Grinning Cracks

by K W Taylor

  “Fledgling,” she said in a voice full of sand and bones. “How do ya?”

  Marcus chuckled bitterly. “Fledgling,” he said. “Madame, it’s been centuries. I’ve been vampire longer than I was ever human.”

  Helen shrugged and flashed her gummy grin again. “Everybody’s a fledgling to me, child.” She studied Marcus for a moment and then sat down on the bench, patting the spot next to her. “Something’s vexing you,” she said. “Spit it out ‘fore either one of us gets any older.”

  Her tone was encouraging but not sentimental; Marcus had the idea she wanted to help him partly because of genuine concern and partly because anxiety in others was simply irritating to her. He had nothing to hide from his elder, so he spoke plainly and set out the situation: his beloved wanted to join their ranks, and he was feeling ambivalent about it.

  Helen smirked at him when he was done speaking. “You’re jealous of her, plain and simple,” she announced. She began to laugh, a husky, smoky sound with a rumble of cough behind it.

  Marcus leaned forward, his elbows pressing into his knees. “How do you mean, Helen? Jealous of Sally? She’s mine, I know that. I’ve never been so sure of another human being’s devotion.”

  Helen shook her head. “No, lad, it’s just...Well, goddamn it, most of us’ve turned a few folks in our time, ‘specially after the whole system fell apart, y’know? But why not you?”

  Marcus shrugged and looked out across the park. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Bullshit.” She shook a bony finger at him. “You, boy, were one of the last of that game they used to play, weren’t ya?”

  “Huh. Game.” He smoothed an index finger and thumb across his mouth. Beneath his lips, he could feel his fangs start to twitch in his gums, aching to burst through the soft, pink flesh to be at the ready.

  When he looked back at Helen, hers were now glinting in the light from the streetlamps—yellow and feral and ornately tattooed, they wound down from between her lips to curl down in impressive arcs to rest against the hollows of her collarbones. Celtic knots and runes had been carved and painted into them time and again like ivory trophies.

  “It’s all a game, innit, boy?” Her voice was a hiss now, speaking around the massive fangs. “You were a pawn, treated so rough and such, but now this girlie o’ yours won’t have to get it so bad. Be a queen, she will, a little sheltered, protected spawn of her lover. Why should she get it that way? What was it like for you, after all?”

  “I had to suffer,” Marcus mused. He gasped and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, God, but I don’t want Sally to suffer!”

  “No, but why should any fledgling not?” Helen asked.

  Marcus felt her gentle, wizened hand stroking his back, and he began to sob. As the tears rolled down his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth, he tasted heady, coppery warmth and knew his face was now streaked with blood.

  “You’re saying I have to make her suffer,” Marcus said flatly.

  “No,” Helen said. “Ya love her. Such a thing ain’t right. We don’t kill what we love, do we?”

  When Marcus looked back at her again, her fangs had retracted, and all he saw was a beatific old woman, timeworn and somewhat overly fragrant with the scent of the street. “You kill, though,” he said, almost warmly. “Not because you want to, but because—”

  “Sometimes you have to,” she interrupted, still smiling. “A girl’s gotta live, a girl’s gotta eat.” She rose, taking up her various bags and parcels with her. “Ah, but that’s the difference, Marcus. I know we don’t kill what we love, so I make it a point not to love.” She winked at him and shuffled off to the park.

  Three nights later, Sally made her first hunting trip alone. Her sire assured her she was ready, but he wasn’t equipped to accompany her himself.

  She kissed his neck and assured him for the thousandth time that the scars would heal.

  melancholic

  Monday night. Grey, turning starless. Twelve bucks in my wallet. I put my guitar away, looking at the speed dial list on the phone. I don’t call anyone. Fuck all y’all, I think.

  I make a grocery list and get nervous thinking about all the dumbasses staring at me funny. It’s a five-minute walk to the video store. I think about renting something depressing, something with a violin score and a rain-soaked English countryside. Something where someone hangs himself. I think about this hypothetical video rental but then feel like I’ve kind of watched that movie already, both awake and asleep.

