Guises

by Charlee Jacob

  I sit with the others in Fig’s, hoping he will choose me again. Craving his youthful slimness, his creamy skin, the fog in his touch. The brutal strength. The flavor of the boy become the bull.

  But he never chooses me. Why should he? He’s had me. I’m used. My flower is consumed and useless, croaking, harsh.

  He chooses others and shares in a kiss whatever they order from the menu. Whether it be The Petals Of Ecstasy, The Stamen Of Power, The Bud Of Genius, The Blossom Of Becoming, The Seeds Of Love, or The Pollen Of Dreams. Names for the same thing. They are the identical bloom which is his and his alone to enjoy.

  | — | — |

  UNDER THE TANGIBLE MYRRH OF THE RESONANT STARS

  It was almost like the night used to be. When it glittered and so did we. Under the incandescent guise of neon and flush with the shadows glowing like effigies of phantoms, we had been so animated in the dark. But the heat gave the disguise up as people panted like dogs in the Dallas street.

  An old woman on a bus stop bench wore red lipstick. In the gasping hot air it had streaked down her receding chin. She appeared first to have hemorrhaged. People blinked as they went by, trying to determine if she’d been coughing up blood or drinking it.

  Someone stared a moment too long. The old lady swiveled, stared back viciously, and then hissed.

  “What are you lookin’ at? I ain’t no sucker!” she yelled. She sprang to her feet and wrenched open her blouse, exposing her sunken chest, pale empty sacs of breasts. “See? The light ain’t burnin’ me up!”

  She huffed and peeled all the clothes from her scrawny body, folded them neatly, and then sat down again, stark naked. The sun showed only sweat, which proved she wasn’t a vampire. The sun didn’t harm her.

  God, it wouldn’t come down to this finally, would it?

  Our little family shivered as we hurried past, hoping the idea wouldn’t catch hold with everyone suddenly stripping to prove their humanity.

  We tried not to cling to one another. Clinging was a sign of desperation and it brought attention. Of course, most people were desperate these days. Since the sun began its assault on the earth through the damaged atmosphere, one supercharged bolt finding a crack in the ozone could torch everything in sight. So far rains of fire had done little damage to Dallas, unlike other places we had been. But everyone waited tensely, one eye on the sky and the other on the lookout for creatures like us.

  If the crowd went ballistic and folks had to strip, we’d never hide our vulnerability. Only pre-sun alert self-tanning creams with plenty of SPF helped us to get through the days. We covered up in clothes but stuck to pastels. Dark colors, especially black, accentuated the bloodlessness and could get us killed in a heartbeat. We wore just enough rouge and lipstick to give us normal color. Ours didn’t melt since we didn’t perspire.

  A teenager went by. Without warning he began slapping his arms and staring up at the murky sky. Everyone else jittered and looked up. It had only been a firefly, alive past its season. It was December now but it was always August with fireflies, mosquitoes and chirping crickets all through Christmas. The kid blushed and walked past, fresh mosquito bites leaking dots of blood. Our small son Matt squeezed his eyes shut, firmly pressing his lips together so he wouldn’t be seen licking them. So no one would see the inside of his mouth. I was proud of him and touched his curly head lovingly.

  “Dad?” Matt asked Martin. “Can we find something to eat?”

  Martin and I exchanged sighs. We knew it was hard for the boy, walking among the crowd and smelling them salty and scarlet-fine.

  An officer in an Aurora uniform stepped out of a restaurant and gave us the lean stare, fingering the ostentatious crucifix that publicly proclaimed him a dayperson. But we wore ours, too, over our clothes so that the emblem didn’t touch our skin. How long would it be before the commission wised up to that ruse and required people to have crosses tattooed on their foreheads?

  Seeing him, I thought of all those I had seen butchered by these bastards. I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t see the hatred in them. He swaggered away, whistling the Aurora theme. I waited till he was out of earshot before I said to my husband, “Martin, maybe they still have exchange stores in Dallas.”

