Vampires Never Get Old, page 15
“I thought I was ready, too,” Jude said, tearing her hand away from Hannah’s warm skin. “But I wasn’t. Nobody is.”
Hannah shook her head, blinked. She took a step back, then another, dimpled knees quivering. “You touch me again and I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
“Yeah,” Jude said. “Of course you will.”
* * *
Will it be hot today?
Will it be cold?
Who is near me?
Are you coming?
Are you here?
The party organizers ramped up their organizing. Dozens of people descended on the park, hanging lights and banners. More trucks came—some with water, others with chairs and tables and linens. Jude did her best to ignore them, only lashing out once, when one of them, a middle-aged white woman with fluffy hair and augments, suggested that Lolo be moved to her indoor habitat during the party. “That thing looks half-dead already,” she said.
Jude said sweetly, “Better than being all the way dead, wouldn’t you say?” and threw a chunk of “salmon” at her fluffy head.
“What’s gotten into you?” said Diwata.
“Nothing,” said Jude, which was true.
“You need a break,” Diwata told her. “Go home. Come back when you’re acting like yourself.”
Acting like herself? And who, exactly, was that? Her night-walking took her northwest, all the way to Jefferson Park. The house was just as she remembered it, a little bungalow nestled among dozens of other little bungalows. She circled around to the back of the house, jumping up to the porch roof. Through the window, she watched her parents sleep. Her mother had one arm flung across her face, covering her eyes, her father was slack-jawed and snoring. She opened the window and stepped inside. Pill bottles littered the surface of the nightstand, and the room smelled like stale smoke.
But she must not have been as quiet as she’d hoped, because her father’s eyes opened. “Judy?” he said, in a voice thick with beer and drugs and sleep. “Is that you?”
“No,” she said.
He struggled to sit up. “What are you doing? What time is it?”
“Late. Early. Depends on your perspective.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
He rubbed his eyes. “You look horrible. Are you sick?”
The whole world is sick. “Are you?” she asked.
“My back,” he said. “You know how it is. Hey, you got any cash?”
It had been a year since she’d been here; you’d think he would be more surprised to see her. Happy, maybe. But this was not the place for happiness. For a brief moment, Jude wanted to flip the bed, dump them both on the floor. She wanted to tell them about love and thirst and what both had done to her when her parents weren’t looking. She wanted to tell them about the golden boy, the one who had worshipped fairy-tale beasts, the one who was a beast himself. The things he had taken from her: will and blood and humanity.
But she wasn’t here for any of that. “Ask Mom for the cash,” she told him. “She’s still paying for my phone.”
“What? How?” He shoved at Jude’s mother. “Wake up, you bitch. You been holding out on me.”
Her mother rolled over. “Fuck off, Mike.”
“Judy just told me.”
“Fuck Judy, too.”
Jude left them to their inevitable brawl and crept into her old room, surprised to find it the same—clothes strewn all over the bed and the carpet, old lipsticks gathering dust on the dresser. She found a duffel bag and scooped a bunch of clothes inside. Then she shouldered the bag, slipped out the kitchen door. She walked to the zoo, arriving with the sun. She put the leather bag in her locker and started her morning routine. Diwata came and helped her put out food for Lolo. Lolo showed no interest in the food, but she loved the bucket it came in and put it on her head like a hat. When Diwata told her she looked ridiculous, Lolo whined and growled until Jude put the bucket on her own head.
While Jude and Diwata and the rest of the zoo staff released the animals into their outdoor habitats, an army wearing identical black T-shirts descended upon them. The T-shirts said B’S BIG B-DAY BASH, and the people wearing them zipped around the property in golf carts, delivering food and drinks to cafés and food stands. Watering trucks came from every direction, and the zookeepers were told to water the animals and “Perk these babies up!” A moving van rolled up and parked between the Wild Things Gift Shop and the Lion House. The T-shirted people set up a stage and then hauled outdoor furniture from the truck and set up chairs and couches around portable fire pits. Hundreds of thousands of tiny lights adorned both trees and cages, meticulously placed by men wearing gloves and stilts. Dozens of security guards watched over people and animals alike, their fingers pressed to the feeds surgically installed behind cauliflower ears, their eyes filled with suspicion and sociopathy. One of them grabbed Jude by the arm just as she went to water Olive and Nell.
