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I love when it rains, when it’s cold out. Not that I feel anything other than cold, but you get my meaning. Make no mistake though, all that UV’s still coming down through the shroud of clouds above, despite their obscured, uncaring gaze on us all, but it makes the extra clothing—the hoodie beneath my leather jacket, the gloves, the beanie—less conspicuous. As for the shades on indoors, and lack of pluming air from my all but useless lungs, well, that’s something else entirely. See, on grey overcast days I can walk with them, pretend I’m one of them. And sure, it’s risky—but if those clouds decide in unison to dissipate, if that sun peeks out from behind them spilling out and over me in this quaint Virginian cafe—well, that wouldn’t be so bad either.
I clasp my hands around my coffee, wincing from the piercing headache I’ve had since waking, (been getting them more and more lately), and twist in my chair to face the melancholic street with its brick-laden sidewalks. The blurred rain loosed from the sky cascading down the storefront’s glass. A quaint downtown in the state I was born. Good ol’ Virginia. When I’m here, (even after all this time), my accent creeps back in its way...what’s it been, Virginia? Three? Four years? I can’t honestly say, but this is more than a nostalgic walk alongside memories I’d be better off forgetting. See, one of ours has gone rogue, is being sloppy, and I’m here to balance the scale. They’re flashy, likely freshly turned, and it’s these types who ruin things for the rest of us. Attention is, well, it’s a drag for wranglers, like Bodachi, and my ilk alike. And in this most symbiotic of relationships between conductor and passenger, sometimes we’re sent to kill our own when they make trouble. Because trouble for Bodachi, means trouble for Hannah Grace and I. And those who cause trouble for my sister usually die.
The less people know about us—any of it, really—the better. So yeah, Virginia’s all abuzz with the recent murder of a young girl. A girl found in an alley in Richmond, with jagged bite marks in her neck. If she was bitten, she died before she turned, well, that or she’s screaming from within a wooden box six feet below the earth somewhere. Hell of a way to spend eternity, but slow turns do happen, you hear about them now and again.
I bring my fingers to my throbbing temples. Another headache, wonder if I’m coming down with something... Though, that’d be a first. I’m not sure I’m subject to illness anymore, but Hannah, she’s been sick, something I’d never thought possible, staying behind more and more while I hunt for the two of us. She rarely leaves the rig, and is always with Bodachi. There’s something that’s been on the cusp of my mind lately, waiting to spill over. It calls to me. What’s wrong with her? What could—
And here it is again. This glimmer of some half-remembered dream. Something tangible, corporeal, and yet, foreign. Hannah Grace on the bed. The room’s periphery distorted so I can’t make out much, but Bodachi’s there... He looks at me, smiles. Hannah Grace nibbles her bottom lip, opens her mouth, says—
Two paws rattle the storefront glass and I spook, spilling coffee on my sleeve and the cafe bar. My dead heart stutters, forcing the stilled blood through my stagnant veins, attempting to revive itself. Reminding me of what could still be... or just moving the stagnation forward for no other reason than it is there to be moved.
The yellow lab’s owner, a man in wrap-around earmuffs and in a long tan coat, jerks the leash of the still-barking, ravenous Labrador, and waves in apology at me through the glass while the big oaf pulls the leash taut. I don’t reciprocate the gesture, and as they pass, the dog glances over its shoulder at me as it rounds the corner. A snarl on its curled, drooling lips. I actually like dogs, but hell knows they don’t like me.
“Now, what did you say to upset a good boy like that?” asks a dark-haired girl two seats over, an earbud between the tips of her fingers and sitting before a laptop. She smiles, pushes her tortoise glasses up on her face.
I don’t know what to say, and even after these weeks of giving an honest effort, talking with humans is still—strange.
She smiles, opens her mouth to speak as her phone dings by her coffee.
NEW MATCH
I glance from it to her. She notices.
“Oh, don’t judge,” she says, and tucks the phone into the computer bag slung across her chair’s back. “The dream of meeting someone organically is dead.”
