[Issue 2025.73]

‘Bright Bleeding Girls’, J.L. George

Art © 2025 Sebastian Timpe

---

When a brightblood girl dies they stop her mouth with rags, or leaves, or dirt, or whatever they have to hand, and they sew her lips shut, and they bury her fast—that same day if they can—for fear she’ll come back hungry.

There is something unnatural about their bodies, those girls. The pallor of death is arrested by a hectic bloom in the cheeks and on the lips, one last defiant florescence of the life-force within. Their skin, like slate, holds heat long after the heartbeat has faded. Perhaps that’s why the townspeople fear them in death.

Or perhaps it’s guilt.

---

They were only stories to me when I first came to town, young and itching to see the world beyond my village. There had been no brightblood girls there for generations, and pricking our fingers and holding our breath for the light was something we grew out of by puberty. Though, if I was honest with myself, I occasionally missed the thrill of imagining I could be someone special, someone with starfire in her veins. Without that fantasy, my loneliness was prosaic, meaningless.

Realistically, I knew a job tending stables up at the big house three towns away was the best I was likely to get. It would be drudge-work—shit to shovel, hooves to pick, tack to clean—but it was better than being stuck within the confines of a single village, where I would be expected to marry a local boy and produce children who’d live lives identical to mine. If I stopped to ask myself why the family at the big house hadn’t employed someone closer to home, it was only to wonder at my good fortune.

The coach drove into town on one of those bright February days when winter had almost worn out and you could see spring starting to shine though the thin patches. Old snow turned to slush beneath the horses’ hooves and piled up in hard, dirty hillocks at the sides of the road. I scrubbed a hole in the windowpane frost to peer up at the big house, which rose tall and pristine white from its hill above the rest of the buildings, daring rain and chimney smoke to touch it.

We rounded a corner, and that was where I saw her.

She sat in a first-floor window. I caught flashes through the diamond lattice: warm brown skin, high, round cheeks, and a thoughtfully pursed rosebud of a mouth. A hint of tiredness around her deep-set eyes.

She held her arm outstretched toward someone I couldn’t see, and blood flowed from the newest of a crosshatch of cuts like liquid moonshine. She wasn’t even looking at it, as though bleeding light was too everyday an occurrence to be remarked upon. When the coach passed by, so close I imagined I could put out my hand and touch the glass, she glanced up at the sound and met my eyes.

That brief glance seared through me, stole the breath from my lungs.

I’d always known I wasn’t the marrying type from the way I’d find my gaze lingering over the angles of a girl’s collarbone or the curls of hair at the nape of her neck. I was fairly sure that was why my parents had let me leave so easily, happy to pack me off somewhere my lack of a man wouldn’t draw questions. Even so, I’d never felt anything like this before—this stunned, burning recognition, as though a steel thread stretched between the two of us, had suddenly ignited in a crackle of lightning.

I wanted to cry out for the coachman to stop, but found I’d forgotten how to speak. Instead I craned my neck to hold her gaze until the coach rounded a corner and she was lost from sight.

---

The light in the blood follows no pattern of heredity. It’s no matter whether a girl’s aunt or cousin or sister had it. It pays no mind to the colour of her skin or the god she prays to, or whether she is rich or poor, or hale or sick. At least, that’s what I’m told.

It simply happens one day, when she trips on the stairs or forgets her thimble or plays too roughly with the cat. There is a slip, and a cut, and, where beads of red ought to well up, glowing pearls form. Only this one rule applies: to shine, she has to bleed.

When she does, her path in life is set, no matter who she is. The world will look on her with awe and tell her she is special, and in return she will open her veins.

That is what I’m told.

---

At the big house, it seemed I’d no sooner set foot inside the gates than I was put to work. Magda, the housekeeper, met me at the coach and swept me up the path, issuing instructions nineteen-to-the-dozen. I wasn’t to go in the house itself unless instructed otherwise; and if I did, I was to stay quiet at all times, because the master’s daughter was sick and couldn’t bear noise. I was to ensure I never took a hoof pick, or a pocket knife, or anything else sharp with me. I was to mind everything Dolores, the head groom, told me, but I wasn’t to mind her moods, the grumpy old thing.

