by Gwen Benaway
Daphne shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m still sorting through all of this in my head. Is there any way I can be knighted without being called a Sir?”
“I don’t think so? I mean, maybe, I don’t know—nobody’s ever asked that before.”
“Well, nobody had ever thought to knight a woman at all before, so maybe we can change it?”
Thais shifted a bit. “That wouldn’t change my title, would it? They wouldn’t just make up a new title for women? They almost gave me the title of Lady while they were deciding how to go about my dubbing, but I wasn’t really keen on having a different title than the other knights. Besides, if they give you a different title, people are less likely to think of knights as women. People already assume I’m a man if I’m wearing full armour, unless it’s that terrible molded breastplate that Lysander made me.”
Daphne tried not to make a face as the prospect of being dubbed became less and less appealing, but before she could respond, Thais cut her off.
“I mean, you’d be fine! People would definitely know that you’re a woman, you wouldn’t even have to wear armour. Except during ceremonies sometimes, but you wouldn’t need to wear a helmet and you could even wear that armour with the breasts. Just, you know, don’t wear it into an actual battle, it’s way too heavy and I don’t expect it would actually protect you much.”
“Thais, I really don’t think that this is a good idea. I’m sorry.”
“Come on, please? There’s only me, Sir Helen, and Sir Lysistrata right now. This is a big deal, and you’d help, you know. You’d be breaking assumptions about who can or can’t be a knight.”
“You’re already doing that.”
“Sure, but you’d help. The more of us there are the better.”
“It’s a lot easier for you, Thais. People just know that you’re a woman. I have to prove it every day! You had nothing to lose from this. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.”
“You’re losing right now! Not just a feast, but Euridice will probably even give you land, or some other sort of gift. You’ll just throw that all away for nothing?”
“It’s not nothing.” Daphne’s stomach knotted as she realized that she wouldn’t be able to make Thais understand. But Daphne did understand—having to voice her objections to the idea had helped her understand how she felt. Helped her understand that no matter how much she admired Thais, she couldn’t be her. Daphne cleared her throat and stood. “Thank you for listening, and for caring. But I think I know what I need to do.”
With that, she made her way back to Aceso’s office, where the fleshsculptor was cleaning her surgical supplies. “Ah, Daphne. How can I help you, dear?”
“Do you think that I could borrow some parchment? I’ve decided to write a letter to the Queen.”
Aceso smiled, setting down the knive in her hand and walking over to her desk, where she pulled out the chair and gestured toward it. “It’s all yours. Would you like me to vouch that you’re needed here tonight?”
Daphne thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “No. I think I know what I need to say.”
Undoing Vampirism
Lilah Sturges
Thank you all so much for coming. It’s not always easy to find a venue for a talk entitled “Undoing Vampirism.” Usually the only people who show up are stoned college kids, undiscriminating social justice warriors, and a few angry goths who sit in the back and glare.
I know what it sounds like, “Undoing Vampirism.” I suppose I could change the name, but I feel that it’s important to be honest, especially given the subject matter. I admit that it’s a doozy, and it’s likely going to be very hard for you to accept, so I implore you to keep an open mind as I explain.
We are vampires. Everyone in this room. And before you start thinking it, I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean that we are, each of us, literal blood-sucking, undead creatures of the night.
I’ll take a moment to let that sink in.
Perhaps you think I’m joking. This is not a joke. Perhaps you think this is some kind of performance piece. It isn’t. I’m looking out at this room and I can very clearly see your blood-soaked fangs. I can see that some of you in the back have turned into bats and are hovering to get a better view. I can see this woman right here, blithely imagining that she is drinking a … what are you drinking, ma’am? Okay, well, what you’re actually drinking is the warm, pulsing lifeblood from a still breathing human child.
Allow me to respond to what I’m sure is your first objection. You are thinking, “I am not a vampire.” You are thinking, “I do not have blood-soaked fangs.” You are thinking, “I am not a bat.” You are thinking, “I am drinking a margarita, not the blood of a child.”
To respond to your objection, I’m afraid I’ve got to give a brief history lesson. Back in the olden days, humans rightly hated and feared us. In response, we learned to hypnotize them, to make them believe that we were not their predators: instead we were their friends, lovers, protectors. Whatever would get them reclining with their necks exposed rather than coming at us with torches and pitchforks.
It was a brilliant idea and a successful one. And over time, we realized that an even more beneficial strategy would be to mesmerize the entire human race into believing that there were no vampires at all, that we were a myth. Such that even as the fangs enter the carotid, they would swear that we are anything other than what we are.
It was an overwhelming success. Humanity’s permanent bamboozlement, coupled with the invention of high SPF sunscreen, meant that the world became a twenty-four hour buffet for our kind. We were safe, unburnt, and very, very well fed.