She goes back to her typing, and I lift my nose to the window again. The scent is faint, but there. My kind can smell one another once we’re close enough. Think it akin to bears pissing on trees to mark their territory. A rugged, rustic smell lost on humans.
One thing the wranglers have going for them is their vast network of communication. Each rig is a set of eyes and intel. It isn’t just that he’s sloppy, no...this one wronged them somehow, that much I know, though I didn’t ask how. Hell, I needed an excuse to get out in the half-light. It’s been a while.
She turns back to her laptop, scrolling through an article about stars, sips her coffee. My lips curl in a smirk. I’ve told myself I’ll try harder to converse with them, those I’m still so jealous of.
I turn to her, coffee in hand as the static rain sings beyond the glass. “You know Astrology’s a scam, right?” I sip my coffee as her eyes meet mine. “I mean, I get the appeal though. It’s easier to neglect responsibility if you blame everything on the stars.”
She smiles, chuckling with her entirety, shoulders shaking as she twists to me. My sister laughs like that. A full body thrum, as if the joy’s boiling over, and forcing an exit. I’ve never understood it.
“So, when were you born?” she asks, voice higher now, bobbing her head side-to-side like some K-pop video, and despite the stupidity of it all, I think back to those hot summers lying with Hannah Grace in the field behind our quaint Virginian farmhouse, and find I can’t remember. I only recall being born that second time... When the drifter, though invited, desecrated our home, my happiness, and sunk his teeth into my sister and I. Me sitting up in bed when it was done, Hannah Grace’s eyes glowing in the twilight. Our parents slain and twisted on the floor between our beds.
“Summer,” I say, clasping my coffee, bringing it to my lips again, eyes on a passing red sedan.
“You know this isn’t Astrology, right?” And there’s something gone from her words now.
She was being sarcastic...When did you get so dense, Alice?
She doesn’t miss a beat. “This is Astronomy, actual science. For example—” She turns her screen to me. It reads: How 40,000 Tons of Cosmic Dust Falling to Earth Affects Us All. “This is an article on dying stars,” she continues, enraptured by the glowing monitor now. “You’re referring to Horoscopes, the Zodiac and all that—which are fine in their own right, thank you very much.”
I smirk, lift a hand in defense. A pigeon bobs along the sidewalk behind the glass at my boots, pecking the chipped walkway on occasion.
Her typing stops. “Besides, what’s wrong with believing in something? It’s that, or admit there’s nothing, right? That it’s all meaningless.” She shuts her laptop, removes her earbuds. “Let’s say nothing matters. Given that we’re here in spite of that, wouldn’t doing the things we love be a kind of rebellion? A miracle even? I think making meaning is an alchemy we don’t give ourselves enough credit for.”
A club outside Boston flashes in my mind. An alley, a drunk swaying girl. Her smile. Her scent. The weight of her scrawled number still in my breast pocket. A leaden mass there ever since.
Nostalgia escapes me in a sigh.
“I met someone like you once,” I say, sipping my coffee, tasting nothing. “But what I’d ask her, and what I’ll ask you now, is say you live forever. Where’s the meaning then?”
She pauses, and once idle water skids up onto the sidewalk from a passing car.
She turns to me, spark of something in those eyes. Deadly serious, though smiling. “Well, we don’t now, do we...and that’s what gives this—” she spreads her arms over the cafe— “Meaning. Value.”
My stomach drops. My peripheral fears confirmed. Her words cut harder than she knows.
She blows into her coffee’s lid, takes a sip. “How many dead stars do you think you’re made of?” She looks to the ceiling, a finger tapping her cup to the beat of Bob Dylan’s words through the overhead speaker. “I like to imagine me as a thousand burning stars. The cosmic debris in my blood and guts and brain keeping me alive. Fueling—no, comprising my soul. It’s just so...”
I miss the rest. The scent is strong now, almost physical in its pungency. Through the storefront glass, a man in a long slate-colored coat and fedora, rounds the corner of the glum downtown street. I inhale him, clock the shades over his eyes. He’s something out of a Noir film, but there’s no doubt about it. He reeks of death and rancid decay, like me. This is my boy.
