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Three months before she died, they finally managed to sell the beautiful Victorian fixer-upper next door. He moved in the next day.
That misty morning, the van was already by the curb when she left home to go to work. Buttoning her trench coat, the woman descended into the white fog, her shoes crunching the fallen orange and brown leaves. Across the dewy lawn, six of the movers shouldered an oblong box and marched like pall bearers into the manor’s gaping maw.
That cloudy afternoon, she returned home for lunch. Parking her car on her driveway, she watched the dull, umber-brown house for any sign of life: a billowing curtain, shadows crossing the window, opening doors. Yet with all its climbing vines, peeling shingles, and circling crows, the once abandoned building was still as a corpse.
That gloomy evening, she returned home from work. Too weary to even wonder about her mysterious new neighbor, she was more concerned with forgetting the busy day and trying to find peace for a few hours before she had to do it all again. Tomorrow and the rest of her life would come before she knew it. But just as she kicked off her shoes and crossed through the living room, desperate to shed her power suit’s pencil skirt and shoulder-padded blazer, three polite knocks rapped her door.
A crow cawed somewhere else in the white fog and black night. The woman gasped at the face in the porch light. Twitching fingers gripped the door handle, for some kind of anchor in her chaos. Air moved within her. She could feel it mingling with her rabbit-racing heart; her blood, a burning ocean ebbing inside her.
Save for his black overcoat billowing in the breeze, nothing moved around him, as if the wind had been tossed to the sky, fell back down to earth, and shattered against the pavement. Or like her presence had no effect on him; she’d never know from his ever-stern, serene face.
“Jonathan? Is that right?” she smiled.
“Sorry, it’s been…”
“Two months, I believe.”
“Yes, two months. What’re you doing here?”
“Well–” Jonathan turned, his dark hair devouring the yellow porch light– “I moved next door, and I thought it polite to introduce myself to my new neighbors.”
“Oh, that’s you?” She pointed to the decaying manor. “Wow, small world.”
“Indeed.”
“Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Their hands found each other. She was going in for a handshake, the egalitarian gesture of the modern woman, but his ice-cold fingers took hers and brought her knuckles to his lips. Just as he did two months ago.
After she pushed down the phone’s long, mosquito needle-esque antenna, the woman shed her pajamas like a cozy chrysalis, threw on a white sweatshirt and matching skirt, grabbed her shoes and keys, rushed out the door, and hoped by the time she arrived at her friend’s place of work, she wouldn’t seem irritable.
The journey was terrible. Somewhere in the late August darkness, she drove her beige jalopy through the city lights, across skyscraper shadows, and beneath the dog day full moon. Nearly every red light ensnared her.
On the pavement, women with crimped hair strutted under lurid lights, arm-in-arm with men who emulated Michael Jackson’s or the Pet Shop Boys’ aesthetics with varying degrees of success. Watching them duck into new wave nightclubs and neon bars, her body tingled, brain wondering what kind of person she’d be if she just let the night into her life like everyone else her age.
Then, the scary part. Checking in with the hard-boiled guard at Arkham Asylum’s gate, the front desk with the frazzled secretary who gave only vague directions, then wandering the linoleum-floored, yellow-walled, and fluorescent-bright hallways, passing by people who didn’t make eye contact with her, until finally she found the break room. Her friend, twirling a ribboning permed curl around her finger, smiled.
“Sorry to drag you out of the house so late.”
“It’s no problem.” By now, her intrigue at this uncanny world of two-way mirrors and gurneys had mollified her mental fist-pounding. “Here’s your lunch. Dinner. Whatever.” She handed the nurse a brown paper bag.
“Thanks so much. Fuck, I hate working nights. Again, I’m really sorry.”
The woman walked around the silent break room. Listening to the overhead light’s fly-buzz, she observed the old couch, the white refrigerator adorned with all manner of passive aggressive notices pertaining to refilling the coffee pot or abstaining from gorging oneself on others’ food, and the leaky sink. “It is kinda spooky.”