Here, above the stables, were my quarters, smelling of sweet straw and horses. There was the standpipe for washing. There, approaching us now on her grey mare, was the lady of the house, and I was always to bow my head and call her ‘Ma’am’. I was a beat behind Magda in bobbing to her as she dismounted her horse, but she didn’t seem to notice. The only indication she’d seen me at all was that she walked away and left the reins trailing.

“Well?” A voice came from the stable block, harsh as a fox bark, so that I started and the horse snorted and tossed her head in protest. “Are you going to stand there gawping, or are you going to make yourself useful?”

Dolores was a rangy woman of fifty or so with iron-grey hair and a long, equine face that reminded of my father, and how he always said you could tell a person’s favourite animal because eventually they started to look like it. I scrambled to obey her, gathering up the reins and leading the horse to the stalls.

The stables swallowed my life almost at once. Every moment from dawn until dusk was taken up with brushing and feeding and mucking-out. My hands grew blistered and then calloused from the work and I smelled permanently of horse sweat and saddle soap. I got to know the horses, each one with its own personality: Cloud, the mistress’s grey mare, who was skittish around almost everyone; Chester, the master’s stocky chestnut cob; William, the Shetland pony they kept for the small children, an immovable rock of an animal with his eyes barely visible under a vast bush of forelock; and a dozen others. The eldest daughter, Isobel, would have been old enough for her own steed, but was a pale, wilting slip of a thing and rarely set foot outdoors.

I only saw her come down to the stables once. She went to Cloud’s stable door, a lump of sugar balanced on the palm of her hand. Placid for once, Cloud took it from the girl’s palm with a delicate wrinkle of her lip and let herself be petted as she crunched the sweetness between her teeth.

I watched them idly as I swept the yard. Dolores yelled something and I turned my head to catch it, so didn’t see what happened next. I only heard Isobel’s high-pitched squeal. When I turned back, she’d darted away from the stable door, clutching her hand close to her body, and Cloud’s ears were flattened to her head.

“Are you alright?” I stumbled over my words, unsure of the etiquette for approaching a member of the family. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“I’m fine,” Isobel sniffed. After a moment she remembered to add, “Thank you.”

Still cradling her arm, she made for the house. I shrugged, decided it was no surprise a rich girl like her was a wet blanket, and went back to sweeping.

---

In some towns, they make the brightblood girls sit in the public square. I’ve never seen it myself, but I picture them atop pedestals, like statues, the light veining them like marble and raining down on the upturned faces of passers-by.

Here, there are clinics in big-windowed houses where the sick and the tired and those who simply want a little pick-me-up come for their doses of shining life. Those who can pay come, at least. The money is supposed to go to the town, for the public good, though I see little evidence of that in the dirty streets and the undernourished faces that crowd them on market day.

Brightblood girls never marry. They never study, or apprentice, or travel the world. They are supposed to remain virgins, to stay away from anything that might tempt them to neglect their God-given duty, though there are enough rumours about what it’s like to sleep with one that it can’t always be true. They are supposed to belong to the world, not live in it.

This is as it should be, we are told. To hoard such great gifts for themselves would be unconscionable. Besides, there are compensations—fine clothes, admiration, a seat at the mayor’s table.

Sometimes, they are enough.

---

On my first payday, Magda took me into town. I’d grown used to Dolores’ taciturn ways, and in contrast, Magda was like a starched whirlwind, darting from carriage to shop to the tearoom where we ate buttered scones amid the clatter and chatter of two dozen townspeople. I’d never been in a place like this before, and it made me self-conscious, afraid to take a sip of my tea or dab my mouth with my napkin until I’d seen Magda do it first.

On top of that, I’d noticed the locals giving us strange glances when Magda wasn’t looking. They were perfectly courteous, but the way they spoke to us was closed-off, freighted with a caution I didn’t understand. I could make no sense of it. Feeling suffocated, I let my gaze drift toward the heat-fogged windows, and that was when I saw her again.

