DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  I remember pumpkins playing a big part, but who grows pumpkins anymore? It’s not like we need them for a pumpkin pie or anything. How am I suppose to get a pumpkin in…

  I look at the calendar. Two weeks? I can’t grow a pumpkin in two weeks.

  I look at Isuzu. Halloween is still two weeks away, and she’s already starred the date. She’s already wearing a costume. It’s one of those counting-the-days holidays. And that means Big. That means Expectations.

  So, what did they do—Isuzu and her mom—in the two weeks leading up to Halloween? I’d ask, but asking means I don’t know, which suggests a failing of parental instinct and a lack of knowledge of things so basic as to call everything else into question.

  So I don’t ask. I imagine. I fill in the blanks. And what I imagine is this:

  Serial B-and-E’s, in costume, with some petty vandalism thrown in for good measure. “Trick or treat,” I imagine Isuzu’s mom saying at their last stop, before jimmying open a lock or bricking her way into someplace fun.

  Laser tag, maybe.

  We’ve still got those places. We’ve actually got more than we used to. Vampireslove laser tag. It fills the hole left behind when hunting became irrelevant. And I can just imagine them—Isuzu and her mom—firing up the fog machines and black lights, donning the target vests, making sure their laser guns work. I imagine daughter chasing mother, mother chasing daughter, scrambling up ramps, hiding behind plywood walls, their hearts pounding their old-fashioned blood around their expiration-dated bodies. I imagine their stereo giggles echoing everywhere while red wires of light slice through the foggy air.

  “Ah, ya got me!”

  “You got me, too!”

  More giggles. More fun than Isuzu and I have ever…

  They’d steal candles from the hardware store to wax windows with. They’d cut rolls of paper toweling into halves or thirds and fling long streamers into the monster-clawed branches of unleafed trees. They’ve got some wild duck eggs they found during the summer and didn’t use for breakfast, saving them for this. They’re quite ripe now, and smell like shit when they smash their runny asterisks against the oh-so-deserving windows of all those places thathave windows to be smashed into.

  “Take that, you suckers!”

  “Yeah, and this, too.”

  “Good aim, baby girl.”

  And Isuzu would blush and giggle and dig out another rotten egg from their garbage bag full of provisions.

  In the treat department, there’d be a few chocolate bars left, saved for just this occasion. And they’d have some homemade sweets, too. Rock candy made from maple sugar Isuzu’s mom boiled down from the sap she’s tapped. There would be honey, too, the getting of which accounted for the swelling that was still going down, but worth it—when you factored in that smile.

  Apples from an abandoned orchard.

  Wild berry jam, bottled when they were still in season.

  A fruitcake that actuallydid outlive mankind—confirming the suspicions of fruitcake haters everywhere.

  And then, later, back in the hole—after the mischief and sugar are done—they’d exchange a couple of whispered “Boos.” They’d curl up to sleep then, while the rest of the world was just getting up, oblivious to what the day used to be and wondering who put all that shit in the tree.

  Through her eyeholes, Isuzu’s eyes are posing a question:

  “So?”

  It’s the So of Great Expectations.

  The So of, “So, now that you know Halloween is coming, what are you going to do about it?” There may also be a “sucker” in there, somewhere, to clarify who the So is aimed at, not that I need clarification. Tag, I’m it. Let the competition begin. And may the better parent…

  “I see you’re all ready for Halloween,” I say. When in doubt, state the obvious.

  Isuzu nods her head, and even though the sheet is hiding her mouth, I can tell she’s smiling.

  “That’s the one with Santa Claus, right?” I tease, and Isuzu goes,“No…”

  “Sure it is,” I say. “Santa comes down your chimney and steals your TV and…”

  Isuzu is not amused. She puts her foot down. “No. No. No.No,” she insists, shaking her head so violently, her eyeholes slide around to the back.

  “Okay, then it’s the one with the Parsnip Man,” I say, tugging her eyeholes back around, lining them up so I can see her reaction. She is—I’m happy to report—both shocked and appalled.

  “Who?” she asks, her eyes saying “laser,” her eyes adding “aim to kill.”

  “The Parsnip Man,” I say. “He flies around in his magical Coup De Ville, bringing parsnips to all the good girls and boys.” I pause. Isuzu shakes. “Don’t tell me you never put out an old pair of shoes for the Parsnip Man?”

  She stops shaking long enough to say,“No,” so derisively I almost want to check for ID. She sounds like an eighteen-year-old girl turning down a sixteen-year-old boy for the prom. I think about mentioning this comparison to her—not the whole thing, of course. Just the part about sounding older than she is. If I remember anything about being a little kid, it’s this: Little kids want to be big kids, and the sooner, the better.

  “How oldare you?” I ask.

  Isuzu holds up one hand, full open, and then adds two fingers on the other hand. “Seven,” she says.

  “Wow! You seema lot older.”

  And no matter how ham-handed the compliment—no matter how obvious you are about telling somebody something they want to hear—if it’s the right thing, they’ll believe it, even if everybody else within earshot is making the puke gesture with their fingers.

  And so Isuzu smiles.

