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I heard about this one HR guy like two towns over who was a seventh son with a unibrow and red hair and was born backwards, and he just turned by himself. Just sitting there in English class and bang. That’s what scares me the most. Like it’s something that’s inside you already, and you can’t stop it or even know it’s there, but there’s a little clock and it’s always counting down to English class.
Emmy wasn’t very different as a vampire. We had this same conversation after she lost her virginity (Ethan again) and she was all it is what it is then, too, with an extra helping of I am part of a sacred sisterhood now.
We sat cross-legged on my lame pink bedspread and kissed because we were lonely and we didn’t know anything except that we wanted to be older and have boyfriends because our sisters had them and her lips were really soft. I didn’t even know you were supposed to use tongue, that’s how thirteen I was.
It’s weird, though, because back then there were maybe twenty or thirty vampires in the whole world, and people just wrote and wrote about them, even though there’s like statistically no way that Stoker guy ever met one.
If you want to get turned you don’t have to go chasing it. Not when some bad steak will do you for about $12.50, and a guy down on Bellefleur Street will do it for less than that.
So, I suck. So, I’m one of those girls. Like we didn’t know that already. Like you never did anything embarrassing.
And how scared we all are, even though if you keep talking about how scared you are eventually you stop really being scared, which I thought was the point of having a group, but apparently not, because being scared is like what these people do for fun.
God, I’m turning into one of those snotty brainy hipster chicks.
TV is strictly pre. So we keep acting like what we did in 6th grade matters, even though no one actually plays football or cheers at all. It’s like we all froze how we were three or four years ago and we’ll never get any older.
About a year ago, some of the causes started having baby causes.
“Probably because it’s not the like it’s the Romanian flu, Uncle Jack. You can’t blockade air. I don’t even think it really started there. Practically every culture has vampire legends.”
The problem is they live forever and they can’t have kids. That’s it, right there. That’s the problem. They don’t play nice with the American dream. They won’t do the monkey-dance. They don’t care about what kind of car they drive. They don’t care about what’s on TV they know for damn sure they’re not on TV, so why bother? Guys like Uncle Jack can’t sell them anything. I mean, yeah, there’s the blood thing, too, but it’s not like nobody was getting killed or disappearing before they came along. Anyway, Noah says they mostly feed off each other when they’re new. Blood is blood. Cow, human,
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some girl goes swooning over a boy vampire because he’s so deep and dreamy and he lived through centuries waiting for her. Gag. I guess that’s why that crap is banned now. No one wants their daughters getting the idea that all this could ever be hot. But guess what? They don’t have
Gossip knows no species, you know? I guess it must be pretty lonely to hang out with a human girl all the time and explain your business to her.
Like puberty. One day you’re playing with an EZ Bake and the next day you have breasts and everyone’s looking at you differently and you’re bleeding, but it’s a secret you can’t tell anyone. You didn’t know it was coming.You didn’t know there was another world on the other side of that bloody fucking mess between your legs just waiting to happen to you.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. If it makes you feel better to think God hates us or that some mutation of porphyria went airborne or that in the quantum sense our own cultural memes were always just echoes of alternate matrices and sometimes, just sometimes, there’s some pretty deranged crossover or that the Bulgarian revolution flooded other countries with infected refugees? Knock yourself out. But there’s no reason.
that amazing sound of the ball smacking against a sneaker thumping between us like a heartbeat and the grass all long and uncut under our feet and the bleeding, bleeding sky and I thought: this is it. This is my last night alive.
We’re hawking fertility here. Hers, ours.]
More than anything in the world, Martin wanted to be a Husband when he grew up.
Whenever Martin drew babies they were laughing and smiling. He could not bear the thought of an unhappy child.
There would be tests, for intelligence, for loyalty, for genetic defects, for temperament, for fertility, which wasn’t usually a problem for women but better safe than sorry. Better safe than assign a Husband to a woman as barren as California.
Sylvie had discovered when she was quite small that adults were discomfited by silence. It brought them running. And when she was angry, upset, when the world offended her, Sylvie could draw down a coil of silence all around her, showing no feeling at all, until whoever had affronted her grew so uncomfortable that they would beg forgiveness just to end the ordeal.
She pulled out the dress and draped it over her bed. It lay there like another girl.
All the bottles and cakes smelled like that, like growing things piled on top of something biting, corrosive.