  Flyer crumpled up on the kitchen counter. Found it under my windshield wiper after work. There’s a poetry slam at the Tavern Club tonight. As long as I don’t perform, I’m not the center of attention. I grab a couple of CDs and drive out to First Street, but I’m too early; the show doesn’t start until nine. I go wait in the café next door.

  Caroline...somebody. Soft, fuzzy hair and no make-up. She’s friends with Albert and Johnny and their evil friend Mike who I used to like until shit just fell apart. Caroline has a sketch book open in front of her, a few lines scratched out on the page in light pencil. She’s sitting with a sort of cute skinny boy. I pass by the table.

  “Hey, Caroline, right?”

  “Yeah, Johnny’s friend—”

  I tell her my name before she has a chance to screw it up.

  “Right, hi, how’s it going? I remember that time at the cigar bar! I was so mad they closed that place!”

  “The owner didn’t have it together,” I remark. “Never would’ve lasted.”

  She invites me to sit down. I get a green tea from the waiter. “You still work at that hair place?” she asks me.

  “I’ve never worked at a hair place,” I say.

  She apologizes. I don’t even care. She works at a doctor’s office. “But I’m going back to film school in the fall,” she says.

  “That’s great.” Everybody’s fucking going to film school in the fall.

  My tea comes. I ask for lemon. The mug looks like it’s been broken and put back together again by a three-year-old.

  Her friend has been quiet. Suddenly, he sticks his hand out. “Jason,” he says. I tell him my name in return, even though I know he just heard it. His hand is rough and too dry, and his grip is weak. “Do you know what the government puts in lithium?” he asks.

  I glance over at Caroline. She pats my hand. Suddenly Caroline is my best friend. I feel like I would die if she got up and left right now. I turn back to Jason. “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Progesterone. Do you know what that is?”

  “Isn’t that in birth control?” I fish my cigarettes out of my jeans to keep my hands from shaking. I look over at Caroline again, and her eyes are big. She pulls her sketch book closer.

  “It’s chemical castration! It’s not just that they want to keep the patients from breeding, they want to keep ‘em from fucking altogether!” I can see his leg start to shake, the bony knee bobbing up and down against the corner of the table. He looks down. “Excuse the language.”

  Caroline grits her teeth. “Hey, it’s fuckin’ A, man.” She turns to me. “I’ve got to go. I bet you’ve got somewhere you need to be soon, huh?”

  I take the hint. “Totally.” I chug my tea, too hot, but I’ve got to get out of here. Jason keeps talking. “That’s why I went off it, you know, the lithium.”

  I nod at him.

  “Hey, ‘fore you go, wanna see something?” he asks us.

  Caroline closes her book and puts her pencils in a little case in her backpack. “I guess.” Her mouth is set in a little diagonal line, like she’s trying not to smell something gross.

  Jason takes out his wallet, opens a change compartment, and pulls out a coppery slug. I hear Caroline gasp.

  “What’s that?” I ask. I clench my fist around my car keys.

  “What do you think it is?” He looks really proud of himself.

  “Why do you have a bullet, Jason?” Caroline’s voice is now soft. Her hand reaches toward him but doesn’t actually touch hi
m. She just lets it hang there in the air, about a foot away from his cheek. The fingers are trembling.

  “See, the way I figure, I can off myself anytime I want. All I gotta do is find a gun when I need it.” He sits back. “Pretty smart, huh?” He smiles, mouthful of white but crooked teeth. I think it’s a shame, really. He’s a good-looking kid.

  I exhale raggedly. “Nice meeting you,” I mumble as Caroline practically drags me through the door.

  “Before you ask, no, I don’t know him really. We’re not friends. Steve says he’s harmless, but he creeps me out.” Her words tumble out in a rush. She’s standing under a sodium-pink street light, and it’s making the soft, unbrushed strands of her hair glow strange, unnatural colors. “Some days, he’s almost normal. But I didn’t know he carried that around.”