A grippy-socked, scrub-clad man wandered through the doorway. Bandages swaddled his wrists and elbow pits. Swaying on his feet, leaning against the wall, his hands failed to grasp anything, falling and dangling by his side like a rag doll’s. His eyes were so full of misery, there was not an ounce of light in them. Lifeless, weighed down by dark bags, his gaze peered straight through her, beyond the wall, a thousand yards somewhere else. Never had she seen that look on another human being.
“Sir, this is a staff-only space.” The nurse stood between her friend and the patient. “The doctor will be here soon and he’ll take good care of you, okay?”
Sighing like a corpse’s rattle, he was gone again, down the lonely and bright hallway.
“Is he okay?” the woman asked. “He looked like he didn’t have any blood in him.”
“As okay as someone in Arkham can be,” the nurse said, stashing her lunch inside the fridge. “He’s one of Dr. Crane’s patients. They all look like that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the medicine.”
“Who’s Dr. Crane?”
“The night shift psychiatrist. He specializes in anxiety disorders and hypnotherapy and rad stuff like that.” Neck cocked, she peeked out of the doorway. “Oh! Speak of the devil!” The nurse adjusted her larger-than-life, chemical curls and straightened her posture. “How do I look?”
“Is he hot or something?”
“Shut up! He'll hear you!”
A white coat billowed into the room like angel wings, accompanied by black oxfords gracing the tiles, and, the breath knocked out of her, she really couldn’t believe who she was seeing. Dr. Crane resembled less a person and more like a man-sized porcelain doll that had learned to walk, a puppet that had busted his strings and wandered freely. Not a mole, wrinkle, pimple, freckle, scar, visible pore or any human imperfection blistered his porcelain skin. His face was a blank slate that’d been thoroughly erased of all clunky writing and dirty eraser smudges. Perfection was wordless. Shimmering black hair framed his face, not a lock out of place. His wide, blue eyes captured her. Like a masterwork locked away in an archive, or ancient jewelry preserved in a glass case, Dr. Crane was something beautiful and inaccessible.
“Hey, Dr. Crane. Didja just clock in?” the nurse asked.
“Yes.” His eyes didn’t move from the woman, who turned to read one of those “just say no” anti-crack posters that got sent to every hospital, school, and shelter.
“What’re you doing in the break room?” Her friend poured a cup of coffee. “You never come in here. Want one?” she offered her friend who was drifting towards the door.
“No, I’m okay.”
“Something smells good,” Dr. Crane said.
“That’s my lunch-dinner-whatever. Or my new perfume.”
“Is this a friend of yours?”
“Yeah, she was just dropping off something I forgot at home.”
Dr. Crane stepped towards her, more silent than a ghost. Lips parted, owl-eyes large and focused, he stood before her. Though thin and not particularly tall, there was something so utterly frightening about his beauty. Adjusting his glasses, he extended his marble-white hand. They were just as cold, his fingers. The woman felt that chill before she even touched him, like standing near an iced window in the dead of winter. Nonetheless, she smiled and gave her name.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Crane.”
“Please. Jonathan.” He kissed her knuckles, just as he did two months later.
Snatching a random polyester windbreaker from the rack by the door, she shut it behind her and stood beside Jonathan. Zipping up the blue, green, violet, and white chevron jacket just below her neck, guarding her body from the skin-pricking breeze that fell the leaves, she faced the misty cul-de-sac.
“I’m relieved to see a familiar face,” Jonathan said, his breathless voice whispering like wind through half-dead willow branches.
“Yeah, it can be scary, being somewhere new and not knowing anyone.”
“Lonely, I imagine.”
“Definitely. When I first moved here, I don’t know, I found the environment a little cliquish. The HOA’s a bit– they can be bullies.”
Jonathan smiled. “Can they now?”
“Yeah, I tried planting a knock out rose bush next to my mailbox and Paul freaked out. That’s the president. Everyone else on the board is really sycophantic, so what he says goes.”
“Perhaps I should not introduce myself, then. I wouldn’t want the neighborhood to shun me because I offended him,” he said, folding his pale hands behind his back. “Where does Paul live? So I know where to avoid.”