“Hey! Where’s your ID?”
Jude looked down at the man’s hand, resisted the urge to rip it from his body, bite off the fingers one by one. Instead, she fished her peeling badge from her front pocket.
“Here,” she said, and smiled.
The man rocked on his heels, mumbled, “Sorry,” and let go. “I … I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she said.
Inside the lion habitat, Olive, the smaller and leaner of the two lionesses, rubbed against Jude’s knees. Monster girl, Olive purred. Nell stood on her hind legs, put her paws on Jude’s shoulders and licked Jude’s face. Favorite girl, rumbled Nell. What did you bring us today?
Jude tried to ignore the T-shirts and the security guards as she hosed down the lion habitat, as she petted the lions. Olive and Nell lapped up the water in big, greedy gulps.
“Good kitties,” Jude told them.
A T-shirt said, “Hey! Goth chick! I need to get some good shots to put up on our social feed. Maybe you could find your furry friends a toy or something?”
“I’ll try,” Jude said.
Right before the guests of honor were due to arrive, Jude met Diwata in the employee locker room. Diwata gazed at her, astonished.
“I almost didn’t recognize you. Did you comb your hair? And what are you wearing?”
The clothes she had gathered from her old room, her old life: short skirt, fishnets, pleather shit-kickers. “I remembered what you said. That I could do something about all this. I thought maybe I’d meet some people.”
Diwata was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Since when do you listen to me?”
“Since now, I guess.”
“Okay. You look…” Diwata tipped her head, considering.
“What?”
“Young and desperate. You’ll make a lot of … friends. If that’s what you want.”
Jude didn’t answer, sipped at the bottle of water Diwata had handed her. She wondered why Diwata wasn’t drawn to her the way others were, but then, maybe she was, in a different way. Diwata had saved her. Jude had thought she was paying back the kindness by walking Diwata to the bus stop every night, but now that seemed silly. That was not what Diwata had asked her to do.
“Come with me?” Jude said. “I’m a little nervous.”
“I don’t believe you,” Diwata said. “You’re not scared of anything.” But Diwata motored ahead of Jude the way she always did, plowing a path through the throngs of guests, most already drunk and rowdy.
Diwata grumbled, “Any of these jackasses even looks at my animals the wrong way, there will be hell to pay.”
They reached the big tent in the middle of the main mall, where the birthday boy was holding court like some kind of king. He was middling tall, with stiff, graying hair and a ruddy face, a small, selfish little mouth like a lamprey’s. He had a bottle of beer in one hand, and he gestured broadly with it. All around, other ruddy-faced men laughed along with him, or toasted him, or slapped him on the back. “Happy birthday, BK! You’re the man!”
Diwata and Jude found some seats by the bar and waited. Across the room, Sanjay stood with a bunch of other party organizers. He waved at her, his big, wet eyes making him look even younger, like a fawn in a tangled forest. She hoped he wouldn’t be afraid of her, after.
“You never told me whose blood it was,” said Diwata.
“What?”
“When I found you with Olive and Nell. There was blood all over the place. Remember how long it took to clean?”
“Oh. That.” Jude had offered herself to the golden boy she loved and, in turn, he’d offered her to some magical beasts he loved more. She was meant to be the toy, but she’d become something else. Something with claws, something with teeth, blah blah blah. A different kind of beast. She’d taken the first bites, but she’d let Olive and Nell do the rest.
Diwata tapped the bar top. “I just want to know if he deserved it.”
“More than I did.”
There were other people who deserved it, so many others.
