Blazing red spreads across his white shirt, flowing down, mostly, but also rising up, wetness winding through the fabric.
I didn’t even feel the blade go in. I didn’t. It was just there, already inside him, like it had always been there.
The circle-in-a-circle disc on the knife hilt gleams under the ceiling’s light, gems flickering the same color as Yong’s blood.
The hallway is still. There is no noise at all. I can’t move.
Yong looks up, looks at me. There are tears in his eyes. A grown man’s face wearing a little boy’s expression of fear and confusion.
“But…my turn,” he says, then his legs stop working. He falls away from me. The knife, still in my hand, slides out of him. He lands on his shoulder, tucks up into a ball like he did when he fell out of his coffin.
I see a spot of blood spreading across his lower back, staining the white shirt wet-red.
The blade went all the way through.
That impossible stillness, that time turned to unforgiving stone, it lasts forever. Then it is gone.
Bello screams, hands covering her face.
Aramovsky takes a half-step behind Bello.
Spingate rushes to Yong, kneels next to him, her knees almost touching his. She leans over him, looks at his back.
“Oh, no,” she says. “Yong! Lie flat, let me see the cut!”
Yong’s hands clutch at his belly. The hands are mostly hidden by his thighs, but not enough that I can’t see the blood covering his fingers.
He lets out a long, low moan. His eyes stay squeezed shut.
Spingate’s hair hangs down, gets in the way. She rubs madly at her thighs like she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, then slaps a palm hard on Yong’s shoulder.
“I said, lie flat!”
Bello leans in, her cheeks glistening with tears. “Stop hitting him! Do something!”
Spingate shakes her head, again rubs hard at her thighs. She looks up at me.
“Em, don’t just stand there, come help!”
The knife falls from my hand and clatters on the floor. Dust instantly clings to the blood that streaks the blade.
I kneel behind Yong’s back.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Help me make him lie flat,” Spingate says, her voice still rushed but now calmer that someone is doing this with her. “We have to put pressure on the wound.”
She reaches under Yong’s shoulder and his leg and lifts, while I grab a shoulder and a knee and pull. We roll him to his back. He’s still curled up tight, the curve of his spine like the curve of an egg, and I have to hold him in place to keep him from flopping over again.
Yong starts to sob, the vibrations shaking his whole body. His mouth is wide open; a string of spit gleams between his lips.
“It hurts,” he says. “It hurts.”
Spingate puts a hand on his cheek, rapidly pets his black hair away from his forehead.
“Yong, listen to me,” she says. “You’ve been stabbed. I have to look at the wound.”
He shakes his head, as if to force her hand away.
“No, no it hurts! Make it stop!”
Spingate reaches up and backhand-flips her red hair behind her. She glares at Bello and Aramovsky.
“Come here and help us!”
Aramovsky rushes over, puts his hands on Yong’s knees and gently pulls, trying to open the boy up.
“No,” Yong says. “It hurts. Go get my mom…please go get my mom!”
He’s pleading for something we can’t give him. His voice sounds wrong: words like his belong to a voice that is higher and thinner than what we hear.
I feel wetness on my knees—his blood, spreading across the floor.
Spingate’s upper lip curls in fury. She shakes Yong’s shoulders, leans in and screams in his face.
“Relax your legs! Relax them!”
Bello reaches in, yanks at Spingate’s arm.
“Stop it, Spingate! You don’t even know what you’re doing!”
Spingate whips her left arm back without looking, trying to brush Bello off, but her elbow cracks into the smaller girl’s mouth. Bello’s hands fly to her face. She turns, half bent over, and stumbles away.
I don’t think Spingate even knows she hit her.
Aramovsky is patting Yong’s knees as he pulls. “Open up,” the tall boy says in a voice that’s both deep and patient. “Open up.”
Yong lets out a long moan, one that’s chopped up into short bits by his chest-rattling sobs. His eyes are squeezed so tight. Snot drips from his nose, runs down his left lip and cheek.
He finally relaxes his legs, lets Aramovsky and me gently move them out of the way. He is flat on his back, body twitching slightly. His blood-drenched hands remain pressed hard against his stomach. From the chest down, his entire shirt is red.
Spingate grabs at Yong’s neck, pulls off his tie and hands it to me.
“Press this against the wound when I get his hands out of the way,” she says. “We need to stop the bleeding.”
I take the tie.
Spingate again leans close to Yong’s face.