  I realize I still have an unlit cigarette in my hand. I stick it behind my ear. “I can’t decide whether or not it would be good if he used it on himself,” I say. I immediately hate the sound of the words. “That’s awful, isn’t it? I’m sorry.” There’s a panicky feeling tugging at my chest.

  “Nah, I know what you mean,” Caroline says. “The mind can be a sad, scary place.”

  I look back at the door to the café and think about tiny beige pills swirling down a drain. I feel my skin grow warm. I think about seeing if Caroline wants to hit the slam, but then that doesn’t sound so fun anymore. Suddenly, her smaller hand is tucked into mine, and we’re walking.

  the morgen

  For months, she couldn’t ignore it. She wandered from room to room, peering out at the sea, opening windows. Finally, she could stand to be inside the house no longer. She flung open the doors.

  At first, she was simply content to stare out at the waves. So beautiful. The scent was familiar, comforting. The sound was like a heartbeat. Then she walked along the grass, then sand, and then finally began to run as the sand grew wetter and more densely packed the closer to the shore she got.

  Back at the house, an elderly couple studied her with tears in their eyes. “You knew the land might not take.”

  The man sighed at his wife. “‘Tis what we get for adopting a mermaid.”

  MOVING

  They walk. Around and around the outside of the café in the drizzle, in the gloom. One is tall, one is short. First it’s a boy, slender and hunched, hands shoved deep into pockets, and then later it’s a girl, hair frizzy from the mist, her face clear of make-up, open and friendly. But it’s the same larger man who lumbers beside them, around, around, never stopping. They aren’t smoking; they’re neither on their way in nor out, but merely whirling past window after window after window.

  We watch them, we four at this fake-wood table with one leg too short, as we’re blasted by too-cold air conditioning designed to keep patrons’ visits brief.

  But we disobey.

  We’re here for the night, for the long, long haul as we sip our coffees and nibble at cookies. We came here for stories, for the sharing and the talking of prose and poetry and semi-colons and typefaces, for the camaraderie of caffeine and displaying proud parent pictures of our pets. And it’s in the midst of red-pen notations and obscure references to mid-century fiction genres long since fallen out of fashion that we notice them.

  Always two. Always moving.

  Around they go as we stare, confused, intrigued. They aren’t looking in, not at us or anyone else sitting at couches and tables and booths or hovering around the fireplace with palms outstretched toward the flames. They only speak to each other, only notice each other, as they circle the glow of this small haven from the rain.

  “What are they doing?” we wonder aloud. Is it a couple? But then, no, the boy is replaced by the girl, and we wonder again.

  “They’re spies,” we decide. “Teenage FBI,” so the song goes, but this isn’t likely, this isn’t reasonable, and though it’s fun to speculate, we know we’re wrong. “Drug deals?” we ponder. But with so much negotiation, discussion, walking that draws attention? A drug deal would be fast, furtive, and far away from the dazzle of artificial light.

  They talk, both of these pairs, and the taller man is the only other constant other than the whirl of their clockwise journey. The first talk, the two males, one younger and one older, seems sadder than the second talk, the man and the girl. A breakup, a new relationship? Brothers and sisters? Whispered secrets of what? Bad news conveyed twice, conveyed privately?

  Does the man have stories to tell tonight?

  Two by two. Walking in the mist, in the sprinkles, spinning between raindrops made fat by pollution and humidity. Denim swishing moistly against denim, sneakers squeaking on concrete sidewalks in this artificial place, this plastic place all pre-fab and looming, putting blood, sweat, and tears out of business, putting passion out of business because people like these two—and people like us, sometimes—want the familiar, want the comfortable. We want sameness no matter where we are, and we could move from this café to the same brand across town and see nothing different.

  We do not seek out something daring.

  “They’re still moving,” we notice, as we pack up folders and pens, papers and phones but fail to leave.

  They’re still moving, as we sit still and watch.

  Of Shreds and Patches

  Zip.