It wasn’t long before the birthday boy’s eyes found her, young and desperate and so, so thirsty in her fishnets and her skirt. He made his way over.
“Hello, ladies,” he said. “Are you having a good time?”
Diwata grunted, but Jude said, “I’m having the greatest day of my whole life.”
The man’s tight mouth stretched into a grin. “Can I get you anything? Beer? Water?”
For the first time, Jude relished her thirst, the power of it. She felt the itch between her shoulder blades, where the wings would burst from her back at the first bite.
Jude smoothed the skirt over her thighs. “Water would be lovely, thank you.”
BATS Or The Cutest Misunderstood Flying Rodents
Zoraida Córdova & Natalie C. Parker
It’s hard to imagine talking about vampires without mentioning nature’s most goth little rodent, the bat. But bats haven’t always been part of vampire lore. Yes, Count Dracula shape-shifts into a bat in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But he can also travel in moondust particles and shape-shift into a wolf, dog, and fog. So why doesn’t Dracula change into a bunny or a butterfly? It isn’t just that those creatures are super adorable and lacking in the “has fangs” department. One theory is that Spanish conquistadors brought stories of blood-drinking bats from the Americas when they returned to Europe, introducing a whole world of terror to their home continent. Blood-drinking bats are clearly only one step away from blood-drinking humans or monsters, right??? Unfortunately, in the real world vampire bats won’t give you immortality—just rabies. The same way witches have feline familiars, the connection between supernatural creatures and animals is so strong that they occasionally become them. In Laura’s story, Jude was transformed against her will and it left her angry and isolated, but she finds her footing among the beasts.
If your vampire self could shape-shift into a creature, which would you choose?
MIRRORS, WINDOWS & SELFIES
Mark Oshiro
invisibleb0y
June 5, 2018
Do you know what it’s like to be invisible?
Do you know what it’s like to not see yourself?
I made this because I have no one to talk to. That’s not me being melodramatic, either. I have been reading the words of others for so long, but it’s time for me to speak.
My name is Cisco.
(Deep breath.)
I’m a vampire.
(Cliché, I know.)
And I’m all alone.
Well, there are my parents, but I don’t feel close to them most days. And not in that corny way you probably assume, either; they think of me more as an anomaly than anything else. I am not supposed to exist, and yet here I am! Shoved out into the world, an impossibility, and I don’t even get a choice in the matter.
I made this because maybe it’ll help my life be a bit more bearable. I don’t know. I don’t really have any grand plans for it. I just need to talk about how I haven’t seen myself.
Literally.
I don’t know what I look like.
Pretty sad, right?
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invisibleb0y
June 6, 2018
There are rules. I can’t break them. My life is a gift, I’m told. Vampires don’t breed, according to my parents, who normally are my only source of information on my kind.
So these rules are there to protect me. To keep me alive and safe. To keep me away from the other clans, from the vampires who will do terrible things to me if they know I exist. I’m too unique and too special. Vampires are territorial, sure, but Mami and Papi assumed the worst was coming, because … well, I’m not supposed to be real.
So they hid us away, far out in the middle of nowhere, and I’ve known the rules for my whole life.
The Rules
1) I’m to be supervised at all times. Seriously. No time away from Mami y Papi. I’ve broken this rule for brief periods of time—maybe a few minutes here and there—but they are seriously always around. I don’t even get to hunt by myself. It’s too risky, even though we’re so isolated from others, because someone might find me. They might find out I exist. That’s the worst possible outcome for my parents: that I’m discovered, taken, dissected, studied, that the very knowledge of my existence will bring heartbreak and death to us all. So we live in an abandoned farm outside of … well, let’s just say somewhere like Blythe. Or Sheridan. Or Freeburg. We’re always in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes there are a few scattered homes, but generally? Nothing for miles and miles.
And still I’m not allowed out of their sight.
