blood.
“Feeling bettair?” she asked.
He looked up at her, unrolling himself from the ball he was in. She was a crimson shadow, a perfectly formed female shadow, in the neon light. His eyes rolled up the arch of her back and settled on her slender neck.
“Nothing zere for you, mon cher,” she said. She took a final drag off her cigarette and snuffed it out in the ashtray on the bedside table. Was that the same cigarette she’d lit when he’d been locked in place? If so, things went much faster than he thought they had.
“Our ‘earts, they no longer beat,” she turned to him, placing one cold hand on his bare chest. “There ees no blood running through our veins. You are ‘ungry now, oui. But I cannot ‘elp you.”
“My body,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to him. Deeper somehow, but smoother, too. “My body… throbs.”
“Zat is ze hungair,” she said. “Zat is why you hear ze heartbeats in ze rue. Zat is why you smell ze blood. Come. Get dressed. I will teach you to hunt.
“We weel be together forever now,” she said, leaning closer to him. The tip of her tongue flicked his lips. He didn’t respond. He wanted to get away from everyone; to have time to himself again. He’d had too much of too many people hounding him lately. He didn’t want to be with anybody for a long while.
His right fist clenched tightly around something and he glanced down to see the sharp, splintered remnant of the headboard in his hand. He turned his gaze back to her.
“No,” he said simply, and brought the splinter of wood in a high arc and down, plunging it into, and through, her back. He nearly succeeded in skewering the both of them. Unaware of his new strength, the tip of the stake pierced his skin but had lost enough momentum to be stopped by his breastbone. She was not so lucky.
With a piercing howl—similar to the one he’d let loose when he’d regained control of his body—she arched backward and flung herself to the floor. He leaned over to watch her writhing there. She landed on her back, shoving the stake even further through her chest. It protruded at an angle from her left breast. The heart, he knew, had to have been punctured. Even so, there was no blood. Just the raw, dry end of the stake that her hands were flailing at and, despite her strength, finding unable to pull free.
“Apparently, you’re wrong,” he told her. “We can feel pain. Looks like you’re in quite a bit of it right now.”
She didn’t answer, but her eyes turned toward him and her mouth worked like an asphyxiating fish’s. A small clicking sound emanated from the back of her throat.
“How do the dead die?” he asked, more to himself than her. In all the vampire movies he’d ever seen they shriveled to dust when the stake was driven through them. There was also a lot of blood in those movies. Great, gushing gouts of it. So far, it didn’t look like reality had any part in the fiction of movies. Then again, art seldom mirrored reality. That much he’d learned in his twenty-seven years.
She finally stopped moving, her hands falling limply away from the stake to thump heavily to the floor. Her eyes still stared at him, but they were far away and vacant now. Even in the neon light, he could see that. As a matter of fact, as he looked around the room, he noticed he could see quite a few things better now than he could before he’d died. Small cracks in the walls and ceilings stood out in sharp relief, like chasms created by earthquakes. A thin layer of dust clung to every object in the room and across from the foot of the bed on the opposite wall, the cockroach he had heard skittering (and could still hear now, he found, when he concentrated) under the bed was making its way up the stuccoed wall.
Yes, it seemed dead was certainly a better way to live.
“Dead,” he chuckled, vaulting off the foot of the bed and picking up his clothes from the floor. “I suppose I had better tell my wife the bad news.”
QUEEN OF THE NIGHT
JD Stone
At the end of August the wind pushes across the rivers in motions that don’t make sense, bringing with it noxious smells and sights: the sulfur of low tide, the silver smear of muscles as they slide down boulders, the occasional drowned local. Chatter is heard from mouth-less people flooding into cramped tunnels like blood into Manhattan, though if one didn’t live on the cusp they couldn’t hear the dark eloquent sound of the waves as the tide nibbled the shoreline and the party boats filled with slandering drunks soon to dock and ruin any seldom saved sane part of the night.
And then there was Chinatown.
At night, it’s a carnival of alien symbols sparkling gold and red that one could admire until their head exploded, raining bone and brain around, but which the people simply upturned their noses at. Here are the narrow streets where you could step on the cracks in the cement, or the crevices in the cobblestone and never be seen again. Here are the alleyways in which cats rule, sideswiped by nameless factories colored up by hoards of graffiti artists, where the odor of severed fingers still lingered from the machinery with no safety regulations. Here is where the blood of execution style killings stained the walls and dried to a dusty orange.
Pell Street.
Beyond the crevices and the hole in wall restaurants, serving dishes that you thought were chicken but may wind up being that rat you just saw scamper over your shoe, is where the women of the night work. Hidden beneath dank silhouetted clubs, deep inside tenements so cops can’t bust them, is the pay as you go sex trade. The walls here are lined with lengthy mirrors so that there is always a girl reflecting in each corner as she dances; private velvet-curtained booths line the back walls so the men of the neighborhood can jerk-off to relieve themselves before getting rowdy.
This is where Coco worked.
Tonight, Coco watched evil little Asian men pour in from the squalid streets, waving around crumpled singles, pipes in their mouths filled with whatever was the cheapest to smoke, calling girls over to them. She tried to decipher the onslaught of their bickering language through the fine folds of their eyes, between the cracks in their tobacco stained teeth, but failed.
There was mold in this place, too, the rotten kind that formed dark sticky lines between the opaque tiles. Coco thought maybe it was from the cigarette smoke because no one listened to the law in this dark angular Chinatown club. Black lace entwined into the frame of the stage lights on the ceiling, almost to the point of a fire hazard, but once the night got going and the lights filtered through, it gave the place a drunken purple sheen and made the DJ spin very wild music as the girls entered to dance for sloppy mouthed men.
Coco danced here almost every night, fine-boned face and feral female gyrations so swift that no one would ever suspect any deviance in her gender. Dark straight hair, that was faintly, brittle came down as far as her breasts; she had high cheekbones, making her honey colored eyes seem permanently scrunched, and thick rouge lips.
The club came to her after moving out of the feigned perfection of nowhere suburbia, when she tired herself out of sucking the ordinary dicks of the town. She swore then to never be Christopher again. Coco was the exotica that she had hid for too many years.
Dancing was the only way Coco could dream of a velvet pink delta between her thighs, sweet petals that could blossom and make every man admire her as she spread herself around the pole. Being here helped Coco compensate for the evil white snake between her legs, and the sac that held two useless scraps of meat. It was a feeling not even the pills that kept her tits perky could offer.
To Coco, New York City was wide and narrow at the same time—as if all its angles never quite added up to that famed one hundred and eighty degrees—and had the potential to send one into a bleak madness if they tried to calculate it. She licked her finger and put it to her nose, making sure the stink of jizz had faded thanks to the gin. Nothing ever said a quick buck like liquor. She just got done blowing a small, cheese smelling cock attached to a chubby Chinese man that had tailed her all week, slipping obscure amounts of money into her black jeweled g-string when she danced the first half of her nightshift. There were times when he offered her lines of coke spread liberally on the shellacked table; other times he let her eat some of his funny mushrooms as she bent down for more tips. Tonight he got his money’s worth.
