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October 1 - October 7, 2024
wings all flit in unison, as if reaching out toward some forgotten home.
But she didn’t want to stop loving Ghost Pipe. Ghost Pipe was beautiful and kind and once, months ago, they lay together in the dark coming up with funny ideas for vanity license plates. Once you give someone a bouquet, you can’t take it back again.
The Spark Panther can outrun its own soul—faster than the human eye, faster than sound, faster than its sorry prey. Its ghost, not so quick, topples out of its body into the dust. Soulless, the Spark Panther is a vicious hunter. It will rend the larynx from an antelope without remorse. It will gather enough meat to last several months, and then it will feast. Meanwhile, its soul begins the journey back to its host.
They have always heard us. Sonos like bad news best. Not out of cruelty—there is simply a fattiness to the moment when a person realizes the worst is here.
You could have loved her—you simply chose not to.
Rotisserie Ib is a good, filling meal, and if you eat it, you won’t have to listen to the truth anymore, ever again. Easy.
But when the little grievings grow too many, the Nawl flips the switch off. Then it no longer feels anything. It floats silently in black pools filling with stormwater. It watches the sky, unmoved by the waxing and waning of the moon. It wants for nothing.
She told me that time is a filmstrip, already developed. We’re like a projector’s lens, moving along the strip, able to see only one frame per moment—but the whole reel is already in place. All predetermined.
Its eyes must be the darkest things I’ve ever seen—little black gems built of fear and the absence of light.
But, sweethearts, I hunger. Feed me that which I crave and I will be able to give you all you seek. I can hear your dear one’s longing bristle. Her shape, a shadow cast on the sundial of my tongue. I taste her motion. Her heart, a billiards game with the eight ball hovering midair, refusing to fall. Do you recall her hands, how they twitch into fever when anxious? I feel them sprinting through my blood, for what am I if not a river for the lost to travel through? You have built me for this. You with your knife, with your hexes, with your ropes, your bloodlettings. Sweet ones, children of my
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When the rooster finally stops eating, all of Aimee’s most precious objects are gone. The room has been thieved of its Aimee-ness, her essence absorbed into the bird’s body. He remains the same size as ever, while the walls sport lost-tooth gaps where band posters once hung. The concert is over. The crowd has all gone home, stumbled in clusters off the walls and sills and out from dresser drawers, straight into the rooster’s beak.
If Aimee were missing before…she is twice as absent now.
The man himself is beautiful, yes, and soft, and tender in his way, but absent somehow. He speaks mindlessly. He’s a little too into himself. Horribly, it’s very easy to be in love with someone you don’t particularly like. The woman loves him the way a honeybee loves the sting—fevered for contact, willing to tug its own guts out in the process. You aren’t an idiot. This isn’t a good look on anyone. But isn’t part of free will getting to say fuck it and follow your passion anyway? So fuck it. At least you have a beautiful house that sways and sways and whispers to you in a low, lilting song.
The goat girl thought this was a vulgar sort of work. Other vampires killed people for food, or out of a predator’s reflex—but Oliver killed people for kindness. Where was his animal instinct?
For a species that can’t look in a mirror, vampires are a vain lot. They replace the mirror with the look on a potential victim or lover’s face when preening in front of them. The goat woman had to admit, she did like Oliver’s way of speaking. And she liked that he wore a purple blazer with a little white turnip embroidered onto the lapel.
As time passed, Oliver and the goat girl became friends. For goats, there is little difference between an enemy and a friend, so it was all the same to her.
“It’s not the dark we’re afraid of,” the goat girl continued, “it’s being in darkness with eyes that were built for the light. It’s not a lone ghost we’re afraid of—it’s the ghost appearing in the realm of the living, in the same room as our breathing bodies. We are
never afraid of a thing on its own, as it is. We’re afraid of something intruding in a context in which it doesn’t belong. What is a monster? It’s a contradiction. A creature who houses two dissonant aspects. So yes, a girl is not monstrous on her own. Nor is a goat. But a goat is a goat and a girl is a girl, or so it should be. Nestle them side by side, in one body, and that is where the monstrosity is born. Am I a monster? Yes, love, I am. I am a monster because I contain too much.”
“She’s dangerous,” they muttered to one another over their liquor. “The monster is a temptress, sent to lure us from our wives.” The men fiddled with their expensive watches and tightened their silken ties. The men spied on the goat woman as she ran errands, followed her halfway home from the store again and again. “She shouldn’t be so crude. She shouldn’t be allowed to look at the plums that way. She shouldn’t be allowed to dress like a lady if she isn’t going to act like one.”
People were always deciding what the goat woman was or was not allowed to want.
The only weapons they carried were their own convictions.
Oliver had always known that a time might come when perhaps, the world might need devouring. When the world would grow old
and sad and sick, and too full of the wrong sorts of hungers. This was his art, after all. He was a master at knowing the moment when death stopped being a tragedy and became, instead, a gift. And if that time came for the whole of the world—he would be ready.