2) No photos of any kind. No evidence in the world that I exist. Which means …
3) No unsupervised Internet usage. Papi stole an old school computer years and years ago, and we sometimes get lucky enough to siphon off a nearby signal. A quarter mile or so down the dirt road from us right now, there’s another house. No clue who lives there. But they’ve boosted the signal for whatever reason, and their connection is probably real shitty because I’m using it every time it reaches us, particularly on clear days.
But I find moments when my parents aren’t paying attention. When they’re occupied. When I can go to all the sites they’d say no to. They don’t want me to read any of the unsavory things people say about vampires. Too much misinformation and propaganda, apparently.
I know how to erase my browsing history, though. Mami y Papi aren’t that savvy, so they have no idea how to stop me. So I’ve read a lot about “us.” What the world thinks of vampires. You all have weird ideas of what we’re like. But I don’t feel any different knowing all the myths and rumors. Is it really so bad just to know?
4) Then there are the little things. The things they tell me are true and I believe them because I haven’t found anything online to counter it all. So: no silver.
5) No wooden stakes. (As if I’m going to stake myself? Okay.)
6) No mirrors. Apparently, they used to be backed with silver, and even if they aren’t anymore, old habits die hard with vampires. No risks taken, no rules broken.
7) No interaction with any humans who are not a meal, either immediate or planned. Do you realize what that means? I have never had a conversation with one of you. Not a single one. Oh, I’ve spoken to humans, but it’s usually as they’re fading away and I’m thanking them. Otherwise? Nothing.
8) No anything.
Okay, maybe that last one isn’t an actual rule. But it feels true. My life is ordered and safe. I don’t think I’ve done anything dangerous since I was born.
It is exactly as boring as it seems.
ThrowawayOne: first
8 Notes
invisibleb0y
June 8, 2018
I shouldn’t exist. Isn’t that a fucked-up thought? But it’s not a thought. It’s who I am. I wasn’t joking about the whole breeding thing. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a child born to vampires … ever. Papi sat me down when I was real young and told me the whole story. Vampires have been around for a long time—maybe longer than what you would consider “humankind”—but the only way for new vampires to exist is to sire a human, to turn them into one of us. But then, despite the impossibility of it all, Mami became pregnant, and then I popped out nine months later. Just like a human.
But I’m not human.
I’m something else.
It’s cool, I guess. I can run really fast without getting tired, and I can see super far. I can’t turn into a bat; Mami said she doesn’t know where that myth about vampires came from. Even though I rest during daylight, I don’t get sleepy like you—just tired. It’s more like meditation than anything else.
I wish this felt more like a superpower.
Because it’s turning into a curse.
They left the clan the moment they found out Mami was pregnant. We disappeared up north in Appalachia, then headed west. We don’t move as frequently anymore, at least not since we found out how desolate it is in the desert. And so I’m stuck here. No real way to do anything but learn about the world instead of live in it.
I’m a secret.
I’m an impossibility.
I’m so fucking exhausted by it all.
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invisibleb0y
June 10, 2018
You know what I did this morning?
I waited.
There’s a moment as dawn arrives when light can fill a room without hurting me. I’ve only felt daylight once, when I was a kid. I was curious. Can you blame me? You’ve probably tested your parents’ boundaries before.
Okay, maybe not like this. I won’t forget the way the sun pierced through my skin that first time, sank deep into my bones, poisoning me for days. Mami brought me an old man, someone near death who lived alone, and I drank him completely dry to accelerate my healing. Even then, I was nauseous and sweaty for a full week.
Never again.
But I’ve found a sweet spot. I’m so close to making it work. There’s one brief moment as the sun rises in the east and is blocked by the branches of the willow tree outside one of the windows that’s not boarded up. It’s just the essence of light, and if I turn my face toward the window, it’s there. In the computer screen. The color of my face. A brief reflection of it. There’s no real shape there; it’s all blurry and rounded, and I haven’t made out any details yet. I don’t know if that’s because we have no reflection anywhere or because it’s just a terrible surface. But I’m determined to see myself.
