The Archivist - REDACTED

This was found among the ruins.

What remains of them are these pages, ink fading under the weight of time and rain.

I know what they have done, though they do not write it.

The sky bled on their heads every day. When the first drop falls, they do not flinch. The second, the third. Blood falls from the sky and they wipe it off their faces like a splash, an inconvenience, a bore. What about their clothes? They have accustomed themselves to wearing black, the darkest of shades, the ones light cannot escape, and so not even blood.

They could have worn red, the color of the rain, but they all wore black. It was lazy. They were lazy. The kind of nation that went through hell and did not remember—except they did. War is hell, and like any war, it has a beginning, a history, and an end. I am not here to tell that story. There are many others you can look at and indulge yourself in like a short story, a thick book, or anything to stimulate your mind to do absolutely nothing. I am not even here. I am there. I was the rain.

It is never my fault. It never was. I am their guilt and shame, falling at dawn and ceasing at dusk. I cannot be guilty. This is the blood that remains from the war. It had to be wept somewhere. The soil never absorbed it, and so it evaporated long ago into the filthiest steam, smoke, and fog. As the blood was rising, today it falls. It rains. No one knows when it will stop, if ever. But I do, and I am here to read to you how the sky stopped bleeding.

There will be a soldier, a priest, a martyr. And there will be a girl. She does not belong among them, but she will be there all the same. They are nameless, because this is a true story. It has happened, and will happen again and again, to the point that names will mean nothing. It will keep happening until all rain runs clear, like conscience that held onto guilt for too long and collapsed on its knees. I am the rain. I am the blood that falls from the sky. I am guilt dripping from their conscience onto their skin, into the earth. I am the blood archive, their guilt in red ink.

Who are they? What is their crime? They are the People, the nation that inhabits the City. Once again, all nameless, because this could happen anywhere, and it has happened somewhere. When a city goes through a crisis, a conflict, a war, a kind of unrest that shakes its people, its land, its skies, something deeply wrong happens. It is suffered. People die. People are wounded. Children scream, and birds stop flying. But when the tolls are settled and the war comes to an end, something else begins: accountability. Accountability is the fifth season they refuse to name, the rainy autumn that falls without fault. 

Have you ever wondered where the blood goes after there has been a bath? All the blood that has ever been spilled onto the tiles of hospitals, houses, bakeries, churches, and playgrounds. Have you ever wondered if it gets cleaned off like something spilled at the office? A little accident. An honest mistake. The janitor brings the cleaning supplies, a mop, some water, and disinfectant. Impossible blood that pools on the roads where children used to play does not get cleaned that way. The trucks may come and extract it out of the drains, line up the streets with fresh asphalt. The hospital wipes it down off the walls. The church polishes its bells from the splatters of blood that once coated it. Mothers wipe their children clean from the blood while their tongues taste rust all day.

It was horrid. There were dead children on the playgrounds. There are still children there, but they are living. And what do they owe the dead children, that they must bathe in their blood every day as though it were their fault? Where is the divine wisdom of a child bathed in another’s blood?

There will be a girl, and she will tell of the innocence in war that does not die, but gets corrupted and tainted with the rust and crust of the adults’ mature blood. I am the blood archive: I keep what they crossed out. 

Let me tell you more about blood and how it falls. It does not fall clear or translucent. It falls deliberately, with a certain opaque heaviness the adults can feel but do not dare give attention to—unless it falls on their skin, somewhere they forget to hide: an exposed wrist beneath a glove, a bare neck creeping out of a collar. Black garments everywhere. There could never be enough black paint, black dye, black anything to hide the amount of blood that falls from the sky. There can never be enough darkness to contrast the heaviness of the blood—the red, thick substance you all try to keep inside of you no matter what. The red substance that is losing its sacredness.

It taints the bread right before they put it in black bags. A few drops dissolve the dry crust like a violation that cannot be undone. They eat it anyway. The people eat the bloody bread.

I have covered the bodies of some of them, yet they are starting to treat me like water. The blood and guilt fall from the sky, and they are bathing in it. The children press their palms into the blood and print them on the walls of the church, on the windows.