At the centre of a ring of companions, or perhaps chaperones, she stood out like a poppy in long grass. She wore a fine red dress whose sleeves reached the backs of her hands. Her hair fell in dark ringlets to her waist and she held herself tall, head high, gaze unashamed and curious. There seemed to be no false modesty in her, no eyes demurely lowered and allowed to take in the world only in surreptitious glances. I thought of how awkward I felt each time I curtsied to Isobel or the mistress and felt a pang of envy.

Then she glanced through the window and caught my eye, and the envy was swept away like a cobweb in a spring breeze.

I stared after her until Magda elbowed me in my side. Her expression was knowing, and I flushed under her gaze.

“They’re not like you and I,” she said, a warning note in her voice. I frowned, not getting the hint, and she sighed. “Don’t go getting attached, that’s all. Don’t go thinking she can be your friend.”

I nodded vaguely in reply, but the brightblood girl smiled over her shoulder at me as she walked away, and the image of that smile lingered in my mind’s eye as though I’d stared into the sun.

---

There are old wives’ tales that suggest it can be brought on by the correct combination of herbs, or by water from a particular spring, or a visit to the shrine of a saint.

Where I grew up, the popular superstition was that spending a night beside water, beneath a full moon, would awaken the light in the blood. At midnight—or, in some versions, just after, during the witching hour—you should drink from the pool or well or stream, cupping your hands around the reflection of the moon. Drink light, bleed light.

None of us ever dared try it, of course. Probably nonsense anyway.

---

I was walking William around the duck pond near the front entrance when I saw the carriage rattle up the drive. Nobody was expected today, as far as I knew, though I was hardly kept abreast of all the comings and goings at the house. With one ear out for Dolores, who’d give me a tongue-lashing if she caught me slacking off, I stopped to peer up at the carriage, letting the pony wander and crop grass at the end of his halter rope.

A figure clad in bright red stepped down from it, and the breath stuttered in my throat. It was her—I was sure of it from the dark curls that tumbled from her hat, and from her posture, proud and open.

Others alighted behind her, and she was ushered into the house before I could do more than stare. Magda handed a small bag to one of the brightblood girl’s companions—payment for her visiting, no doubt—before they followed her closely into the house. It occurred to me I’d never seen her alone.

“Don’t just stand there, girl! What do you think they pay you for?” Dolores yelled. I gave a tug on William’s halter, startling him back into protesting movement, and forced myself to start walking, glancing back up at the house as many times as I dared.

I saw no sign of her behind the windows—but then, I supposed, they’d probably taken her to the upper floors, to Isobel’s rooms, which were always shielded from the sun by heavy curtains. That had to be why she was here.

I didn’t expect to see her again that day. But, later, as I was carrying hay to the stables, a flash of red in the middle of the grey yard stopped me in my tracks.

She was standing before Cloud’s stable door, murmuring to the mare in a low voice as she petted her velvety nose. New bandages, clean and white, peeked out from beneath her crimson sleeves. I hugged my armful of hay to my chest like a child with a doll and didn’t move, acutely conscious that I’d never actually spoken to her.

“So, are you going to say hello?” There was a hint of amusement in her voice, which was low and rich and sweet, like honey wine. She didn’t look at me, just kept petting the horse. Cloud allowed it, to my surprise. I’d rarely seen her so docile; she usually grew tired of being fussed over and turned her back or snapped her teeth at the hapless visitor within a few minutes.

I swallowed dryly. “I don’t know your name.”

“Oana,” she said, and turned to face me at last. “And you’re the groom. I’ve seen you around town.”

A faint smile played across her lips, and warmth rose to my cheeks. “Elena,” I said. “But everyone calls me El. And, um, Dolores is the head groom. I’m only a stable girl.”

“El.” She spoke like she was savouring it, my name a teaspoon of sugar on her tongue. “What made you come here?” The question took me by surprise. I hadn’t known she’d be here, though perhaps an unconscious part of me had been looking for her. I blinked speechlessly at her until she clarified: “To the town, I mean. You’re not local.”

“Oh! I needed a job, and I’m good with horses, so…” I shrugged vaguely, arms still full of hay. “Were you born here?”

Oana’s smile faded. “I’ll never leave.”