  She even blushes. Oh, sure, vampires are sensitive to that sort of thing, and can see blushes where others can’t. But it doesn’t take black marble eyes to see that flush of pride. Hell, you could practically read by the glow she’s giving off. You could use it to land aircraft.

  And just like that, I’m forgiven for my Parsnip Man faux pas.

  “So,” I say, “what’s a big kid like you do on this—what is it again?”

  “HALLOWEEN!”Isuzu shouts, going up on her tiptoes so she can reach the top of her lungs.

  I flinch.

  This is the first time since I’ve known her that Isuzu has made so much noise. Her little in-hiding, tee-hee laugh—though less flat than before—remains a tightly leashed thing. She knows better. I know she knows better.

  “Shshshsh,” I shshshsh. “Keep it down, will ya?”

  And the ghost Isuzu’s playing at justdies. It’s kind of like watching a hot air balloon deflate. All of a sudden, the sheet she’s wearing goes heavy, her tiptoes go flat, and the ghost sinks back to earth, almost apologetically. She starts staring at her shoes, and I can see the part in her hair through the eyeholes.

  The hum of electric things fills this quiet space we’ve entered.

  It goes on for a minute. Almost a whole minute’s worth of me being quiet, Isuzu being quiet, me staring at her, her staring at her shoes. And then, suddenly, her eyes grow back behind her eyeholes. They begin to sparkle again with seasonal mischief.

  “Ha-a-a-a-l-l-l-l,” Isuzu whispers, drawing the word out, keeping her voice down.

  “O-o-o-o-o-oh,” she adds, bouncing up and down on her tiptoes again, a happy little ball.

  “We-e-e-e-e-n,”she concludes, using all of her hushed breath. She marks each extra syllable with a bounce—my happy, restrained ball of pure kid joy—ping-ponging between heaven and this other place.

  Alot of our Halloween decorations are really just my old decorations, returned to their rightful places, now that they’re more seasonally correct. All the little funereal knickknacks I hid away, trying not to scare Isuzu on her first evening here—the bone things, the cemetery things, the various homages to Dracula, Nosferatu, Lestat—out they all come. Safe now. Acceptable. Expected and required. I could put them out as Halloween decorations, maybe spray them with some Silly String cobwebs, and then maybe just forge
t to ever put them away. Maybe then my place would start feeling more like my place again.

  Not that I’m complaining, but ever since Isuzu came into my life, everything’s been…different.Different in good ways, sure. But also different in “just different” ways.

  Like?

  Well, I feel like a visitor to my own life. I feel like I’m always onstage. Always on guard. I can’t really beme around her. Instead, I’ve become the me-I-am-when-I’m-around-her. More careful. More worried. Moremortal.

  More inside my head, trying to see things through her eyes, hear things through her ears.

  Usually, at least.

  Sometimes I forget myself. Or, really, sometimes I go back to the me I was before I was under constant surveillance. It’s the little things that usually do it—bring out the old, real me. The one with a Screamer’s patience—and vocabulary. The one so easily frustrated over something as simple as, say…

  …a jack-o’-lantern.

  How are we supposed to have Halloween without a jack-o’-lantern? We can’t, obviously. So, obviously, I have to get one, which means I have tomake one, which means I need a pumpkin, which is when I start swearing.

  “Fuck,”I mutter under my breath—but not far enough under for Isuzu to miss it. Not that this requires much volume. When it comes to hearing things she shouldn’t, my little Trooper has the receiving capacity of a larger-than-average satellite dish.

  “That’s abad word,” she calls out, not bothering to look up from the drawing she’s doing, sprawled on the floor, a peacock fan of colored Magic Markers spread next to her. “You’re gonna go toh-e -double-hockey-sticks,” she adds—echoing, I’m sure, what her late mother probably said whenever her daughter made the mistake of echoing her own swearing.

  “Sorry,” I say, smiling at the thought of a vampire’s being told he’s going to hell. And her spelling my damnation out—it’s almost too cute to bear.

  H-e-double-hockey-sticks.

  And so I start thinking about playing hockey in hell—perhaps when it finally freezes over. Which gets me thinking about what other games might be played in hell. Bowling, for some reason, seems likely. Followed by…

  “Wait a second,” I say, my pumpkin dilemma suddenly dovetailing into my mental riff on sports in hell and then blossoming into a full-blown Eureka.

  I snap my fingers and tap at the air.“Yes,” I say. “That’s it!”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I say, adding a tap per “yes.”

  “What I do?” Isuzu says, snapping to and freezing, like a dog startled by a sudden noise.

  “A basketball,” I say, bending to scramble Isuzu’s hair, before disappearing into my bedroom closet and returning with the object itself.

  “Orange,” I say, before letting it go, letting it pang on the hardwood floor, and then catching it with the fingertips of both hands.

  “Round,” I say, letting it go, letting it pang, catching.

  “Say hello to our pumpkin, Pumpkin.”

  The first eye pokes out just fine.

  The basketball is still rigid with the air inside it. It pierces neatly with a single hard stab from the pointier half of a pair of scissors. It exhales one long sigh, the air coming out stale and rubbery, with a hint of talcum. The rest is just a matter of cutting out from the hole, following the Magic Marker triangle I’ve outlined.