“That house over there.” She pointed. Tucking her hands back into her pockets and hunching her shoulders against the cold, the woman chuckled. “But you can’t dodge him forever. He’ll probably send a welcome wagon over to your house tomorrow morning.”
“Oh. Just what I needed. Well, I work nights, so I’ll be asleep.”
“Maybe it’s for the better. Then he can’t get any ammunition to use against you.”
Jonathan had a studying glimmer in his face, like he already knew every possible grain of dirt on her life’s mountain, as if his sharp eyes had already flipped through every page of her mind’s library. “Has he ever used anything against you?”
She shifted towards the door. “Not really. Just, I’m at a weird point in my life, and in his letter, he was kinda just passive aggressive about that. He’s something of a male chauvinist pig, has notions about a lady with a job but no husband or kids.”
“It must be anxiety-inducing being in that house by yourself, hearing bumps in the night and knowing you’re alone and defenseless.” Jonathan smiled, aquamarine eyes scintillating. “However, Thoreau believed all good things are wild and free.”
“Wild, sure,” she chuckled. “How’d you know I lived alone?”
“Much of psychiatry is simply cold-reading.”
“Oh!”
“And what is this point you’re at, if I may ask?”
“I wouldn’t want to lay all my cards on the table. Otherwise you’d get bored of me.”
“Oh, that cou–”
A change in the night wind brought a passing cold slamming straight against the side of her head, ruffling her collar, slipping by her anatomy, and hitting him square in the face. Wrapping her arms around herself, she backed closer to the doorway.
“It’s so cold, isn’t it? I think we’ll have an early winter, don’t you? Jonathan? Jonathan, are you okay?”
The dark-haired man remained motionless, except for the tilt in his head, like a dazed-eyed farmer in a cornfield witnessing a flash of alien light across the sky, wondering if he’ll start floating, if he’ll ever see his home again, or he’ll be gone forever. Slack-jawed, the psychiatrist’s blues fluttered shut, a broken exhale unfurling from his pink lips. Like a mechanical ballerina in a broken music box, his turn towards her was stilted, inhabiting a liminal space between dislocated and graceful. “Yes?”
“Everything good?”
“I’ve had a very long day.”
“I imagine the move disrupted your sleep schedule.”
“Not necessarily. I think I should go now. I haven’t eaten all day.”
She opened her door. “Yeah, go take care of that. Maybe I’ll see you soon?”
He was halfway down the porch. “You will. Goodnight, my darling.”
Once Jonathan was gone into the mist, body and overcoat swallowed by the night, she closed the door.
~
After work, she stopped by the mall to pick up some perfume as a treat for herself. It’d been an awful day. Work wasn’t worth thinking about outside the office, so she decided to direct her anger at the long line she had suffered at the pharmacy. Partially, her reason for visiting the mall was to push all the thoughts out of her brain.
Riding the escalator down, she watched the Friday night masses. The crowd consisted mostly of scrutinizing teenagers loitering and PDA-inclined couples heading in and out of the movie theater. Denim, jelly bracelets, nylons, and chunky heels pushed around each other like liquid atoms, faceless silhouettes blurring past her.
They had torn down a historic neighborhood to build this echo chamber that plugged her ears with noise. Neon lights blurred her vision. Mannequins in the window, donning puffy-sleeved gowns, garish patterns, and angular shoulder pads, beckoned her, assuring her that if she bought whatever they had to sell, she too could be beautiful and fix everything.
She walked past the plastic plants towards a department store. None of the perfumes were exactly an olfactory delight, more chemical than natural. She had made a rule once that she'd only buy a bottle if the scent excited her like a bleeding doe aroused a starving wolf. After twenty minutes, she left with a little black dress. When would she ever wear this? Did she really need more clothes, or did she just need to feel okay?
Standing in the middle of the atrium, she tilted her head up and watched the sun set through the skylight. Had the shopping mall and Wall Street promises of this decade been a lie? The problem, she found, with consuming whatever it was you craved – candy, flesh, clothes, cash – eventually, that pit inside you filled up, but you kept devouring and eating, and then you’d get sick, and queasy, and you wonder if you actually wanted it at all, or you just felt like you had to eat something to take up space. No feeling, clothing, or building lasts. Someday, this too will be gutted and bulldozed. What will become of her, 10, 20, 30 years from now? When she stopped feeling young, she went home.
