Vampire

Does every piece of writing that begins with once upon a time have to be a story? Does every story with Vampire as the title have to be about a vampire? Does it have to be so bloody cold in this room?

She stands and, with incredible fluidity of movement, picks up a log and flings it on the fire. It lands perfectly as if placed atop the flames by precision robotics. She sits down again and picks up the pen. It’s filled with blood for ink. She licks her lips and examines the nib. Could she suck it dry? Would it be worth the effort? She once read about cucumbers taking more calories to chew than they delivered to the body. With a huff of exasperation that obscured her journal briefly with a cloud of water vapour, she applied herself once more to the page.

It was he who did it all. He made the monster out of me. He pulled me apart and put me back together from the parts he found lying in the corners of his castle. He drank me dry and then pissed me back into life with no thought about the biology of it. Left aside, ran down the drain and collected from the sewers. That’s me. And now I sit in this room freezing my … whatever the equivalent of bollocks is … probably tits. Yeah, freezing my tits off.

She flings down the pen again and jumps from the chair, soaring over the table without catching the edge and flinging it to the side as she would have done just a few days ago. She’s grown adept at twisting her body around things. Do no harm to wood and stone. She reaches the ceiling and flips gracefully through an impossible number of degrees before soaring down to land by the window. She senses but doesn’t see that the moon is staring balefully through the closed curtains. War drapes. Blackout. Star jumps are beyond her dignity but she thinks of them and then dismisses the thought. No heartbeat. Dead body. Nothing to generate heat. She walks back to the desk with all the restraint of a corpse and sits on the chair. Picks up the pen. Writes.

I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care that he’s dead and gone now and that I conspired with the sun to turn him to ashes while I hid in the closet. None of that changes what I’ve become and that I’m gone from the world I once loved. Now even cloudy days fray me at the edges sending tendrils of smoke into the air as my skin burns without heat. Ah, if only there was heat in that furnace but no, it’s just pain with no relief from the shivers that consume me in the night and torture me in the day when I lay locked in the dark with my eyes open and my mind racing but going nowhere. Nowhere. Goddamit I’m hungry.

She narrows her eyes as she sees that the last sentence has gouged through three pages of her notebook and wants to rip the whole volume to shreds but she doesn’t do it even though she could. Not like ripping a phonebook in half straight down the spine but starting at the first centimetre-square in the corner through all hundred pages and the leather cover and chewing like a voracious animal through the rest until nothing is left but a snow-like layer on the ground. She frowns at the thought, draws in a breath and screams it out into the air. The pen in her hand catches her attention and she stops. Stills her body and mind. The barrel of that quirky writing instrument she stole from his castle seems to glow. The blood. The hunger. Unbearable. Inserting the business end into her mouth she tests her strength and it’s enough. Pausing only to spit the tiny ball bearing into the fire she empties the contents into her mouth. That’s enough goddam writing for now.