The Astronomer’s still going on, oblivious to my ignoring her. She pushes her glasses up on her nose again, scrolling through another article, and when she turns to me, my gaze envelops her. Her pupils dilate, lip trembling, as she slackens in her chair. I lean in, head throbbing in a pulse now, still clocking the passing ronin in my peripheral vision. “The man walking along the street.” She turns to him, mouth slightly ajar, drool forming in the corner of her lips.
“Oh, okay...” Her words slur like a drunk.
Another car passes in a whir as the man waits at a nearby crosswalk. He looks skyward at the rain’s recent uptick.
“Go to him, say you’re a bit of parlay. If he misunderstands, say you’re a gift from a like-minded individual. An olive branch. Then, arm in arm, walk six blocks down Main, turning left at the final light where downtown begins to thin. There’s an abandoned brick house, visible from the intersection, condemned, windows shattered, and with an enormous pine in its front yard. Lead him around back and to the basement hatch, coax him inside.”
She nods, pushing her chair back with such force that it falls to the floor with a thwack. The bell chimes as she leaves behind her every possession. Such a good girl.
I watch her cross the street without looking, an SUV having to slow a bit to allow her by. She intercepts the man at the crosswalk. They converse, and after a while, she takes his arm. The two of them strolling down Main like new lovers.
I massage my screaming temples. The pain angrier than before. Pretty big ask when it comes to hypnosis, but I’ve done longer. I remove the flask from my jacket, turn it back as the gray outside looses a barrage of slanting rain.
“Um,” a voice behind me now. “You can’t drink in here.” A barista stands at the edge of the cafe’s small counter. The few patrons scattered throughout the room turn, look to me as well.
Johnny Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave flows” from the speakers. The raspy voice coaxing me in thought. It dawns on me to tear them apart, rip them limb from limb, but Bodachi says the initial response to confrontation is usually the wrong one. And so, replacing the flask, I rise from my chair, glimpse the now empty crosswalk, and lifting my still steaming coffee, I shoot it down in one gulp. Their eyes widen, and a transfixed man drops his latte to the floor. The bell sings as I push the door open with a smirk. Hannah Grace shaking her head in my mind.
***
I adjust my Ray Bans as I round the corner of the dilapidated house, the frames crawling down the bridge of my nose in the slick rain. The twin metal doors to the house’s bowels lay splayed, open wide as if they’re the unhinged jaw of some serpent, peering up from the earth, mouth ajar in anticipation.
Maybe the basement was a bad call...
Fingers flexing, I roll my neck, the bones cracking therein. I haven’t fought one of ours in a long while, and hell knows that this wolf’s gotten lazy picking off easy sheep for so long—here’s hoping it’s the same story for him.
The decrepit steps groan beneath my boots, the exhaled dust of each a whisper when it caresses the concrete below. A rapid heartbeat thrums in my ears, pulsing in my skull, though the blood from my flask sustains me.
Nice thinking, Bodachi.
It’s dark but for the sliver of grey crawling through the lone window in the corner. The Astronomer is prostrate, groaning there on the floor, her breaths shallow, fingers, arms, and legs, twitching. Blood pools from her head, and her hair sticks to the concrete, flat and matted with crimson.
I suck in the scent of my kind and turn to the rusted water heater under the stairs. My right hand’s fingers extend, and the cracked sheep nails dislodge, give way for elongating claws. “Come out, or I’ll drag you out by your tongue.”
He stirs, slowly rising, peculiar look on his sunken face. He steps out as if entranced, drunk even. Five o’clock shadow peppers his face, dark circles as chasms beneath his tired eyes, heart slamming in his chest.
Human, and yet...something’s there...familiar...
He runs a hand through his greasy hair. “I hardly believe it,” he says, standing in the grey allowed from the window. “They said it would draw you out. That you or yours would find me, something about the smell...”
He digs the metal fangs from atop his sheep’s teeth, points at me. “Your eyes, they glow like coins. Like the forums said.”
