Tainted blood

The Promise of RedIn the beginning, there was trust.A needle gleamed beneath sterile light,a doctor’s hand steady as the word cure.Blood was the covenant between life and loss—It pulsed through the nations like scripture,binding flesh to flesh,one body to another in the secret faithThat which flows from one would heal the next.The hospitals were cathedrals of mercy,The transfusion bag is a sacrament.No one questioned the vein’s quiet gift—that crimson tide that whispered you will live.But in the corners of the world,where cost met convenience,where science knelt before profit’s altar,The covenant was broken.Blood, once sacred, was sold in barrels,traded across oceansfrom prisoner to patient,from addict to infant,from the desperate to the dying.The world learned too latethat the river had been poisoned.What was meant to savebecame a ghost that traveled silentlythrough the arteries of nations.Fever. Weakness. The slow bloom of betrayal.A mother’s milk turned bitter.A child coughed roses into her pillow.And the doctors wrote new names for the plagueas if renaming could cleanse its origin.It was not only the disease that spread,but shame—the kind that governments hide in foldersand lock away beneath polite regret.The promise of red turned black.The hands that healedbecame the hands that woundedwithout knowing,without wanting,but still—without stopping.And in every dropwas the echo of a thousand criesfor accountability, for truth,for the return of that first pure heartbeatThat once meant life.II. The Market of BloodThey built a market out of mercy.A quiet, unlit bazaar where one needswas measured in ounces and price.The veins of the poor became currency—a pulse auctioned in whispers,a life signed away for a handful of coins.Men lined up outside warehouses,arms bare,trusting the system that smiledand took what it needed.Each vial labeled donor,each receipt marked hope.But hope, like blood, can sour.Behind the cold hum of refrigerationand the click of bureaucratic pens,A deal was made between silence and profit.Blood flowed across bordersthe way oil once did—precious, powerful, and deadlywhen tainted by greed.The merchants of medicinewore suits the color of apology.They spoke of shortages,of necessity,of the good of the many—but never one of the fewwho paid with fever, with lesions,with the slow unraveling of their cells.They called it an accident,a tragedy without blame,but in the dim corridorsof the infected,Truth grew like mold.Someone knew.Someone signed the shipment papers.Someone looked away.Families became statistics,their stories reduced to chartsthat never showed the color of grief.Mothers buried sons who had never sinned.Hemophiliacs, once promised freedom from bleeding,bled inward,silently,for years.The television said:We are investigating.The newspapers said:A scandal unfolds.But the blood kept moving—from lab to lab,from one unsuspecting armto the next.No one stopped it.No one could.Because once blood leaves the body,It remembers only the hungerof the next vein.III. Inheritance of SilenceChildren were born into quiet rooms.Their mothers had already learnedthat silence was safer than truth.They were told: Don’t speak of it.The world won’t understand.And so a generation grewbetween whispers and withheld names.The illness became an heirloom,passed not only through veins,but through the unspoken —an inheritance of guiltfor something no one had done.Photographs yellowed on mantels.The fathers faded first,their faces soft with apology.The mothers followed in fragments —an absence here,a cough there,until the house itselfseemed to breathe with loss.The children learned the meaning of stigmabefore they could spell it.In playgrounds, they hid the truthbeneath long sleeves and fake smiles.In classrooms, they heard words likeplagueshamecontaminationand wondered how their own nameshad become synonyms.They grew up inside the echoof words not spoken —the church that wouldn’t bless their dead,the school that “regretted to inform,”the neighbor’s eyes that looked away.Yet inside them, the blood still burnedwith its quiet rebellion,a truth that refused to be forgotten.They began to write, to speak, to remember.The silence cracked —small fissures of courage appearingin journals, protests, and late-night letters.They demanded to knowWhy had their parents been treatedas experiments,Why was compensation a rumor,Why did justice come too lateor not at all.And somewhere,in the sterile archives of the guilty,files began to tremble —paper ghosts waiting to be seen.The children became witnessesof an inheritance not of wealthBut of warning.They carried the names of the lostlike candles in their throats,and though the world had moved on,They refused to let memory diethe way their families had —slowly, beautifully, and unseen.How long still