I watched them queue for bread. Black bags stacked like coffins, waiting to be filled. A drop struck the crust before the boy could see it. It sank, softening it into pulp. He bit it anyway, eyes dry, mouth red with the taste of metal. He made a face, spat the bloody crumb onto the ground.

His sister laughed. “Ew!” she cried, racing him to the building nearby. She pressed her hand against the church glass and watched the blood-print bloom like a flower, dripping down the sill. “Mommy, look!” she shouted, proud of her little art, proud of her flower that was not a flower.

Their mother called from the bread line, arms full of loaves. “Come along now.”

The boy kicked at the ground. Blood splattered against the wall, joining his sister’s bloom. He turned on his heel, skipping toward his mother. “Wait for me!” he cried.

What has happened to the children?

If you are dry where you read this, you are not innocent. You are not clean.

It is of unbearable disgust that I feel when I am encountered by a child. All innocence and softness within their eyes. They have probably never seen blood before, yet here they are wiping it off their cheeks like jam, as it darkens their hair and backpacks that are an effortless black, almost grey and unserious, like a child should be. 

Why? Why the children?

I am everywhere, though I do not choose who feels guilty and who does not, who gets soaked in red and who does not. I am there. I am in the sky. I fall on the City as if it wronged me, but I fear I am being wronged by nobody when I am all over a child’s skin and so close that their breath reeks of metal and rust.

Why? Why me?

So let me tell you where I was before I left the victims’ bodies and fell from the sky, when I was sacred, scarce, and scary to the children.

All the blood that is the weather today is wiped off like an accident, like it should not be there, like a consequence of a mess, chaos and unrest with a little color. Red. The color of blood. A different kind of red, not like the swings, not like the fire hydrants. A deep red layered in agony.

There is blood that comes out of a papercut, thin and unserious, almost comical and orange. So what?

There is blood that comes out of a slash with a sharp object, a hiss across the skin, a demanding crimson. Blood that wants an apology but does not plead for it. It only asks to be controlled until it shies back inside the skin, remorseful.

And then there is blood that clots. It cooperates, if you will. Blood that clots is almost black, layered but not in order. If you put your finger in it and swipe, it will not trail into a gradient of red. It will feel heavy under your weight, like a solid substance of death and depth.

That kind of blood pleads. It holds onto itself, grows larger, collects at the part where it hurts, the part where there is trauma, the part where it has been betrayed, as if the skin can mend it before all the blood a body can carry drains and runs dry.

That kind of red is the deadliest: a sniper wound, a bullet, a spike, or a blunt fall that breaks bone and mocks the skin.

It feels redundant to call that kind of red, red. Like a nursery rhyme of colors. Like a love song filled with red hearts. Like a red toy car.

No. It is a much more serious darkness, ugly in its voidness with a disgusting lingering halo of “red.”

That is me. I am the disgusting blood rain, their debt in death.

So much violence was seen in this City. All kinds of bloodshed have been witnessed. They all have martyrs. They all have lost loved ones. They were once outside fighting for their future, barehanded, clean-hearted after declaring peace, and the soldiers did not declare any back. They drew their guns in self-defense, and left the People with one crime: the crime of moving on.

But blood is not like water. It does not evaporate into nothing. It has a density and consistency too thick to be lifted off the City like some accident, a little mistake.

No. Blood is not water.

They can line up the houses with new paint, the streets with new roads, the churches with new windows, cleaner ones, more holy. They can wipe the blood off the execution platforms, the hospitals, the military bases. They can disinfect the whole city, and still their crime remains: the crime of forgetting, the crime of pretending nothing happened, the crime of self-government under no law, the crime of painting the city black when the sky rains red, the crime of concealment and passive shame, the crime of forgetting the crime.

But blood does not dissipate into nothing. It stains. It plagues. It infects the air with memory and remembrance. None of them have actually forgotten.

Because I, their guilt and their shame, I fall from the sky. I am the blood of the martyrs they paraded when they could have saved, the children they shielded with when they could have fed. I am the blood clotting between the wood of the platforms where traitors died.

They can forget, or pretend to forget, but the blood will be there. Until all blood that was shed on the ground falls from the sky. Until then, the sky will keep bleeding. And I will keep writing.

I am the Archivist, and this is my testimony.