“Whom do you serve?” I say, biting my lip to murder a half-formed smirk. The saying is well-traveled, comical in these modern times, but Familiars, Thralls, they’re usually desperate, take their jobs seriously.
He relaxes, shifting his weight to his other leg. He’s rife with our stench. “Whom do I serve?” I clock the crowbar in his other hand. “Well, all of you, really.”
I step towards him, flexing my left hand, watching him watch the claws sprout from my pale fingertips. “Does your master hibernate? Too weak to hunt?” I hate the idea of killing a vegetable in its sleep, but so it goes. “Your killings—you’re being sloppy—gonna get caught. And I like Virginia. I plan on coming back.”
“So you,” he says with a smile, bloodshot eyes gleaming. “You include me?”
The girl groans on the floor near the cinder block wall, dragging her arm in stuttered arcs along the floor.
He moves to her, and I allow it. “The blood’s working...like he said it would.” He steps on the exploring arm, halting its motion. “Her eyes were large, dilated when I spoke to her.” He turns to me, smile wider than it rightly should be. “I think I hypnotized her. I’m beginning to see now that in my world, all things eventually work to my benefit.” He casts a hand over the girl like she’s roasted, apple in her mouth. “The killings are an offering to you, your kind. You’re gods in this world, but so am I, and I’m awake now, moving lucid through my creation.”
“Like who said it would? How do you carry our scent? Whom do you—”
“No,” he says, voice deeper now, grip wrenching the crowbar. “I’ve waited too long for this—have questions.” The girl’s fingers curl beneath his weight. The sun seeping in through the dirtied window in the upper corner.
“Well,” I say, removing my shades, staring into him. Loosing the hooks of my mind. “I’ve questions too. Whom....do...you...serve...?”
He twitches and blood spurts from his nose. He shakes his head, chuckles. “I don’t think that works on me anymore. I’m like you now, or close enough. A god of gods in this world.”
“Says the man in fake fangs....” I try again with all I am, and he backs to the wall from the force of my mind. A knife sheaves through my undying brain with the effort, and I fall to a knee. Something cool runs from my right ear. I wince, growling. “What do you mean the blood?”
Red runs in tributaries from his nose and lips. “I injected it,” he slurs, swaying. “It speaks to me. Says I’m the dreamer...creator.”
I rise, my brain screaming with the exertion, aflame with pain. “Whom do you serve?”
He wipes the blood from his face, trembling again. “Why, I serve all, Upir. I give this world life.”
He’s insane. Strung out on...something...
“What’s it like?” he asks, leaning forward, both hands gripping the crowbar so tightly it shakes. “Living forever without fear. The things you can do.”
“Some days it’s like Sisyphus and his stone.” My fingers twitch, anticipating violence. “Living forever, well, it gets old.”
The dreamer rolls his neck, shifting his gaze to the girl who’s long since stopped moving, his mouth ajar. A string of bloody drool descends in a line to the floor by his shoes. He smiles, and replacing his fake fangs, blood pools from his mouth, down his chin.
“I know your kind,” I say, watching him loom over her. “Killing for sport.”
He whips around, eyes wide. Blood seeping between the spaces of his gritted teeth. “This was for you. An offering to meet one of you.” He points to the motionless astronomer. “She said as much. We’re in my dream, Upir. All things work to my benefit here. This place is me, and I am it, as are you. And in you being me and I manifesting you, well, I know we kill for the same reasons.”
“I kill to survive.”
He chuckles. “Though, you enjoy it.”
A drunken boy abducted from a club just south of Boston. The power I’d felt that night. Bending them all to my will, all but one...her. The look on Bodachi’s face when I drew near, the sheep slung across my shoulder. Hannah Grace showing the first signs of her weakness, staying behind while I had a night on the town.
He’s still talking.
“I’ve come to in a dream of my own making. The blood has shown me...continues to do so...and you, standing there so sure of yourself before a god. Though why wouldn’t you be? You’re gods in this world of mine. But how can you be sure of anything? It’s belief which makes us conscious.” He stumbles towards me, his eyes different now, one more dilated than the other. The right side of his face droops like a stroke victim. “Observing the world through those two indentions above your nose.”
