Juices: Beet, Human

I cut myself as I am grating beets, and do not notice, because my blood is the color of the beet juice. I grate and grate, and bleed and bleed. My mind is elsewhere, and I do not feel the pain. Only as I am finished grating all the beets, and go to wash the beet juice off my hands, it will not wash off. I run water over my hands, and my hands fill again with beet juice.

This confuses me just long enough for me to imagine that the beets have stained my skin so thoroughly that the stain had seeped into them. I think, I had been grating beets so long, I am excreting their juices!

I realize the truth, of course, and have to throw away all the beets that I have grated, and -- instead of eating the beets -- sit holding my beet- and blood-stained hands up in front of my face, so the bleeding will stop. My palms are still stained with beet juice. The beets I have thrown away are stained too, probably, with my blood. I have not been able to stop the beets' bleeding either, and now my counter and cutting board are both stained with our juices. And still, I cannot tell which is which.

Anecdote #3

I walked down a hallway yesterday, one that had a glass door at the far end. It was a long hallway, and as I turned to walk down it, I could see a boy through the glass door at the end of it. I had a long time to look at the boy as I walked down the long hallway. He turned his head to look at me, when I was still far down the long hallway. We looked at each other through the glass door the whole time it took me to walk to it. I began to feel uncomfortable at how long we had been looking at each other. I blurred my vision a little, made my face blank, so he would think I was not looking at him as he was at me, so he would not be uncomfortable as I was. He did not seem to be uncomfortable. He did not look away. He swung his legs from the bench he was straddling, and kept looking at me. It felt like the end of an age when I opened the door and stepped outside. As the door swung shut behind me, I glanced back, to see what the boy had seen. I wanted to see the long hallway from his perspective, and imagine myself in it as he would have seen me. And I saw that the door was mirrored. I could only see my reflection. Behind my reflection, I could see the boy's reflection, looking at his reflection. He was still swinging his legs.