The purple sky and orange clouds of the sunset had died into darkness by the time her car pulled up outside her home. A box waited at her porch. She cut it open in the kitchen; her expectation of finding the new mixer she ordered from that catalogue dissolved into the reality, boxes of lye. Checking the label, she sighed at her own carelessness, left her porch, crossed the lawn, bracing herself to ring Jonathan’s doorbell, but sighed in relief to see him kneeling in his garden, sleeves rolled up, pouring buckets of rancid liquid on his plants.
“I’ve never seen someone garden at night!” she called out.
Jonathan wiped his hands on a dish towel and rose to greet her. “It’s the only time I have for it.” His angelic face was partly-illuminated by the street lights. “How are you, my dear?”
“It’s been a long day.” She hoped her weariness wouldn’t find its way to her voice, her face, or any part of her other than her private thoughts. “Our mail got mixed up. Sorry I opened it, um, I was expecting something and didn’t check the label.”
The psychiatrist blinked. “Oh. Thank you. You’re an exemplary neighbor.”
Her fingers brushed against his snow-cold ones as they transferred the package from one to the other. “Well, you probably have to leave for work soon.”
“I don’t work Fridays or Saturdays.”
“Oh! Then I don’t feel so bad for bothering you.”
“No, I appreciate the company. If anything, I should be letting you go. It’s getting late.”
Her hands crept into her pockets, burrowing down to the bottom. “Actually, I haven’t been sleeping very well. Earlier, I had to go by the pharmacy and get insomnia medication.”
Jonathan walked towards the doorway, bluely watching her as he opened the door, kicked the box into the doorway, and slammed it shut. From the brief glimpse she managed to capture of his house, the lights were dim and white sheets shrouded the furniture. Stalking towards her, every step Jonathan took along the dry grass was as soft as fluttering leaves. Each movement of his seemed so careful, calculated, and deliberate. Never had she seen someone so self-possessed. A lonely howl from the neighbor’s dog disrupted their silence.
“Are you watching the television late?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then why can’t you sleep?”
Her hands curled and gaze fixed to the end of the cul-de-sac, where the asphalt blended with golden lamplight. Pure night didn’t seem to exist in the world anymore, not in Gotham’s skyscrapers, not in the suburbs where kids play well after hours, nor even out in the country where she and her friend sometimes went cruisin’ when they needed the quiet. The only time she ever faced night – true and tenebrous like the ancients knew when they doused the fire– was in her bedroom.
“I keep having sleep paralysis.”
“What do you see?”
“I see a shadow,” she began, walking towards her house by his side. “First night, it was hanging upside down outside my window. The second night, it was peering into my room from the hall, like a child spying around the corner. Only when I could finally move again did it go away.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was shaped like a man, but I knew it wasn’t one.”
Jonathan, nodding, adjusted his glasses. His moon-white forearms were still exposed, and she wondered how he wasn’t freezing.
“The next night, it was in my doorway. The one after, it was by my cork board. In the coming week, I kept waking up and it moved around my room: by the laundry basket; at my desk; inside my closet and peering through the crack; in my bathroom, but it had no reflection in my mirror. Then it was at my bedside. Next, in bed with me. Last night I woke to it sitting on my chest, bending its head down towards my neck. I couldn’t move, my voice was gone. I thought I was dying.”
She and Jonathan came to stop on her porch. The ruby-red moon shimmered its blood-light onto Jonathan’s water-blue eyes, still regarding her with the same cold, clinical gaze he always had. Nodding, he removed his hands from his pockets, exposing his long fingers and soft palms to the wind.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Don’t worry,” Jonathan said, drifting closer towards her. As her heart rate spiked and dripped down somewhere in her stomach, he smiled. “Were you frightened?”
“Yes, I thought– I mean, the first couple times it happened, I was afraid it was…”
“An unwelcome visitor?”