When I’d dreamed of light in my veins as a young girl, it hadn’t occurred to me how confining such an existence must be. A town could no more afford to lose its brightblood girls than for its rivers or its crops to go walking around. But even a river, at its end, reached the sea…

“I’m sorry. Was it rude to bring that up? I’m never sure—I’m not one of them.” I glanced in the direction of the house, and Oana followed my gaze.

“Nor I,” she murmured.

“Why did they call you up here?” It slipped out before I could talk myself out of my curiosity. Oana was quiet for a moment before she answered.

“The daughter,” she said, at last. “Her… condition.”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose she’s too sick to travel into town.”

Oana gave a noncommittal hum. It occurred to me she’d probably seen sicker, carried into town on the backs of carts or in the arms of tired parents who couldn’t afford to call a brightblood girl out to their houses.

Apparently eager to change the subject, she proffered a hand. Compelled, pulled by that bright thread that seemed to link us, I took it and let the bundle of hay fall. Her thumb brushed the hollow of my wrist, and I was suddenly very aware of the blue threads of my veins and the red unshining blood that beat in them.

“You like the horses,” she said, and I nodded in reply. “How did you know you wanted to work with them?”

I shrugged. “When I was little, in my old village, we lived near a farm. The farmer had bought a pony for his grandchildren, but they weren’t interested, so he let me ride it instead, as long as I took care of it. I used to love riding up the mountain road. It’s bare up there, because the sheep eat the grass down to stubble, and there’s a flat stretch where you can gallop so fast it feels like you’re flying.”

I stopped myself, thinking all this talk of flight and freedom might be salt in a wound, but Oana didn’t let go of my wrist. Her fingertips shivered like butterfly wings against my skin, and a soft, distant look had come over her face. I felt a small burst of pride at having put it there.

It disappeared when she shied forward, dropping my hand and giving a small cry of pain. I darted close to her. “Are you alright?”

Oana winced, gathered herself and nodded. “Yes. The horse…” Cloud had butted her, uncharacteristic good mood apparently at an end, and the buckle on the mare’s halter had left a long scratch down the back of her shoulder.

I hovered, wanting to soothe but not daring to touch. “I’m sorry. That one’s temperamental.”

“I’d better go. They’ll come looking for me if I’m much longer.” Oana took my hand and squeezed it once. “It was nice to meet you, El.”

The memory of her lingered on my skin for hours, like stardust clinging to my fingers, and I still tingled all over with it when I turned in that night, tossing and writhing in my bed above the stables. I brought myself off with quick strokes of my fingers, thinking of Oana’s soft palms, the curve of her neck, even her scars. But when I came it was with my hand pressed to the pulse point at my throat, feeling the frantic beat of blood beneath my fingers.

---

Some say it’s an illness. They are a small contingent—the families of brightblood girls, mostly, or the boys who’d wished to marry them; those for whom the loss of them is greater than the world’s gain. It seems a paradox, a sickness that is also a cure.

But there are stories. One tells of a seaside sanatorium down south, one of those places where the rich go to rest and recuperate and take shining blood with their tea.

Perhaps a dozen brightblood girls lived there, and one of them had always been a rebel. She’d come into her power later than most, so had the misfortune of time to dream. Every moment she spent behind the sanatorium walls was spent grudging the loss of that imagined other life.

They found them one winter morning—half of the brightblood girls who lived in that place, bodies strewn like petals around their dormitory, wrists or throats slit with a filleting knife she’d stolen from the kitchens and hidden up her sleeve. The window was open, curtains billowing, snowflakes drifting in to cover the floor and sparkling in the morning light. In places, it was impossible to tell snow from blood.

She knelt in the middle of the room in her white nightdress, face upturned with a mouthful of pearl. She had made a single cut across the centre of her palm, and the blood that flowed from it was such dark red it looked black against all that snow.

---

“Mama says you’re to take me out riding.” Isobel said it with all the enthusiasm of a child assigned extra schoolwork.

She had been looking more cheerful lately, though, setting foot outside more, and even smiling occasionally. Her parents had mostly kept her in the house until now—for fear she’d tire herself out, according to Magda, though she never looked particularly sleepy to me. I stole glances at her when I could, as though I might spot a hint of Oana in her face. Roses in her cheeks, or a new spark in her eyes.