  The goal was to get everything as blurry as possible, and that meant to go faster and faster and faster and just zip and zoom, you know, just like a speeding streak of light in a photograph. No mere twinkles for this guy. Not content to go “aw, look at those pretty city lights.” He wanted them always to be long trails of white stripes shwooshing past the windows of his death machine. He wanted to melt into the illumination, become it, and not just be an observer.

  And then of course, after skidding through downtown like electricity, he would roar up to the front of his castle’s double doors, the low grey building looking like the spoils of war. Every night, he had to make an entrance. There would be enough time after death to be a wallflower.

  It is a typical night that he does this routine. It could be tonight or thirty years ago, because at his castle there is no time but nighttime. He gets out of his car, not locking the doors and making a show of it. Tick tick, steel heels hitting pavement. To him, the eyes of onlookers are the lenses of non-existent paparazzi.

  The rest of his clothes are black, too, because everything has to be in his closet, in his world. Pants tight across the crotch, tight across the seat, a haven for the tucked-in tail of his too-big shirt. There’s a silver ankh around his neck, and this is the only thing he wears that means anything more than fashion.

  He’s got a chiseled, snarly face, pallid and ghostly with nearly translucent skin, blue eyes more steely than a knife, eyebrows enhanced with a touch of kohl, and mounds and mounds of tousled black curls cut short. A tell-tale streak of brown near his left temple screams that the black is a ruse, bottle-supplied. In better light, blue highlights stand out. No wristwatch, and you know it’s not just a happenstance but a conscious choice, a purported agnosticism of Time itself.

  Now there’s the king’s castle. He knows everyone of importance in it. Concentrated fields of very dark people all very young, much younger than he, but some claiming to be centuries old. Those liars are the ones with the forever-burning false hunger to be a creature out of a cheap novel, fake and pretentious and deluded as the king himself. A permanent haze of smoky bliss hangs in the air—one whiff and you’ve got a buzz. Our black-clad hero does indeed rule here, despite the approach of no one. They’re too scared to invade his aura. With him, you wait and hope to be noticed.

  Laser beams are sweeping the walls everywhere, bathing them for brief seconds in disturbing green light. Some shuffle pathetically on the dance floor; others lie on couches, openmouthed and sleepy, trying to eat the music. He takes a moment when he first comes in to stand, eyes closed, and lets the bass overtake him.

  When he feels sufficiently satiated on sound, he goes to lean against the bar, cigarette clamped b
etween lips that cry out to be bitten.

  It is then that she arrives.

  She arrives. Hell, she’s the kind of woman who arrives even when she comes. Imagine her as you wish. She’s everything to everyone, as much in charge as he is, and she approaches him, which, of course, nobody ever does.

  Not a word, just right up to him. Perhaps he raises a questioning eyebrow, tries to say something, but then he decides not to. He waits for her to speak, which she doesn’t, almost as if trying to see if she can piss him off, ignite a passionate rage in him.

  She simply stands very close and then, quick as a cat, she kisses him. “Kiss” is too mild a word, overused and lacking in sufficient intensity to describe just what she does when she puts her lips on his and attacks his mouth with her tongue.

  She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t talk to him, but just leaves. And he stands, dumbfounded. For only a second, there is no reaction, and then he’s out the door after her. Nothing, nowhere ...it’s as if she’s vanished into the night, without a trace, without a face, without a word. This could be the girl who never was.

  But no. His lips are still hot from her, his nose still detects the scent of her, like ammonia and berries, and his eyes still see her eyes, which stayed open when she devoured him. It was so like being eaten alive, he thinks, because in some strange way, he feels almost drained, like a piece of his soul was stolen when she vanished.

  He asks around, not caring if he looks feeble and desperate. Hey, do you know this beautiful thing, eyes that bore into you, wearing this and that and standing over there? Did you see her come up and plant such a smooch on me that I swear I thought my knees would give? You don’t happen to know who she is, where she lives, how to find her?

  Nobody seems to know, and nobody saw a thing. He’s home, days later, still thinking of her, still wanting her, but it’s a fearful wanting. He can’t sleep, pacing in the grey daylight of his bedroom, smoking too much and not getting enough sustenance. All he wants is her.