  Martin looked at me sadly and a bit reproachfully. I felt like an idiot for even saying it, especially in front of Matt. As if plasmic groceries were still possible and we could belly up to the bar.

  “Yeah?” Matt lisped hopefully. “Think so, Dad?”

  Martin shook his head, replying, “We should find a park. Or a good alley. We have to be careful, son.”

  We squinted at the sight of an Aurora callbox on the corner.

  “There’s a parking garage,” I suggested, pointing to the end of the street where the garage went under a bank.

  “Most of those are under camera surveillance,” Martin said. “I don’t want to chance it.”

  A pretty woman came out of Neiman’s. (So strange to see a department store still doing business, as if tomorrow couldn’t bring a solar storm that would wipe it all away.) She strode swiftly up the sidewalk. Her skin was a radiant peaches and cream. She kept her eyes down as she looked furtively up and down the walk. She briefly glanced at us, sniffing the air like a cat. She smiled before hurrying by. Then a gust of wind came through the canyon of high-rises. It tossed her skirts up and her white legs flashed.

  “Sucker!” someone screamed.

  Why hadn’t she made up her legs, too? I wondered if she’d been finicky about the color rubbing off on her clothes.

  “Sucker!”

  “Sucker!”

  “Sucker!”

  She dropped her shopping bag to run. Martin snatched us back protectively against the granite of a law building as she turned in the direction she’d come from, back to the other end of the street. Her eyes were wild and her lips stretched in an involuntary grimace as she cried out, a scream that was more of temple bells than banshees. I saw how pale her gums had become, almost indistinguishable from her teeth.

  People shouted as they pursued her down the block. Someone hit the callbox and the alarm was deafening. There was nothing we could do but watch as she tried pitifully to shift, her outline fluttering unevenly as she attempted to fly. Her shifting was at best only partial and grotesque. She could barely even run without recent blood for nourishment. Bound to the land, she was no faster than the mob behind her.

  The van screeched smoking tires around the corner, the sunrise logo of the Aurora Commission emblazoned on the door. The man we’d seen coming out of the restaurant was driving it. I heard his rebel yell through the windshield and could barely suppress the growl in my throat.

  They cornered her in underground parking. Her chimes echoed on the same wind that had blown up her skirts to give her away. As they hammered their pitiless thorns into her heart, her screams were a solemn nocturne.

  “Momma?” Matt buried his face in my lap.

  Martin held us while the commission’s wagon blared out its anthem on pumped-up speakers.

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

  You make me happy when skies are gray.

  You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.

  Please don’t take my sunshine away.

  The war cry had been a joke at first. Sunshine. Nightpeople. As if the slaughterers whistled while they worked. Hi ho, hi ho.

  I trembled, trying hard not to as the van toodled by a bit later. Everyone on the street was singing along joyfully. “You are my sunshine…”

  Martin forced himself to sing, too, through tight lips.

  “It’s okay, lady.” Some redneck nudged me. “They got the sucker. Devil lost hisself another ‘un.”

  I stared down at the spilled contents of her bag. Several pairs of beige pantyhose, expensive and rare since nylon was no longer being manufactured. Too bad she hadn’t slipped into a Neiman’s dressing room to pull a pair on. Had she feared the rooms were monitored, studying customers for glimpses of outlawed bloodless flesh?


  The bag also contained numerous pots of medium complexion makeup base, rouges, lipsticks. Featherweight gloves. All to conceal her natural pale. And a personal caprice: a violet bottle of Passion perfume. This had broken and the furnace wind smelled so sweet.

  ««—»»

  “We have such secrets to share,” the first vampires to be interviewed whispered seductively. Ten years ago. The networks clubbed each other for the rights to their stories. Books were written. A wunderkind director made a very classy movie. There were a couple of vampire sitcoms. The public was delighted to find that the people of the night were splendid. And immortal. They had been around for thousands of years. They were history itself.

  And they didn’t have to kill to exist, just meet an evening’s requirement of a pint or so. It was all very sexy, oral, stimulating. New. They were so handsome and compelling.