I saddled a pony for Isobel and Cloud for myself. Despite the mare’s temperament she was fast and smooth to ride, and once in a while, on her back, I recalled that old childhood feeling of flying.

We rode up past the big house, letting the horses follow the stream that fed the pond. The path was rocky, but they were sure-footed, and soon we were looking down on the town from one of those crystal-blue autumn mornings you can almost mistake for summer.

“I want to stop now.”

I rolled my eyes at Isobel’s command. Typical of her to stop the adventure before it had even started, I thought—but, to my surprise, she didn’t insist on turning for home. Instead, she dismounted and handed me the pony’s reins to hold while she hitched up her skirts and made for a cluster of purple mallow flowers.

“They’re nicer than the ones Mama buys from town.”

Privately, I agreed. Perhaps she wasn’t quite the wet blanket I’d thought, after all. “You’ll need something to wrap them in, so they don’t bruise.”

Isobel nodded and fumbled in her pocket, frowning when she failed to get hold of whatever she was looking for. She pulled off her riding glove and fished for it again.

“Ouch!” Her hand flew from her pocket, this time clutching the prize—a handkerchief. It fluttered to the ground as Isobel put her finger to her mouth. “I put a pin there so I wouldn’t lose it while I was sewing… I must have forgotten.”

I hummed in acknowledgement, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking back to the stables, and how Oana had scratched herself on Cloud’s halter, and how Isobel had fled to the house when the same thing happened to her. I’d seen the bead of blood on Isobel’s fingertip before she hid it, shining in the autumn sun like a tiny pearl.

---

They die young.

There’s a reason we call them girls, after all.

Sometimes a treatment goes wrong—a doctor cuts too deep, or takes too much blood. Sometimes they are swarmed by the needy, the tired, the sick, those who have waited all day or week or month only to be told there is nothing to be done. Sometimes they do away with themselves for reasons we can only guess at. They never leave notes.

Sometimes there’s no obvious cause. Perhaps there’s only so much bloodletting the body can take. They grow feverish and tired, and soon enough all that’s left is death, and rags, and a needle and thread.

On very rare occasions, when a person is very sick, the brightblood girl dies and the patient lives. These cases seem to have no correlation with the age of the patient or their malady. In fact, most of the time, the rumours have nothing to say about what was wrong with them.

They are, however, usually rich.

---

I disappeared as quickly as I could once we got back to the stables. Isobel had been quiet for the rest of the ride, her good humour dissipated, though I didn’t think she realised I’d seen her blood. She made a beeline for the house as soon as we dismounted, leaving me to my chores. It seemed an age before I was able to slip away from under Dolores’ watchful eye.

I followed the footpath into town—rough and stony, but faster than the road if you were sure-footed—but the sky was already darkening by the time I made it, winded and with my stomach growling from a missed dinner. Though I’d been here only a handful of times with Magda, I found my way unerringly to the house in whose window I’d first seen Oana. That thread between us, I thought, leading me once more.

I knocked without waiting to catch my breath. There was a sound of bustling footsteps, and at last a middle-aged woman in a brown dress and apron came to the door. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow,” she said. “We’re closed. Unless it’s an emergency, and those cost extra.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” I said. “I have to tell Oana something.”

The woman’s eyebrows drew together. “She left for the big house half an hour ago.” Her hand moved to her pocket—an unconscious gesture, I thought—and I saw that it was heavy with gold. More than they’d paid Oana to come up to the house last time. A lot more.

I ran back up the hill, breath tearing at my lungs. My eyes were wet from the cold night air by the time I reached the big house. I kept running, though by now it was more of a stagger, past the carriage in the driveway and its stamping, snorting horses, and past Dolores’s voice when she called to me.

I slipped in through the servants’ entrance and found Magda in the hallway. She frowned, not expecting me, but there was no time to explain myself. “Is she here?” I demanded. “Oana?”

“Who?”

“The brightblood girl.”

Magda said nothing for a moment. I couldn’t parse her expression—the firmly-clamped lips, the rapid blinks. “No. Nobody’s been up here.”

But I’d seen the carriage outside. She was lying to me.