  The second eye—that’s another story.

  The basketball keeps its shape easily enough when the only thing pressing on it is the outside air, but when I try stabbing it again, it caves in. Clearly, I need to re-create the resistance of that first time. And so I work two fingers in through the first eye, squeeze the ball so I can prop the second eye up from behind, and then press in with the scissors again. The idea is that the tip will poke through and pass safely between theV of my fingers.

  Ideas. Plans. Wishful thinking.

  Perhaps the better idea would have been to stick a funnel in the first hole so I could fill the basketball with sand. That would have kept the whole thing rigid and my fingers in clear view. With the basketball full of sand, I could just poke, poke, poke—eye, nose, mouth—shake the sand out, and then cut, cut, cut.

  That would probably have been the better idea.

  And this is probably a good place to mention that vampires, when we bleed, do not bleed well. Where a mortal might have to squeeze a pricked finger to tease out a single shiny bead, vampiresgush. We gush at the slightest provocation. We gush like a teenage girl meeting her favorite celebrity. We do not gushlong; we’re not talking about hemophilia here. But we do gush hard for a second or two, the blood flung out in a syrupy red spurt that can travel pretty far, provided it doesn’t hit something along the way, like, say, the eye of the bleeder or some innocent bystander.

  The first time you see it, it’s always a little weird, a little embarrassing for both parties involved—worse still if the nonbleeding party is the one who catches a round of friendly fire:

  “Ohjeez…”

  “Sorry…”

  “Shit…”

  “Let me get a handkerchief.”

  “Better make it a towel.”

  “Sorry…”

  Andthat’s how it goes if the parties involved are mutually consenting vampires who are not—as a general matter—squeamish about all things bloody.

  Unfortunately, Isuzu is not an adult. Or a vampire. Or immune to the sight of blood, even though she’d seen quite a lot of it in her short life—most of it coming from the woman I’ve just stabbed myself trying to outdo.

  Unfortunately, too, my vampire reflexes, sensing they’re being attacked, react with all their true vampire speed. My heart doesn’t have time to get off a single beat between the scissor point piercing my fingertip and me yanking my fingers out of the eyehole and into the open.

  Right out there in the open—and aimed at where Isuzu lies sprawled, innocently coloring away at a yowling black cat, her legs crooked up behind her and crossed at the ankles. To me—to my vampire eyes—the spurt seems to take forever to trace its arc from my throbbing fingertip to the sheet of paper she’s been working at for the last half hour.

  And then:Splash!

  A great bloody red Rorschach.

  Isuzu looks up, already disgusted as a second spasm sends another bit of me sailing smack dab into her already scrunched forehead. She looks both shot and shocked. Her eyes blink and the red splotch on her forehead begins running, slowly, down between her eyes, along the bridge of her nose, to the jumping-off point at the tip. Her eyes dart down to where another drop has splashed on the floor, and then back up at me, just in time to see the last few drops dribble out before the wound closes up like a tight-lipped smile.

  I tense, prepared for anything—a crying jag, a screaming fit, a flashback to the night her mom was killed. Anything, that is, except for…

  “Gross, Marty,” she says, looking at me like I did it on purpose. She brushes her arm across her forehead like she’s wiping her nose. “Totally gross.”

  It’s not until she looks back at her drawing, the red Rorschach and black cat having bled together to the improvement of neither. It’s not until I look where she’s looking that I notice the clear little drops of nothing pat-patting to the already ruined page. Her back is to me, and she does her crying silently, but it’s crying nevertheless.

  I wait for her to turn. She doesn’t. And I don’t make her.

  “Sorry about your picture, kiddo,” I whisper, and she shifts her little wing bones in a shrug.

  I really should have used sand.

  By the time Halloween arrives, I’ve actually done some of the things I imagined Isuzu’s mom doing. Like tapping maple trees for sap to make sugar to make rock candy. Like finding an abandoned orchard where apples still grow. I’ve even scared up some chocolate on eBay, and found a maker of scented candles who grows and dries her own fruit for the fragrances. I talked her into FedExing me some dried apricots, peaches, and cranberries at an exorbitant cost, and under the pretense that I wa
s a small-scale perfumer experiencing a temporary supply chain glitch.

  “Ya, sure,” she said over the phone, all the way from California, by way of Maine. “Waddever.”

  Renting out the laser tag place for the night wasn’t cheap, of course—but at least I’ve got my grand finale for the evening.

  On the issue of costume, we’ve had to compromise.

  I had my heart set on turning Isuzu into a princess, one of the several I’ve created for her bedtimes over the last several months. A princess whose skin is made of tougher stuff than fabled—pea-proof stuff. A trouper. A princess who can take care of herself, but doesn’t have to, because she isn’t being held captive by a mean, or wicked, or evil step-anything. I’d even gone as far as buying the necessary yard goods—the gauze and glitter, the needle and thread, the pipe cleaners and some sparkly blue Liberace cloth. The rubber sword. The too-big army boots. But Isuzu prefers the classics. Her heart’s vote was cast for that holey old sheet she’d sprung on me two weeks earlier.