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Sometimes, painting angels and biblical scenes feels like it might be the only way to reprogram their meanings. Other times, I wonder if I’ll spend the rest of my life tearing the lies off God.
“Did you follow me home because I look like Billie Holiday?” “I followed you home because your heartbeat lives in my head. I wished to be closer.”
She crosses her ankles and leans against the rail behind her. “Do you fear being needed?” “All I’m saying is, you can’t just go into bookstores telling strangers you need them.” “But I have done so, and now you must decide the consequence for this act.” Laura bites her lip, watching me. “I am ready.”
Saying yes to a date with a woman who followed me home is a questionable act unto itself, but if she heard my heartbeat, that means there’s something left of me, and I’m too desperate for proof of that to care about what my common sense has to say.
“You think I would be so shallow as to care whether you are a good person?” Laura asks. She fondles one of the bats dangling from her ears, smiling playfully. “Be evil if it would please you. You will smell the same to me.”
“Do you still not want my number?” “I want all of you,” Laura says, chilling me. “But I do not have a phone.” I’m not sure what answer I expected, but it wasn’t that. “Why not?” “I find them overstimulating to witness,” she answers. “The thought of owning one makes me wish I had died in battle.”
“Happy early birthday,” the cashier says, grinning as he raps the touchscreen register with his knuckle. “If you sign up for our loyalty program today, you’ll get a coupon for a movie and a bucket of popcorn on us.” “I thank you kindly, but I am loyal to no one but my family, and to nothing but my appetite,” Laura says, tucking her ID away.
I decided to wear my hair out today, and wisps of my Afro keep getting in my face. Trying to tame it is like trying to tame smoke.
“What about your brother?” “Cypress was mortified to his very core.” I pause while picking up my fork, winded. “Why?” “He feared that my old age, and indeed the very nature of my unholy existence, will eventually mangle your sense of time and reality until your sanity degrades irrecoverably and you enter a vegetative state, never to regain cognitive function,” she says, smoothing back flyway strands of hair with the squeaky dish glove. “And after that, you will break up with me.”
“I love being your girlfriend.” I gaze at the picture on the refrigerator, trying to make out the limbs and hair of tiny Vlad the Impaler smiling amongst the scene of utter carnage. “Me too.”
“I usually only see Dracula when it’s bedtime, which is once a month, so I sometimes call him PMS,” Talon continues. “He does the sleeping.”
“I, too, yearn for your flesh.” She says it like it’s an unfolding epiphany.
“Hemaclysmic is a gay club?” I ask, setting my phone aside. “Heterosexuals are an endangered species in the undead community.”
“I do not understand humans, son of Van Helsing. When I come from, you drank the blood you spilt while it was still warm,” she laments. “And if you could not drink any longer, you bathed in it. Modernity is depraved, I fear.”
“Whose are you, Vlad Dracula?” “Yours,” he says in the same unaffected tone. I nod. “Just checking.” His eyes, thus far caged and unreadable, glimmer with something like intrigue. “I am your baby?” It takes a moment for me to realize what he’s talking about; it hasn’t really registered that this is the same person who was sitting on my face last night.
“You are the mirror I could never break. Breathe.” I didn’t realize I stopped. Even if I don’t understand what that means, I need all the proof the world has to offer that I’m more than just scars in the shape of a person.
“Don’t,” I cut across. “I can’t keep making excuses for you. How can you say you have nightmares about me dying when you make it so hard to be alive?”
“I just don’t get it,” I say, my voice in a million pieces. “Is it really that hard to love me?” She lets go and holds me at arm’s length, gaping at me like I drove a knife into her back. “In all my years, nothing has been easier. You must understand this.” I wish I did. I wish I could stop feeling like everyone I know secretly wishes they didn’t know me.
“If I asked you to fuck me like you will not see me in eight days, what would you do?” I reach for her hand, tug her into my arms. “I’d fuck you like I’ll never see you again in my life.”
“They were writing good books and dressing nicely in that century,” the shadow says with a sour scowl. “I could resurrect and destroy Van Helsing again and again until the end of the world and it would not recompense me for all the outfits I lost when he destroyed my castle.”
“Personally, I don’t understand monotheism. You’ve only got one god, and if he’s boring, who the fuck do you talk to? Like, if Baldr was the only god, I’d probably just kill myself, but I think Christians go to hell for that, don’t they? Do you just become atheist?” “I’m…not sure.” The only thing I’m sure of right now is that I’m within spitting distance of dissociative breakdown.
“When I come from, scars were the language of battle.” Her hand travels up my arm without touching my skin, raising shivers from my bones. “The alphabet of war.” I ease my hand from her grip. “I haven’t been to war.” “Then why do I smell it on you?”
Bunnicula doesn’t remember much before the shadow. She can faintly recall taking glamour shots for PetFinder, but nothing more.
“There can only be two fangs,” Champion says with something of a lisp. “Otherwise, the integrity of veins will suffer. I am a vampire, not a barracuda.” I stifle a giggle. “You’re so cute. You look like a kitten.” “I am not cute,” he says, deadpanning. “Have you seen yourself in the mirror?” I snicker. His eyebrows shoot back up, practically grazing his hairline. I cover my mouth. “Whoops,” I say through my fingers. “Guess not.”
When I look over at him, his nostrils are flared, and his green eyes are fixed on Smaug’s piles of gold and jewels. “You don’t like the movie?” I ask. “I am somewhat disgusted by this dragon’s lack of a system for organizing his spoils,” Champion says, massaging his temples. “At least put them into separate rooms.”
“What is your name?” he asks, now within smelling distance. I steel my body against a tide of chills. “You’re gonna say it soon enough.”
“This is not goodbye. This is goodnight. Death is nothing but a shade of darkness that your eyes might never fully adjust to. I am not gone,” she says; the emphasis cracks her voice, which has so far been smooth and unbroken. “I’m just so deep in shadow that you can’t see me. I’m here, I’m watching, and I love you.”
“That’s Zeke?” I gasp. Minty Fresh seems to respond in the affirmative with a low growl. “You digested the false prophet?” Dracula wails.
“Oh no,” I say, hurrying over. “Baby, don’t cry.” “But I was to torture and kill him. I gave him a speech,” he says frailly. “It had been over a century since I gave a speech.”