The very idea had her hand gripping the door handle. “Well, yes, but after that, I kept thinking, what happens if it touches me? What if it’s– I wondered if something was making me see it, I don’t know. That’s a very superstitious thought, yes, but I’m not sure what to think. I’ve never experienced this before.”
Jonathan’s shadowy hair didn’t move much in the breeze, still gelled and pristine. Long, dark lashes fluttered, like a spider scrambling for a safe corner to build its bed and wait with more patience than any human could muster. “Well, it’s only natural to look beyond the veil for answers to a strange question.”
“I suppose. Do your patients ever have sleep paralysis?”
“As a matter of fact, they do,” the doctor said, taking a seat on her porch swing. He didn’t even have to pat the empty space beside him for her to feel compelled to take it up, to be with him in any socially acceptable manner. “It’s usually indicative of insomnia, which itself is a symptom of an underlying anxiety disorder or a specific phobia.”
“It is?”
“Yes. What we see in our dreams, or in half-lucid states like sleep paralysis, are often the very fears we are too ashamed to admit in daylight.”
“What do you think mine is?”
“Are you afraid of intimacy?” He leaned closer. “Are you afraid of letting people in?”
She laughed. “Something like that. What do you think I should do? I really need sleep.”
Jonathan’s gaze flitted from her door back towards her; the intensity of which made the back of her neck sweat even in this cold. “Perhaps we could try a little exercise.”
“Like what?”
“Let me in.”
“Like, invite you into my house?”
“Only if you’re comfortable,” he whispered, voice sweeter and warmer than a s'more pulled from a campfire.
A moth hurled itself against her porch light, banging its head against the glass. A few weeks ago, she went to her friend’s house for a bonfire, where one landed on her woolen blanket, seemingly to gorge itself, before diving straight into the fire. Its winged carcass burned with the wood. If that one experienced too much of its desires, the one above her head would die of denial. She knew which one she’d rather be. How exhausting it was to be on the other side of the glass and never find an opening to warmth and joy. “Yeah, yeah–” she stood up– “I trust you.”
Jonathan smiled.
Inside her, a certain effervescence bubbled into an overflowing euphoria. Now, she could finally have it, the best of both worlds: A man in her house for an evening, a stable career, everything else that came with being young and finally feeling like you had your shit together after a lifetime of not knowing what to do with yourself. Chaos had to spew out the celestial bodies at random, that primordial, starlit vomit, before it could arrange it into harmony. Life made sense!
Striding into her hallway, she flexed her hands. Pulling the cords of her lamps, illuminating the living room one by one, she bathed herself in the crescendoing light. “Do you want a drink?”
Jonathan wasn’t by her side. Gazing around her living room, she paused to find him standing still and patient-eyed in her doorway. “What’re you doing there?”
“I haven’t been invited yet.”
“Oh, you’re a bit of a stickler,” she chuckled. “Are you gonna do this every time I have you over?”
“No. Just this once.”
“Okay. Come in, Jonathan.”
“Thank you, my darling.”
When he stood in her living room, cold eyes studying the sundry tchotchkes and books on her shelf, soaring up to the posters and photos on her walls, he inhabited the space so fully, yet did not block the air around him. Jonathan was just another beautiful thing that belonged. That night, she slept like a corpse, and every night after until she died. The shadow had left, spirited away wherever the angels and the devils were.
~
All the stores in the mall had closed by the time she and Jonathan found their way through the revolving glass doors. Cages pulled over the storefronts, the echoes and barely audible music had departed with the crowds. Amongst the green plastic ferns, they stalked around the linoleum hellscape like wild animals, sheltered within their coats. The lights were dimmed, but never off, because energy needed to be wasted and technically, people could come here and get their 10,000 steps.
Climbing the stairs, then crossing the glass tunnel, the couple wandered around the food court. Her eyes traced the red, blue, and yellow neons crawling along the brown walls. Just a short walk away, a silent carousel waited by the windows that overlooked the plaza. She and Jonathan, cold hand in a warm one, found themselves climbing over the fence and sat themselves on two different horses – his white with a ruby, gold, and jet Roman headdress; hers black, with a pearl, silver, and diamond harness. The gems were as real as the horses. This decade was all costume jewelry.