But as the bodies began piling up in ever-greater numbers a problem arose. And I don’t mean the smell, which was bad. The sight of all that gratuitous death, the blood and gore running into the gutters, and oh so many flies, began having a deeply insalubrious effect on us. Where once our status as badass, sensitive creatures of the night allowed us to ignore the truth about our nature, it was now abundantly clear: we are parasites. We contribute nothing, we give back nothing. We are the authors of a suffering that is greater than anyone can bear, and we do not have the moral courage to give our victims a voice or even an awareness of how deeply they suffer.
We could have done something then to fix the problem. But we’re vampires. That’s not what we do. We went the other direction. We hypnotized ourselves. We made ourselves believe that we were also human. We became indifferent to the stacks of corpses, insensate to the reek of decomposing flesh, and most importantly, blissfully unaware of our authorship of it all.
And that brings us to the present. We go merrily on with our lives, gorging on blood and calling it McDonalds, or phô, or a craft cocktails. It’s all the same. It’s all blood. But we no longer feel the breath of our victims on our cheeks. We step over their bodies without a second thought. We no longer feel the awesomeness of death; we have turned the extinguishing of a human soul into a forgettable Subway footlong.
This is hell, folks, and we are the demons.
Now, understandably, you’re not feeling great about this and you want to protest that it’s entirely false. You might be asking, “How do you know all this?” You might pointedly be wondering, “How are you so woke when the rest of us are just stumbling through the world like our presumed undead cousins, the zombies?”
I know all of this, oddly, because I’m transgender. I am a transgender vampire. Or, as we refer to ourselves, a “transpire.”
I knew that I was different from a very early age but I couldn’t say just how. I knew I was more sensitive, more aware of certain things, but I thought there was just something very dark and beautiful about me, something that wanted to cling to the shadows and hide from the sun.
When I was young I didn’t have the language to describe how I felt. I only knew that I wanted to be around girls and do the things they did. I mean, I also wante
d to bite them and drain their blood, but I realized even then that the desires to be a girl and to eat them were unconnected—I wanted to eat everyone, regardless of gender.
It wasn’t until many years later that I saw Lana Wachowski’s beautiful HRC Visibility Award acceptance speech, in which she looks every inch like the Vampire Queen she literally is, that I became aware of the fact that I, too, was transgender. It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks, and I knew that I was a woman. Still human, I believed at the time, but a woman. It wasn’t until I came out as trans last year, though, that I began to realize the other truth about myself.
Once the world started seeing me as trans, I began to be treated differently. I was seen as different, as other, as less than. And that was when I began to notice something very odd. When people misgendered me, called me “sir” even though I had tits and was wearing a dress, I started noticing a certain pointedness of tooth in their fake smiles.
Likewise, when someone in a bar stared openly at me, I began to notice that their pint glass was full of something other than beer, something darker and more pungent.
But it wasn’t until a man followed me into a ladies room and dragged me out by my arm, and I noticed the crusted blood cascading down the front of his shirt, that the illusion dropped for good. I saw it all. I saw it clearly, and everywhere, and forever.
The world you are not seeing is vile. It is grotesque. Trust me when I say that you do not want to see it. But you must. If you want to be aware of the truth, you must. If you want to have anything like a conscience remaining to you, you must. If you want this world to survive, you must.
Because we cannot go on very long living in a charnel house. We cannot thrive if our home is an abattoir. We’re going to have to do something. We are going to have to get our hands dirty. We are going to have to get to work and start doing something about all the bodies.
But most of all, we have to admit that we are vampires. We have to admit that we’re the ones doing it. We have to admit that we have done evil in this world and that this evil is bigger than any one of us but the responsibility of all of us.
I’m going to assume that anyone still remaining is starting to suspect the truth about themselves, is starting to run their tongue along their upper teeth and feel for the needle-like evidence, is starting to feel certain unpleasant thoughts and memories and desires bubbling to the fore.
And at this point, you are probably wondering how we make the change. How can our self-hypnosis be undone? How do we cease the ceaseless carnage? How do we keep our world from becoming unlivable, even for we who are technically dead?
It starts with honesty. It starts with admitting the truth about ourselves. So what I want everyone here to do is say along with me, “I am a vampire, I drink the blood of children, and sometimes I am a bat.” So listen again and let me repeat that so you can all get it: “I am a vampire, I drink the blood of children, and sometimes I am a bat.” Okay, so now let’s all say it together: “I am a vampire, I drink the blood of children, and sometimes I am a bat.”
How does that feel? How does it feel to finally be admitting the truth, to accept just a little responsibility for who you are and what you’ve done? It feels good, right?
Listen, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take time. You’re going to want to forget about all of this, and you probably will at first. You’ll go back to your old habits; you’ll go back to carelessly tearing out the throats of passersby on the street. But you won’t feel great about it anymore. Something in the back of your mind will nag at you, taking all the fun out of it. And eventually you’ll find yourselves here, where I’m standing, realizing that a change is long overdue.