  Martin and I were still in college when the undead were discovered, understood, popularized. Hits. Soon there were more bite-groupies around than even the vampires themselves could have foreseen. Many people wanted to experience the orgasmic thrill of being bitten, not to mention the fashionable hickeys. Others wanted to cross over entirely into the latest in-crowd. The ranks swelled until there were vampires in nearly every walk of life, no pun intended.

  Vampire actors rehearsed only after sunset; vampire teachers held classes between nine PM and four AM; vampire philanthropists set up nutrition programs for the homeless, exchanging food for small quantities of blood. Vampire businessmen worked alongside mortal ones to expand business hours to accommodate the rising numbers of affluent nightlife. Vampire politicians nibbled obligingly on proffered babies instead of kissing them.

  It was nouveau and profitable. It was a revelation to a worn-out populace that had been drowsing in dissipation and cynicism. The nights glittered like never before. Superstition was dead. Long live the night.

  Vampire scientists finally cured cancer in all its forms because by understanding blood they knew how to purify it. Vampire leaders steered potential conflicts away from eventual wars because they respected blood too much to approve of slaughter. Vampire poets comprehended total union and the emotions that made the blood pound so they made us weep and sing. It was a precious time. No more hunger or racism or murder. Only an incredible sense of sharing as more discovered the style beyond the fashion, experiencing the invigoration in shadows and the sacramental healing of starlight.

  I crossed because I wanted to write and felt I needed the knowledge to take me past the mere artifice of words. Martin was an architect who wanted to design sun-proof homes. We married at one minute past midnight as a slowly creeping fog curled at the edges of the garden where our wedding party stood. Pledging all of time, the ‘till death do us part” deleted from the vows. We had Matt and settled into always being there, wondering how the human race could have remained ignorant for so many centuries, fleeing from rapture.

  “We have such secrets to share.”

  The secrets weren’t horror and damnation after all.

  But they were an exchange of losses. First of daylight and sunny pleasures, the flavor of Mrs. Field’s cookies, spaghetti sauce and milk shakes. Not so bad considering what these were replaced with. Glory, marvels, physical incorruption in a luster of spotlights. Then that, also, was lost. When it began to rain fire.

  Ten years compared with the rest of forever was nothing more than a single crimson moment.

  It came down in glossy pellets no bigger than flaming matches and no smaller than tears. Bolts of solar corona zigzagged like lightning but were far more incendiary. It went off like nitro when it struck and burned like phosphorous. It cremated everything utterly. For miles. Everything and everyone—but us. Firefighters stood helplessly with hoses gushing at impenetrable edges, watching us emerge from conflagrations unscathed, only our clothes burned off. We bore the ashes of the dead on our bodies, cupped handfuls of it from those mortals we had attempted to rescue. We came out naked, unhurt, carrying cinders. We opened our mouths to cry, and black smoke puffed out.

  This was providing it was night. We slept through the daystorms unknowing, unharmed as our beds burned away beneath us and our houses fell down, disintegrated. Those who poked through the ruins after the fires had burned out found us lying whole on blackened earth, opening our eyes with innocent yawns, looking at the burned dusk in amazement, and at the ashes that had shielded us from the sun.

  Yes, we could be burned. But only after our souls had been pinned to the earth with a stake of hawthorn or pure iron. And even then we had to be beheaded before we could be set ablaze.

  Naturally, people became terrified of the threat of fiery rains. And they resented it deeply that we were immune. A rumor started among suddenly pious fools that the old legends were true. Vampires really were the devil’s minions. Sure to follow was the associated gossip that the fire was God’s punishment for making us popular, creating a golden calf out of heretical Night. God was smiting the many who had left the sphere of ordinary woundable flesh to become glittery Liliths and brash young Draculas. For partaking of Eden’s truly forbidden fruit: life’s blood. Those who hadn’t crossed had done nothing to stop us. They had been entertained, amused, and had willingly given us that fruit and incense besides. These were the last days. It was Judgement. Thus far, we minions hadn’t suffered so it lacked a certain logic.