Jonathan, while not one for attitudes he deemed “frippery,” enjoyed his Valentino suits. He sported a black, bronze, and blue diamond-patterned silk tie, a white collared shirt, and the black, wool peacoat with the shoulder pads so he didn’t look so frail. She was clothed in a matching, violet, peplum jacket and skirt set and an emerald-green overcoat. Both wore shining leather shoes. He didn’t look like he belonged in this era’s clothes, but she couldn’t think of where to place him aesthetic-wise. Jonathan was simply above the bargain bin that was high-end fashion. As for her garments, they were so tight and heavy like everything else she owned, was required to own, and expected to shoulder the burden of acquiring more and more.
The psychiatrist watched her, lips in a soft line, a stray, gelled curl adorning his smooth forehead.
“Do you think this is what being dead is like?” she asked. “You’re just wandering around places people should be but aren’t, because life’s already left you behind? And you see all these places you wanna go to, but you’re shut out by something?”
“Perhaps.” He looked around the plastic, the tiles, the neon, the department store logos, and the “now hiring” signs in half the windows. “Yes, maybe so.”
Jonathan wasn’t holding onto the golden bar that connected the horse to the carousel. Why was she? Her hands dropped onto her noble steed’s carved mane. Unmooring herself in any way shook something deeply rooted inside her.
“Could you imagine dumping a 14th-century peasant in a 20th-century mall? I’m talking about some feudal boy from a Transylvania-kind of place. How would he react?”
“As repulsed as we are now.”
“Wouldn’t he be afraid? Of the lights? The tiles? The neon?”
Jonathan tilted his head, large eyes tracing the lurid spirals on the ceiling. Hers followed the curve of his neck. “That’s not the question you should be asking. The greatest pain for him, I believe, would be his discovery that this was built by men, not God. And that this was all his lords and kings ever aspired to all along.”
“You’re probably right.” The woman looked around the massive emptiness of the space. “I guess this is all there really is, huh? Did you want to go out to eat, or a club, or a bar, or somewhere fun instead?”
“They’re all the same waterhole to me.” Pressing his sharp cheek against the bar, he leaned close towards her. A tender, cold kiss to her lips, then three to her neck that nearly killed her. “Why don’t we go to your house?”
Leaving the gilded mall alone in the night, they stalked arm in arm down the pavement. Past the club blasting “Tainted Love,” under the sparkling movie theater’s marquee, all the way to her car, they followed the road until they were tucked away in the suburbs from the skyscrapers’ innumerable, bright eyes.
~
All curtains were drawn tightly, as she was afraid of finding a stranger looking inside. Drifting about her well-lit, green-walled kitchen, she deposited, chopped, and otherwise prepped whatever ingredients she needed for the soup. The routine wasn’t nearly as interesting as spying on Jonathan in the living room. The psychiatrist traced his fingers along her books’ spines, as he did over hers the first night they shared her bed. Though he had refused a bowl, she didn’t take offense, simply enjoying seeing him take up space in her life. Rain tapped the windows like his fingers did along her jugular as she drifted off to bed.
“You have quite the library.”
Wincing against the onion’s cut-stench, she smiled the best she could with crying eyes. “Thank you. Oh, um, shoot. Could you grab the garlic from the fridge for me? I forgot it.”
Jonathan brushed his hand along the small of her back on his way to her fridge. He flung the paper bag onto the granite countertop.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look sick.”
Removing the back of his hand from under his nose, he nodded. “Yes. I have a sensitive sense of smell. Garlic is too pungent for my liking.”
“Oh, don’t worry. Look at my eyes, I can barely handle onions,” she chuckled, sliding the diced, white cubes into the black ramekin, then grabbed the garlic and broke off a few cloves. Jonathan backed towards the sink. “Are you gonna stay over tonight?”
“No, I have work tomorrow.”