I thought fast. Best to feign ignorance, I decided, and nodded. “Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Best to take a moment and decide on a plan. I’d sneak off to one of the outbuildings; no-one would disturb me there. With a final nod and a mumbled apology to Magda, I backed out of the servants’ door.

As I rounded the corner of the house, I heard voices from the woods behind it.

Voices and footsteps, and a sound like a heavy object being dragged.

There was a creak above me. A window had been thrown open wide, and the heavy curtains, normally closed, billowed in the night breeze. It was a clear evening with a gravid full moon.

Isobel leaned out of the casement. She held one hand out before her, and in the other, something silver gleamed. I gazed up, transfixed, as she drew it across her palm. Her gaze was dreamy.

A droplet hit the cobblestones by my feet. When I crouched to look at the ground, I saw lightless red blood.

---

There is one other rumour about the light in the blood, and it is this: if it passes the lips soon enough after death, it has the power to restore life.

I don’t know anyone who’s tried it, let alone had it work. In some of the stories, the volume of blood required is fatal. A deadly exchange: a life for a life. In others, the resurrected person comes back faintly wrong. In still others, a bond is forged between the life-giver and the resurrected—psychic, indelible, burning like white fire.

But, as I said, it’s only a rumour.

---

They buried Oana in the woods behind the house. It took a long time for me to claw the earth away from her face, from her glazed eyes and breathless lips. They hadn’t sewn them shut. Perhaps they’d been in too much of a hurry. Perhaps it had been an accident, and they’d been unprepared.

It didn’t matter. Oana was in the dirt, her red dress dirtied and snagged, and Isobel was normal now. She’d never live the constrained life of a brightblood girl, and all it had cost was Oana.

It took me a longer time still to drag Oana from her shallow grave and sneak down to the stables in the dead of night, saddle Cloud while Dolores snored, and lead her to the graveside. Lifeless, Oana was heavy as clay, but I tied her to the saddle as best I could and mounted the horse behind her.

Cloud took us up the hill until we were high above the town, the stars in their indifferent thousands thick above us and the moon shining like a great pearl in a god’s hand. I rode for hours, following the stream, until every muscle ached and I could barely keep us on Cloud’s back.

Exhausted, I stumbled to the ground and pulled Oana’s body with me, tugging at her until she lay on her back beside the water. The cool night air made me shiver, but her cheek still felt warm. I let myself imagine she was sleeping, and in a moment she’d wake up and kiss me.

No. They had taken her from me. If I wanted to save her, I would have to grasp those threads of rumour and twist them together into something stronger than death.

The quick-moving brook shivered and shook the moon’s reflection into myriad tiny pieces, but I cupped my hands around it as best I could and drank. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache, but on my parched throat it was the sweetest thing I’d ever felt.

I felt nothing change in me. Still, when the moon began to fade and the sun to creep up over the horizon, I cut my palm and held my breath.

In the grey dawn light, I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to tell if it had worked. My blood felt hot and sticky, as it always did. I almost didn’t dare look at it.

When I did, I saw rivulets of light.

I put my hand to Oana’s lips. The blood flowed past them and into her slack mouth, but she didn’t swallow, didn’t move. I cut my wrist instead, deep, steadying myself with my other hand, and my vision greyed as the sky lightened. I bled and shone and bled and nothing happened.

It had been foolish to think I could help her. Like a child pricking my thumb with a needle, I’d let myself believe I could be more than what I was—a saviour instead of a drudge who was alone in the world once more. I’d dreamed of running away with Oana, or of both of us bearing down upon the big house with wind in our hair and vengeance in our hearts, but it had all been pointless. They would just find two bodies instead of one, if anybody bothered to look for us at all.

The sun was almost up now.

Movement. A rustle like a rabbit in the grass. Cloud threw up her head with a rattle of her bridle behind me, and so I was distracted when Oana’s eyes opened.

At first I thought I was dreaming, but there she was, alive and breathing as the stars faded, a hundred stories sprung to life. She took my hand and licked her lips, her mouth smeared with light, her eyes hungry as graves.

© 2025 J.L. George

[Issue 2025.73]

Comment on the stories in this issue on the TFF Press blog.