Okay, I'll cough up something. *

I hate the smell of bleach and blood. So one has to find a middle ground. I only in the mornings. If someone needs me, I am available well past midnight, but mornings belong to me, and they can rest assured that I will have everything sparkling, shining, well-arranged, neat, and redolent of a neutral odour that has nothing to do with bleach. I used to use it, but it drilled little whitened moth-holes in my clothes and made my hands smell like an old swimming-pool. On good days, bleach smells like a orderly but well-used locker room. On bad days, bleach makes the house smell like a reputable slaughterhouse. All the erased odours are blindingly and conspicuously absent. The alarm rings in my phone, timed to chime by an app that goes online to find when the sun rises. I look out the window to see a faint red glow from the horizon blushing across the glass pane. By the bed is a box of disposable plastic booties, a pair of which I put on my bare feet. Then comes the white-coat, like that of a meat-inspector; plastic goggles and then the surgical mask and gloves. Next pick up my cleaning pail: with a bottle of industrial strength hydrogen peroxide (a natural, odourless, oxygen-based bleach and disinfectant, just as effective as chlorine bleach but without that hated smell), a boc of baking soda (a natural deodorant), and several bottles of Nature’s Cleaner, a stain and odour-removing product bought at a boutique petstore a few block away. If you want a good stain remover, go to a petstore. I open my bedroom door cautiously. It’s not locked; I stopped locking it after my mother left, and I fell in love with Max. I hear only a door on the third floor slamming shut. There is no other sound, not the pad of footsteps or the sigh of someone turning in. I leave my room and heard downstairs. The mess in the kitchen is not as bad as a I feared. I’ve cleaned up far worse. The kitchen floor us bloody, but there are no pools, no fragments of unidentified biologicals on the linoleum floor.. There is only a generalized pattern of smears over the checkerboard tile pattern, still slightly damp. A pattern of regular round smudges like a crimson sponge painting . Just before I woke, they were licking the floor. Every inch of it.