I’ve had enough. “Sorry, but I’m real as day, if you’ll pardon the expression.” I curl my fingers, widen my gait in a subtle crouch. “Tell me, if you die in your dream...what happens then?”
He relaxes his posture. “You wouldn’t, not now that you know what I am. Who I am. See, if you kill me, if I were to wake, this, you, all of it goes away...so I’ve been murdering and killing these women in hopes that your ilk would find me, give me life eternal, so that in me living forever, you might as well in this world I’ve created. This world I’ve dreamt for us all.”
I move how only my kind can. Breaching the gap between us in too few strides. I yank his hair and head aside, expose his pulsing throat, whisper, “Wakey, wakey,” and plunge my teeth into his jugular. Real fangs doing real work. I’m full, but I don’t care. I’m angry, alive and dead all at once.
Me and Hannah Grace as children in our family’s field. Back when we waved sticks as swords in autumn before we were called in for supper, before the grass turned to dust, the soil to ash.
I pull myself from him, and plunge my clawed fingers through his jacket, skin, and flesh. Tearing past the moist innards, and as my hand juts upward, snapping ribs and ligaments with its ascension, I grasp his quick-thrumming heart. Blood juts from him with the movements, gravity feeding on the mess pouring from his torso. He’s terrified, bulging eyes agape, pleading for his end, but the notion that he might be to blame takes root, spurs me on.
All of this—my life, Hannah’s, her sickness, our slain parents—could’ve possibly been avoided if he hadn’t dreamt it, made it into being.
Blood launches from his mouth as I grip his heart tighter, speaking to divinity if it ever existed.
“Why create? Why birth the possibility of pain?”
As his heart collapses I can’t help but moan. Because of what he thinks he is, wants to be. Because coattails weren’t made to be ridden. And it’s the closest thing to killing God I’ve ever known.
I pull my arm free, and he collapses at my feet, sheep that he is.
“Human,” I say, as if the very word’s derogatory, beneath me, and yet, there it is....that familiar tang of jealousy after each kill. The opportunity to die, and how it’s lost on my sister and I. Stolen from us by someone whose face I barely remember.
I fall to my knees, looking down on the dead man, his overcoat streaked crimson and in disarray. Limbs splayed as if he’s fallen from a great height.
And there it goes, as it always does. That most foreign of invaders clawing throughout my entirety. How my throat tightened before my hand went searching for his soul. That unfamiliar feeling come ‘round now and again, if even that often: hope. To latch onto the dream’s orator, kill its master, and fade into oblivion...that was the promise made in this condemned husk of a once home. All humans do is lie, and I can’t help but smile at my continued belief in them all.
I rise, glowering over him a moment before I crush his neck with my boot, lest he get his wish. His head lolls, free-floating, detached from his spine. Something resembling a billfold peeking out at me from his inner jacket’s pocket. I pluck it free, unfolding the leather in the lowlight.
A syringe, spare needles, and two vials: one empty, one full of red. I bring the filled vial close, pop the lid, inhale. The scent is putrid, lined with decay, blood, yes, but void of life. He’d injected it, and if there was once a sound mind within the walls of his skull it had robbed him of it.
I replace the cap and tuck the vial into my jacket pocket, tossing the leather case aside.
Sun’s stare fills the window now, illuminating the once-concealed dust floating on the air. The light rests on the girl’s face. She moans.
Alive? But I push the thought away. I need to leave, show Bodachi and Hannah Grace what I’ve found. As I make for the stairs, I’m taken back to the last night of my life. The one I’d give what little’s left of me to forget. I clutch the railing, and look to her there, so helpless. My mother in her place now, broken and drained. Her pale skin waxy, her thin veins constricted and pushing out from the taut skin of her face. I still question why Ma and Pa didn’t turn. Why we at least couldn’t still be a family if forced to exist like this. She groans again, and I imagine myself the drifter, standing before some girls’ bedroom window, looking over a shoulder at my work, the slain, my yellowed fangs long as railroad spikes.
