An Education in Malice

by S.T. Gibson

She wore her dark hair long and it fell over her shoulders in waves. Her lips spread into a smile as she silently took me in with warm caramel eyes, and I thought, for a shining moment, that she was seeing me as I was seeing her: As absolutely perfect.

Love turns some people into birds or beggars, but you make me into architecture, into a sanctuary of soft and holy spaces shaped to catch the sound of your voice. These eyes: rose windows bathing you in light. These arms: alcoves open in shadowed embrace. This heart: a confessional dark enough for your sins. This mouth: a bell driving away demons and calling you home.

She smiled in a way that showed all her teeth. It was, I realized a moment too late, not a friendly smile.

De Lafontaine’s piercing eyes met mine, stealing the breath from my lungs, and then, without remorse or hesitation, she bit down.

I didn’t need any other teacher, not when the light of her brilliance shone bright enough to illuminate my whole life.

I learned how to survive in the cutthroat world of girlhood, where all strangeness was unrooted as ruthlessly as weeds from a garden.

But this girl, this Carmilla… she undid all my domestication. One smile from her and I wanted to loose my hair and chase her barefoot through the woods, I wanted to knock her to the ground and pin her like a butterfly, I wanted to dig my teeth into her plush lower lip, I wanted, I wanted.

Unless keeping us starved for her approval, fighting over scraps of her love like neglected puppies, had always been her aim.

“Well, what a miserable little band we all are. Bound by blood and secrecy, with no recourse to anyone but each other. It would almost be romantic, under more advantageous circumstances.”

She seemed entranced by the gruesomeness of the experience, rapt in the face of the macabre. I wanted with every ounce of will to yank her down the corridor by the wrist and not stop running until we were above ground again.

I felt that something might snap at any moment, and that I would be the collateral damage.

She blinked a few times, banishing the water gathering in her tear ducts. “But then I got what I wanted, and now I don’t know what to want. I’ve always known what I wanted, Laura, I’m positively made of wanting. It’s strange, to be sure of so little.”

She wanted to swallow this night down whole, like a snake might do with a baby bird, and spit up nothing but bones.

I felt like I was treading water in honey, slowly being drowned in sweetness, and the waves were closing over my head. I was losing control, and that terrified me.

She had been reading to us from John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and I had been moved to tears by the melancholy in his words. “It reminds us of our humanity by allowing us to express all those feelings that polite society would deem inappropriate, monstrous even.”

She was a force we couldn’t escape, like gravity, or the chill that had blown in with December.

I felt, acutely and miserably, that I was that wine glass dangling from her fingers, covered in marks of her ownership.

Carmilla and I grew even more entangled, like flowers who, denied sufficient sunlight, entwine their leaves around each other and grow up strangled with love.

“It was always going to be this way,” she said into Isis’s hair. “One of us was always going to bleed for the other.”

Time unspooled like a silver thread all around me. In that moment, there was nothing real in the world outside of the blood in that cup and the gleam in Magdalena’s dark eyes. When she smiled at me, her pointed canine teeth caught the light.

I was keenly aware of my own power, which had finally surfaced after so many years of trying to quash and silence it. No more Laura the saint, I thought. No more Laura the scared little girl. I was Laura the night creature now, regardless of what path I chose to take.