don’t tell anyone about my menstrual cup, okay? Boys should be able to have
secrets too.
Aqdas Aftab
Aqdas Aftab is a community-engaged writer from Islamabad, currently based in Chicago. Combining the grotesque with the sacred, Aqdas writes about the forces that keep them alive: Islamic mythology, gender improvisation, spiritual surrender, feral desires, and their elderly cat. Boys Don’t Bleed was recently produced by Attempted Productions at Chicago’s Bughouse Theater. Some of their creative writing has been published or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Fourteen Hills, The Margins, smoke and mold journal, The Rumpus and The World Within Us: An Anthology of South Asian Queer Poetry. Aqdas is also the co-creator of Transform Gender Collective, a transformative justice collective for transmasculine BIPOC.