And for those of you who don’t believe a word of this, who think I’m just a wacky transgender doing some kind of art piece, I have to say, I pity you. Because you’ve cut yourself off from what you truly are. You ape humanity, but you are not human. Your empathy is a sham. Your commitment to peace and justice is an obscene joke. Until you are willing to accept that you are a fucking Dracula, you are never going to be able to live seriously or authentically. You will always be ensnared by this lie we’ve all woven around ourselves.
So wake up, folks. Wake up before we’re all drowning in blood. Not that we can literally drown, because we’re immortal, but it’s still a powerful metaphor.
I appreciate your listening. Try to enjoy the rest of the show, and please, please tip your waitresses. They work hard and, judging by the hunger in a lot of your eyes, they’ll all be dead soon.
Thank you.
i shall remain
Kai Cheng Thom
“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away”—Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
dawn has just begun to crawl into the sky, its colours flaring orange, violet, and green through the smog, when the warlord arrives at my temple by sea. Selen, my gorgon, hisses and uncoils her enormous body from where she is wrapped around one of the unfallen pillars in my sleeping chamber. her serpent mane froths, a hundred forked tongues testing the air in anticipation. but Selen does not need to warn me. i know he is here.
it has been so long since my last supplicant that my skin has gone hard and cracked, like clay left out in the sun. scales rain down from my head-tails as i rise from the lichen-covered dais where i have lain for the past three moon cycles. the sound of the warlord’s motorcade echoes off the cliff walls into which my temple is etched. i can hear only a few engines—three or four at most, which is unsurprising. even warlords fear being known to visit me.
i cross the stone room and stand before my altar, Selen at my side. she licks my hand as i caress her absently. gingerly, i lift the box of beaten metal and seashell on the altar and slide back its lid ever so slightly. Light—life—flares within, and i snatch it, this morsel of soft, shimmering essence, between my long sharp fingernails. this is the last. i have saved it all this long while, denying myself, in anticipation of this day. no matter. it shall soon be replenished a thousand times over.
throwing my head back, i drop the shred of essence into my open jaw. warmth floods through my body, down my throat and into my gullet. in that moment, i am, briefly, everything—the roaring of the ocean, the sting of the salt. i am the sky and the screaming drones that fly beneath it. i am the sun-blasted earth and the spined plants that take root within.
the euphoria of the essence fades, but its replenishing effect does not. my skin is as fresh and moist as the day i was first called into Being in the Shining City. my scales, fully restored, are iridescent, bright as stars. my head-tails are long and supple. sensing my transformation, the surge of my Divinity, Selen purrs and rubs her body against mine in ecstasy.
i smile, revelling in the sensation. for in rare moments like this, my Divinity is for no one else—not for Shining Daddy, not for any supplicant—it is just for me.
i walk the cavernous expanse of the chamber, skirting broken statues and toppled pillars as i go. i step out onto the once-majestic ziggurat carved into the cliff in which my temple was made.
ascending the steps from the beach is the warlord, dressed in raiments of red and black leather and silver metal. from his colours, i discern that he is the greatest warlord in the region—the one to whom other warlords pay tribute in food and oil and labour and other such affairs in which i have little interest. he is the one the others fear. on the sand below wait his guards, a lonely pair of them, and sworn to secrecy on pain of death, no doubt.
i stand and wait. Selen towers on all fours behind me, her serpent mane writhing and spraying venom into the air.
he reaches the top of the ziggurat, one step below mine, and stops. he pulls off his war-mask—an ugly, crudely wrought thing—and i see that his
face is weathered and lined. he is old in the years of those who dwell Below, but his body is muscled and strong. in his eyes, i see the deaths of all those he has killed, an unending vision of slaughter. i hear their screams, their pleas for mercy. i hear the threats this man, this Below-dwelling creature, has uttered in the dark.
in his hands, i see the blood he has spilled, the bodies he has beaten and torn apart. these are hands soaked in the stories of violence, hands that could break open a creature such as i, fragile as i have become since Shining Daddy forsook me.
his eyes wander over my naked body, my shining scales and head-tails, my bare breasts and phallus. hunger sparks within him, and wonder, and fear, and greed.
kneel before me, i say, and he does.
in the Shining City, i wanted for nothing. i had power, and grace, and wisdom beyond measure. i was Best Beloved, Daddy’s Delight, preferred child of the Shining Father by whose Divinity we are all called into Being.
i had many names, then, and titles too, though even i have forgotten most of them by now. i tended His garden and His creatures and drew His chariot. i built great monuments of crystal and coral and shimmering nacre in testament to His glory. i delivered His judgments to the dwellers Below, and they looked at me in terror and awe. all this was mine, and more.
my highest honour, however, was the time i spent each evening in the uppermost tower of the Shining City. there, i and i alone attended to Shining Daddy. there, i performed the duty that i loved the most: i sang for Him the songs of Creation. i sang with the voice that He had given me, the voice that sounded like the light of His Divinity piercing the darkness of the Void for the first time. i was that light, that sound, that colour, that song. no other in all of Creation had been given a voice such as mine. every night, i sat upon His lap and sang my heart out for Him.