Pressed powder (The Visitation of the Dove) should be liberally applied, but only the merest breath of blush (Parable of the Good Harlot) is permitted.
twenty-seven tiny, satin colored buttons ran up her back like a new spine. Its neckline plunged; its skirt flounced, showing calf and a suggestion of knee.
She was inside the dress, inside the other girl.
The other girl was very striking.
Martin would frown and Dad would hold him tight. Husbands were not afraid of affection. They had bags of it to share.
He smoked Canadian cigarettes and nipped some kind of homebrewed liquor from his gray plastic thermos. He’d egged Martin into a sip once. It tasted like dirt on fire.
His name was Thomas. He had broad shoulders already, chocolate-colored hair and cool slate eyes that made him look terribly romantic. Martin tried not to let it bother him. He knew how the program worked. Where the other three weeks of the month took his Father. Obviously, there were other children, other wives, other homes. Other roasting chickens, other martinis. Other evening television shows on other channels.
After all, Husbands didn’t get to choose. Martin’s future wives—four to start with, that was standard, but if he did well, who knew?—wouldn’t all be bombshells in pin-up bathing suits. He had to practice looking at women, really seeing them, seeing what was good and true and gorgeous in them.
Her body would be the best kind of body: the kind that had borne children. Breasts that had nursed. Legs that had run after misbehaving little ones. He could love that body. The sudden hardness between his legs held no threat, only infinite love and acceptance, a Husband’s love.
will remember every date. Every wife will be so special and I will love her and our children. I will make her martinis. I will roast the chicken so she doesn’t have to. When I am with one of them I will turn off all other channels in my mind. I can keep it straight and separate. I will study so hard, so that I know how to please. It will be my only vocation, to be devoted.
women from before the war, with so much health in their faces Martin could hardly bear to look at them. Their skin was so clear. She’s dead, he thought. Statistically speaking, that woman with the black hair and heart-shaped face and polka-dotted bikini is dead.
A girl with red hair who lived two blocks over and was so pretty that looking at her was like getting punched in the chest.
Martin’s body convulsed with the tiny, private detonation of his soul.
Would the test show her mother, practicing her English until her accent came out clean as acid paper?
Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Don’t be silly. Japan isn’t a virus they can see wiggling in your cells. Mom’s documents are flawless. No alarm will go off in the centrifuge.
One we have Charles Patterson, six foot one, Welsh/Danish stock, blond/blue, scoring high in both logic and empathy, average sperm count 19 million per milliliter! This hot little number has a reserved parking spot at the Office! Of course, when I say “Office,” I mean the upper gentlemen’s club, brandy and ferns on the 35th floor, cigars and fraternity and polished teak walls.
Our productive heartthrobs are too valuable to work! Stress has been shown to lower semen quality, Sylvie! But as little as possible should change. If you take the Office from a man, you’ll take his spirit.
Who can tell? It’s so thrilling to speculate! It’s not like men and women got along so well before, anyway. Take my wife, please! Why I oughtta! To hell with the whole mess. Give it one week a month. You do unpleasant things one week out of four and don’t think twice.
Black boys didn’t get Announced. Not Asians, not refugees, not Sylvie if anyone guessed. They got shipped out. They got a ticket to California. To Utah.
Six foot even, Swiss/Polish—ooh, practically Russian! How exotic! I smell a match! Brown/gray, top marks across the board, average sperm count a spectacular 29 million per milliliter! You’re just showing off, young man!
Thomas spun her around shyly as the music flourished. He had a romantic look to him. Lovely chocolate brown hair. He was saying something about being interested in the animal repopulation projects going on in the Plains States.
In four years Sylvie will be Mrs. Charles Patterson 19 million per. It’s over and they began to dance. Charles was a swell dancer. He promised to be sweet to her when he got through with training and they were married. He promised to make everything as normal as possible. As little as possible should change.
Or it would request just as politely that he arrange for travel to Washington for a battery of civic exams and placement in government service. Fertile men couldn’t think clearly, didn’t you know? All that sperm. Can’t be rational with all that business sloshing around in there. Husbands couldn’t run things. They were needed for more important work.
All sex shall be potentially reproductive. Every girl screwing a Brother is failing to screw a Husband and that just won’t do.
Don’t worry, Martin. It’s a relief, really. Now you can really get to work. Accomplish something. Carve out your place. Sell the world to the world.
She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent.