  The scientific community was more pragmatic. The sun was heating up, a gradual process as it swelled over thousands or millions of years before it died into a cool dwarf. It would only be making temperatures noticeably warmer at that stage. It wouldn’t engulf Mercury and Venus for a very long time nor burn away our oceans. But that would occur eventually, so perhaps in that respect it was the beginning of the last days. The scientists were puzzled since this wasn’t supposed to start for another five million years. How could their careful calculations have been wrong? Well, they had also sworn that such things as vampires did not exist. Perhaps the universe really was more magic than measure.

  If only they hadn’t damaged the ozone layer, rupturing it like a series of bad hernias. Solar wind poured through until even the longest night at winter solstice was uncomfortably sultry. There were volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves. And as always vampires came out of the molten lava rivers, out of the rubble and steaming fissures, swimming up from newly submerged Atlantises to be alive when all others perished.

  You would think they might seek us out, bending forward with breasts exposed, begging to be bitten and brought into the immortal fold. You would think they might find what we offered to be that much more precious. It didn’t happen that way; it never does.

  The first thing that did happen was that furious fundamentalists broke into the blood exchanges and ruined all the equipment, dumping the plasma down sinks and into gutters. With our food supplies closed, vampires got hungry. Unable to solicit donors, they grew starved enough to attack people. Now we hadn’t only brought down God’s wrath but we had become a clear and present danger. The Aurora Commission was born.

  ««—»»

  We had been living our lives, clinging to what we had. It could never happen in our city. That vestige of human hope is a frailty. We knew others had fled, had been driven out to wander the country, or had been destroyed. In those nights we lived in Massachusetts: sane New Englanders, ivy walls and the cold Atlantic Ocean and dependable Yankees.

  Until the soldiers came onto our street. They had been storming every residence in town all during the day, searching for sleeping vampires. If they had come to us before sunset, we would have died. But there had been so many that the dispatching in every neighborhood stole the hours away. It was sunset by the time they made it to our block. We awoke to chimes in the wind, the dying screams of friends—pierced and beheaded—rendered into poignant final notes. I got up in a rush and took Matt from his bed.

  “Momma, I had a bad dream,” he said, rubbing his sleepy eyes.

  “What’s that? Music?” Mar
tin asked as he tilted his head and listened.

  The Aurora trucks and vans rolled up nearby avenues, tinny speakers blaring You are my sunshine, my only sunshine… The symbol of human righteousness in a rising solar disk was ironic since this is coincidentally what would destroy the planet. Well, we could have told them that.

  Please don’t take my sunshine away.

  “Momma, is that the ice cream man?” Matt clung to me as Martin hustled us into the attic, it being too late to run from the front or back doors. They were in the yard, trampling all my carefully chosen night-blooming flowers underfoot. Those that hadn’t already been scorched by the awful heat.

  “It’s a pogrom, son,” Martin told him.

  “What’s that?” Matt asked.

  “It means we’re no longer the beautiful people,” Martin replied grimly.

  I shook my head. “It’s just too easy to blame us, isn’t it?”

  “They have to blame someone. You remember what it was like to be mortal, don’t you? To be that vulnerable?” Martin reminded me.

  “I’m feeling pretty vulnerable right now,” I said, trembling as we heard the first floor doors splinter from the force of axes wielded by soldiers who would also use them to decapitate us. We heard all of our lovely things being smashed as they went from room to room and then moved upstairs looking for us.

  Martin had to use a crowbar to pry open the attic window that had been nailed shut for years. Normally he could have opened it with a gentle shove of his fingers but we’d been forced to ration our blood from what little we still had in the refrigerator. We’d grown enervated. He helped me to climb onto the roof. I pulled Matt after me. The soldiers were trying to yank the ladder down to get access to the attic. They pounded on the other side of the hatch. Matt began to cry.

  “What do they want, Daddy?”