When a Blood Mobile Passed By
by Abby Manzella
Yesterday my husband and I saw a blood mobile maneuvering through our town with its red cross gleaming on a white paint job. It was the size of a tour bus, but no musicians had been on the road in many moons. Instead of a band filling the vehicle with their tired sweaty bodies, we pictured the insides outfitted with reclining chairs, cookies to elevate blood sugar, and refrigerators for the blood.
Medical vehicle sightings and the auditory blare of their sirens had become more conspicuous in recent months—it had been a long year—but it had been a while since we’d seen a blood mobile actually roaming the streets. We started pondering the possibilities of such a moveable feast.
“I think a bunch of vampires should be driving it,” my husband said.
“Yes,” I responded. “In the story version they’d have tinted windows to keep them protected from the sun, and they’d be the good kind of vampires. You know, the ones who only slightly drained their victims instead of killing them.”
“Honestly, donors wouldn’t even know they were feeding vampires. To most people it would seem like a regular blood donation with a nurse who had grown pale from all her time indoors.”
“We’d call it ‘Vampire Blood Bus,’” I said.
“How about ‘Blood Bus,’ to keep a bit of mystery?”
I agreed on the title, and we both agreed on the possibilities of our newly imagined story. Such ponderings were part of how we enjoyed our time alone together. We narratively inoculated ourselves from what was out there by envisioning apocalypses beyond our current apocalypse. Our stories about the undead kept at bay the newly dead who haunted our thoughts and our streets.
Content with our rendering, we continued driving down the road. The conversation turned to other matters.
Abby Manzella is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizen in U.S. Internal Displacements, which was awarded the honorable mention for the MLA Book Prize for Independent Scholars. Her work has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and she has published with sites including Literary Hub, Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Colorado Review, Bending Genres, and the Boston Globe. Follow her on Twitter @AbbyManzella.