The old railing cracks in my grasp, and I look to the open hatch-doors above, willing myself to them. I ascend the protesting steps, and pulling on the hood of my sweatshirt, I half emerge from the doors clothed in the shade of some nearby pines, and grasping a door with each hand from the stairs, I pull them shut.
***
I bend to her and her shallow breaths, brush the hair from her throat. There’s a faint imprint of a soul extinguished within me, and though I’m a husk staring through endless grey from the dark of this world’s corners, there’s something there, waiting for a glimpse of who I was, wanting to remember. Every now and then, it comes up for air.
As fangs break skin and warmth fills my mouth, I’m lost in thought. It’s not often I have time to contemplate things. Why we do what we do, or how we go about doing it. The way I see it? If we have to be bad to survive, why can’t we be a little good doing so?
Rather than swallow, I expel the blood back with my saliva (The secret spice, if you will), and slumping against the cinder block wall, I pull her head into my lap, cradling it there, her eyes darting behind closed lids.
Up to you now, Astronomer.
The rays of that burning sun creep through the soiled glass above us, and it dawns on me to steal a caress. Going as far as to extend my hand to its majesty, fingers outstretched. A memory now: me running my hands through the golden grain of my family’s field. The sun’s on my face. It’s warm, so warm. I close my eyes in the half-dream, and as the eternal cold of my existence drives the memory from me, I clench them tighter, grasping at its receding aura, willing its return, attempt to weave a dream of my own.
***
I rap on the motel room’s door. “Hey, you ready?” The sun hides behind the grey melancholia above the truck stop. I’d crawled from my place in the eighteen-wheeler, between the pallets of animal feed and manure, things to keep the curious away. At his most paranoid, Bodachi loads the trailer with raw fish, anything to throw off, well, everyone. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off in the sewers of some high-life metropolis like others we’ve met along the way.
I knuckle the door again, and the curtain drawn across the window shivers. Movement. A car passes behind me in the near-lifeless parking lot, though I’m not worried. The motel and stop are both wrangler owned. I knock again. Pause. Harder now. Nothing.
I grip the doorknob, twist, feel it protest. The motel’s buzzing sign at the turn-off flashes through my mind: Welcome Inn. And as the cheap lock buckles with more persuasion, I push open the door.
Hannah Grace sits on the bed, back against the cheap headboard. Her eyes meet mine, and she winces as if pained at my entry. Bodachi’s in a chair next to her, his hands steadying a syringe and its plunger. He pauses his withdrawal, and the red swarming the translucent plastic from the crook of Hannah’s arm does as well. He goes white, despite his olive complexion, and removes the syringe. His head jerks to Hannah, though her gaze doesn’t leave mine, red wells in her glassy blues. I realize my jaw’s dropped, find Bodachi’s widening eyes.
“What?” I ask, and flex the fingers of my right hand. “What are you doing, Bodachi?”
He stands, stumbling back into the nightstand. A lamp topples from its surface and falls to the floor. Its bulb still glowing in the silence.
He backs to the wall, blindly feeling his way as he goes, his eyes stuck to mine. I’ve never seen him like this before. “Go on, Hannah,” he says, reaching for the snub nose he keeps in the small of his back. “Now.”
Blood runs like tears from Hannah Grace’s eyes, her lip trembles.
“I can’t...” she says, crimson veins in webs now. “Not aga—”
“Hannah!” Bodachi screams, even as I’m stepping towards him, fangs extending over my lip, the nails of my right hand grown long. Hannah speaks, stills me dead when our eyes meet.
“Alice,” she says, and her eyes dilate. The talons of her mind laying siege to my innermost self.
I slacken, falling back against a dresser at the foot of the bed. Malformed versions of words leaving my lips. “We...have to go. He’s close...”
Bodachi relaxes, his hand moving from the still tucked revolver, and righting the fallen chair, he’s at her side again. He massages her upper arm, and upon the syringe’s reinsertion, blood floods the barrel again.
