Teeth: Vampire Tales

Joshua hurried inside, dropping the hammer on the floor and collapsing onto the couch, utterly spent. A feeling of profound loss hovered somewhere on the edge of his awareness. He had turned his back on something, on some grand possibility. He knew the pain would come later.

Soon his mother returned, and he took some of the medicine she’d bought for him, though he didn’t expect it to do any good. He made a cursory attempt to eat some of the pizza she’d brought, too, but his appetite was gone. She sat beside him on the couch and brushed the hair away from his forehead. They watched some TV, and Joshua slipped in and out of sleep. At one point he stared through the window over the couch. The moon traced a glittering arc through the sky. Constellations rotated above him, and the planets rolled through the heavens. He felt a yearning that nearly pulled him out of his body.

He could see for billions of miles.

At some point his mother roused him from the couch and guided him to his room. He cast a glance into Michael’s room when he passed it, and saw his brother fast asleep.

“You know I love you, Josh,” his mother said at his door.

He nodded. “I know, Mom. I love you, too.”

His body was in agony. He was pretty sure he was going to die, but he was too tired to care.

A scream woke him. The heavy sound of running footsteps, followed by a crash.

Then silence.

Joshua tried to rouse himself. He felt like he’d lost control of his body. His eyelids fluttered open. He saw his brother standing in the doorway, tears streaming down his face.

“Oh no, Josh, oh no, oh no. ”

He lost consciousness.

The next morning he was able to move again. The fever had broken sometime during the night; his sheets were soaked with sweat.

He found his mother on the kitchen table. She had kicked some plates and silverware onto the floor in what had apparently been a brief struggle. Her head was hanging backward off the edge of the table, and she had been sloppily drained. Blood splashed the floor beneath her. Her eyes were open and glassy.

His brother was suspended upside down in the living room, his feet tied with a belt to the ceiling fan, which had come partially free from its anchor. He’d been drained, too. He was still wearing his pajamas. On the floor a few feet away from him, where it had fluttered to rest, was a welcome-home card he had made for their father.

The plywood covering the open stairwell had been wrenched free. The vampire stood on the top stair, looking into deep blue sky of early morning. Joshua stopped at the bottom stair, gazing up at it. Its burned skin was covered in a clear coating of pus and lymphatic fluid, as its body started to heal. White masses filled its eye sockets like spiders’ eggs. Tufts of black hair stubbled its peeled head.

“I waited for you,” the vampire said.

Joshua’s lower lip trembled. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t get his voice to work.

The vampire extended a hand. “Come up here. The sun’s almost up.”

Almost against his will, he ascended the stairs into the open air. The vampire wrapped its fingers around the back of his head and drew him close. Its lips grazed his neck. It touched its tongue to his skin.

“Thank you for your family,” it said.

“No. ”

It sank its teeth into Joshua’s neck and drew from him one more time. A gorgeous heat seeped through his body, and he found himself being lowered gently to the top of the stair.

“It’s okay to be afraid,” the vampire said.

His head rolled to one side; he looked over the area where the second story used to be. There was his old room. There was Michael’s. And that’s where his parents slept. Now it was all just open air.

“This is my house now,” the vampire said, standing over him and surveying the land around them. “At least for a few more days.” It looked down at Joshua with its pale new eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed out.”

The vampire descended the stairs.

A few minutes later, the sun came up, first as a pink stain, then as a gash of light on the edge of the world. Joshua felt the heat rising in him again: a fierce, purging radiance starting from his belly and working rapidly outward. He smelled himself cooking, watched the smoke begin to pour out of him, crawling skyward.

And then the day swung its heavy lid over the sky. The ground baked hard as an anvil in the heat, and the sun hammered the color out of everything.

Baby by KATHE KOJA

It’s hot in here, and the air smells sweet, all sweet and burned, like incense. I love incense, but I can never have any; my allergies, right? Allergic to incense, to cigarette smoke, to weed smoke, to smoke in general, the smoke from the grill at Rob’s Ribs, too, so good-bye to that, and no loss either, I hate this job. The butcher’s aprons are like circus tents, like 3X, and those pointy paper hats we have to wear — SMOKIN’ SPECIALIST, God. They look like big white dunce caps, even Rico looks stupid wearing one and Rico is hot. I’ve never seen anyone as hot as he is.

The only good thing about working here — besides Rico — is hanging out after shift, up on the rooftop while Rob and whoever swabs out the patio, and everyone jokes and flirts, and if Rob isn’t paying too much attention, me and Rico shotgun a couple of cans of Tecate or something. Then I lean as far over the railing as I can, my hands gripping tight, the metal pressing cold through my shirt; sometimes I let my feet leave the patio, just a few inches, just balancing there on the railing, in thin air. Andy always flips when I do it, he’s all like, Oh, Jani, don’t do that, Jani, you could really hurt yourself! You could fall!

Oh, Andy, I always say; Andy’s like a mom or something. Calm down, it’s only gravity, only six floors up, but still, if you fell, you’d be a plate of Rob’s Tuesday-night special, all bones and red sauce; smush, gross, right? But I love doing it. You can feel the wind rush up between the buildings like invisible water, stealing your breath, filling you right up to the top. It’s so weird, and so choice. Like the feeling I always got from you, Baby.

It’s kind of funny that I never called you anything else, just Baby, funny that I even found you, up there in Grammy’s storage space, or crawl space, or whatever it’s called when it’s not really an attic but it’s just big enough to stand up in. Boxes were piled everywhere, but mostly all I’d found were old china cup and saucer sets, and a bunch of games with missing pieces — Stratego, and Monopoly, and Clue; I already had Clue at home, I used to totally love Clue, even though I cheated when I played, sometimes. Well, all the time. I wanted to win. There were boxes and boxes of Grampy’s old books, doctor books, one was called Surgical Procedures and Facial Deformities and believe me, you did not want to look at that. I flipped it open on one picture where this guy’s mouth was all grown sideways, and his eyes — his eye. Anyway. After that I stayed away from the boxes of books.

And then I found you, Baby, stuffed down in a big box of clothes, chiffon scarves and unraveling lace, the cut-down skirts of fancy dresses, and old shirts like army uniforms, with steel buttons and appliques. At the bottom of the box were all kinds of shoes, spike heels, and a couple of satin evening bags with broken clasps. At first I thought you were a kind of purse, too, or a bag, all small and yellow and leathery. But then I turned you over, and I saw that you had a face.

Right away I liked touching you, your slick wrinkled skin, weird old-timey doll with bulgy glass eyes — they looked like glass — and a little red mouth, and fingers that could open and close; the first time you did that, fastened on me like that, it kind of flipped me out, but then I saw I could make you do it if I wanted to. And then I wanted to.