“I’m not coming,” Hannah says, her voice quivering. “I’m...not well.” Her eyes widen, and my knees all but buckle. “You have to forget this, okay? You were never here.” She wipes away bloody tears, red smearing her cheeks. “Go get him, Alice.”
Bodachi mumbles something I don’t quite catch. Prick? Thief?
I sway in a stupor, and turn for the door, catching myself on its frame. “Sure, feel better.” I grip the door with an unsteady hand, glance over my shoulder.
“Bodachi?”
He looks up at me, stiffening in the chair as if caught, guilty. “What, girl?”
Drool slides from the corner of my mouth with the words. “Take care of her.”
With a long sigh, he nods, smiling as his heart rate slows, resuming his default demeanor, calm, Zen. “‘Course, it’s me, Alice.” He leans towards me and his eyes flick to Hannah before he meets my drunken gaze. He smiles, says, “Tear his heart out, girl.”
Hannah Grace points to the sunglasses at my boots, I pluck them up and...I’m seated at the cafe’s bar, watching a man and his yellow lab turn the corner a few blocks up Main. It’s raining, I’m—
I lurch forward in a fury, hyperventilating with the recollection. Sucking in the musty air solely out of habit, reflex. Seems panic warrants akin reactions from the living and the dead. My chest and ribs crack, pop, violently reawakened.
She made me forget...like a sheep...but how? Why...?
I pull the filled vial from my pocket, bring it close to my eyes, twirl it there. I pop the cap with my thumb nail, bring it to my nostrils.
Why give your blood?
I remove my burner from my inner pocket and flip it open as headlights pass over the windowpane above. The old glass glistens, some far off, abstract universe glimpsing our own.
My thumbs hover over the keys. Hannah’s name in bold atop the blank canvas of a text I can’t seem to form.
How long has this been going on?
And I thought I was hiding things.
Liar.
Why not tell me?
My eyes fall to the vial, then to the dreamer’s corpse propped up near me, the jagged punctures in his throat.
“Tell me more,” I whisper to the blood. “Help me remember.”
I shoot the crimson down like it’s cheap whiskey, there to perform a function and not to be enjoyed.
***
The empty vial rolls from my fingers, stops where the wall meets the concrete. A shifting in my lap. A tremor. She’s looking up at me, eyes gleaming like galaxies, skin paler than it’s been or will ever be. She draws in breath, wriggling her nose at the discomfort. At the once automatic function become manual, unnecessary.
I clench my teeth behind my lips, brace for the onslaught. For all the questions I’ve heard so much about. All the hows, whys, and what nows? The mysterious ocean Hannah Grace and I had to navigate ourselves. Our maker just another absent father in a world of absent fathers.
She tilts her head. A swaddled newborn with a spinning mobile. “Your eyes...”
Guilt surges through me. That’s one thing I still feel. It’s always there, deep down where the marrow used to be. Perhaps that’s all I am now: walking guilt, selfish longing, insatiable regret.
She curls in on herself, and her stomach groans. She winces, teeth and eyes clenched.
Her hand levitates, floating toward the dreamer’s corpse not far from us. She sits forward, though I doubt she knows why, and I stay her ascension, easing her back down.
“Can’t drink from the long dead,” I say, and she’s lost in my eyes again. The intimacy a house aflame. “Doesn’t work that way.”
She shivers, takes in her surroundings with a slow, swiveling head. I remember the utter calm now, the complete serenity of waking to pseudo-life from the dream that was your life. Doesn’t last though. Nothing does.
I wring my stomach out like a rag, forcing the dreamer’s—Hannah’s—blood back up, my mouth filled with it. I kiss my index finger and its tip comes back red. I lower it to her. She sniffs, and her eyes widen.
Her tongue darts out, sapping the blood from my finger, and life enters her, those brown eyes brighter than before. She looks to me, the dreamer’s corpse, and finally to the window above us in the what should-be—used-to-be-for-her-not-so-long-ago—darkness.
“Am I...” she begins, not knowing how. “Am I dead?”
A lump forms in my throat, and despite having the answer I’m at a loss. She wipes her drowsy eyes, and I glimpse her bracelet. Emblazoned in the thin metal are two words: “Embrace Uncertainty.”
She curls in on herself again, arms cradling her stomach.
Hannah and I in agony, hunched and gritting our teeth, dragging our parents atop the bloodied hardwood of our no-longer-home. The yelps of the coyotes making the hunger in us furious.
I purge my stomach, angling her mouth beneath mine, and pinch her nostrils shut. The old instinct, though irrelevant now, kicks in, and her mouth opens for air. She struggles at first, grabbing my elbow with her thin fingers, but when the blood comes, dripping slow like molasses to her tongue, she relaxes, coos even, swallowing it down like it’s the best thing she’s ever had, because it is.
I lean back, lick the blood from my lips, and she wipes her mouth and chin with her fingers. Sucks them dry like a baker’s asked her to clean the spoon. She glances to the steps.
“I need to get back,” she says, foot still in her old life. “My astronomy final’s tomorrow. I need to study.”
Thanks to the delirium of the change, she hasn’t even questioned how she got here. If there’s a time to tell someone that life as they know it has ended, it’s now.
I open my mouth to speak and pause with realization: I never asked her name. She who was once a tool, a means to my end, now my responsibility. How the clouds lie heavy in this mess I’ve made.
“What’s your name?”
She creeps onto her elbows. “Imani,” she says, and massaging her forehead, she lies back down, her body unacclimated to the change.
I brush the blood-matted hair from her face. “There’s no going back now, Imani, at least not that I’ve found.”
“What do you...what do you mean?”
I look to the ceiling, the exposed studs there. “You’re like those dead stars now.” Rain taps the window in increasing fervor. “Stay too close to the living and you’ll swallow them up.”
She looks to consider this, big browns bouncing from the dreamer to me, the window, me again. I can’t imagine what Bodachi will do. Maybe I’ll play like she was already turned... but no... she’ll have questions, the answers to which are learned in the first nights of being what we call “alive.”
“There’s,” she begins, startling me from thought, “something inside you.”
That’s nothing you sense. A heavy void, and it’s in you now too. That’s the soul fading from your shell. I should’ve let you die...
She looks up at me again, eyes twinkling in the blue dark, fear overtaking her features.
I don’t need to breathe, but occasionally I will to remember what it feels like. To gorge on the air as my neglected lungs engage in their old way. Recalling a farm in Virginia, my life before...warmth. Trying to recall our donkey’s name, a name Hannah and I can’t seem to remember. The time I fell from him. Pa’s laugh. My mother’s smile. Hannah Grace in that motel room. How she made me forget. Bodachi’s smile of approval—relief at the act, and as rumination takes hold, jagged questions swarming my mind, I return to the breath. To the present moment, lowering my gaze to the newborn.
“Do something for me, Imani.”
Our eyes meet, though she doesn’t speak.
“Inhale and think on your life. Of those closest to you. The ones you love most. Savor the breath, remember, and never forget what it was to be alive.”
Her face is blank. She parts her lips to speak.
“Go on,” I say. “You’ll thank me later.”
She closes her eyes, sucking in the air. The once automatic action requiring conscious effort now, like scratching a non-existent itch. I wonder what she’s thinking, watching her there in my lap, little knowing she’ll often revisit this moment. Replaying it over and over. How this memory—all memories—are just copies of what truly occurs. A clone of a clone transfigured and slowly altered over time.
Her eyes move from behind her lids as if dreaming, and in a way, she is. We all are.
My head throbs and I’m taken from the moment’s peace to the problem at hand, or rather, my lap.
Hannah Grace charmed me... It shouldn’t be possible, and yet, beyond the how’s, lie the why’s?
Questions rear their heads, roaring in the stillness, but above the chaos a soft voice mumbles.
The Astronomer’s eyes reveal themselves, and I brace myself for more questions, how she’ll take the answers.
She swallows. “How many dead stars are you made of...?”
I rest my head against the cinder block wall, Hannah’s scent thick on the musty air. And gazing up at the exposed studs and piping, the bones of this sad, sorry place, the words catch in my throat, claw free: “Just the one.”