“That’s right. Well, give me a call when you– OW! FUCKING–”
The knife collapsed to the tile floor with a clang, falling alongside droplets of Bordeaux-dark blood. Doubling over herself and clutching her hand to her chest, she rushed towards the sink and snatched up paper towels. “I’m okay, I’m okay, just– ow, just nicked my hand. I’ll be–oh, thanks for getting that.”
Haunches raised, Jonathan crouched onto the floor, black suit falling about his arms and thighs like wings. Kneecaps planted on the tile, he pressed the red-stained, silver-glittering knife to his lips. Pink tongue caught the drops that dribbled towards his wrist. His heaving sighs felled her bleeding hand, the towel floating to the floor like winter snow.
Askew glasses were discarded, brushed aside by a twitching hand. Legs dragging behind him, Jonathan slithered across the floor, heady eyes fluttering up at her. Her back pressed against the counter’s sharp corner, less concerned with his crawling and more alarmed by the warmth thermometer-rising from her gut to her head, dizzying her.
She never thought much when Jonathan was around, such was his effect on her, the people on the street, and his obsequious colleagues who never dared question his brilliance. He knew everything. He was everything. Wasn’t it wonderful to mean everything to someone so important? Along with her blood and life, her hand was his.
The side of her index knuckle was bleeding, but Jonathan started with her fingertips, cold tongue lapping up the droplets that dribbled down. Translucent nails longer than she remembered circled around her wrist. Jonathan’s lips closed around her knuckle. Eyes fluttering shut, the psychiatrist pressed his opened, moaning mouth against her cut. Curt, breathy gasps permeated the quiet house.
The woman watched her lover lick and suck at her bleeding wound. It was too minute to feel truly dangerous. Sinking down to his level, she cradled the back of his head. Burrowing her fingers into his dark hair like a mole in the earth, she held him to her blood and let him nurse. Maybe he needed to be filled and she needed to be emptied some to feel complete. With Jonathan on his knees, white teeth nibbling at her flesh, his lips sucking away at her blood, devouring a modicum of her to be deposited in some gnawing void inside him, the empty space between her atoms were completely filled. The voice inside her that whispered this is what she needs won.
Rolling her onto the ground, Jonathan mounted and kissed her. “Thank you, my darling.”
So consumed by his presence, she didn’t even notice the red and blue lights outside the curtain. It wasn’t until the next misty day she learned that Paul and his wife were gone.
The following evening, she and Jonathan discussed it in his yard as he poured his homemade fertilizer onto his belladonnas, pokeweeds, and henbane. In a foggy autumn, the only clear patch seemed to be Jonathan’s garden of poison.
~
On the night she died, it was the first snow of the month. Before she had closed her curtains for the night, she watched the first pale flurries fall through the jet-dark sky. If she had known it was the last time she would see an early winter with a beating heart, she would’ve stayed longer. The problem with not knowing when your life ends is you forget to appreciate everything that truly matters – sunrises, lunch in dingy diners, perfume counters, green grass, the knowledge that, even though you will die someday, at least you won’t always be the same person you are now. Hope can only be yours so long as you are alive.
Of course, when the woman turned from the window to join Jonathan in bed, she expected many more decades, that her problems would only exacerbate with time.
Snuggled beneath her puffy, Laura Ashley duvet, her aching back eased slightly when Jonathan wrapped his arms around her waist and burrowed his face into her shoulder, slow little kisses meandering up and down the crook of her neck. Inside the throat Jonathan adored, her voice teetering between honesty and silence, urged by her red blood to speak now or die with regret.
“The year will be over soon.”
“Everything must die,” Jonathan responded. “Does it trouble you?”
Shrugging, she flexed and clapsed her hands over her belly. “Do you ever feel like you’re running out of time?”
“In what way?”
“I mean–” she rolled onto her side, facing the tenebrous, opaque space he inhabited, why must it be this way, if only she could see his lovely blue eyes sparkle in the sunlight– “You’re only young once. This is the time to make a name for yourself, to explore everything, before the cage ensnares you. By cage, I mean a stable career, a family, children, disease, old age, death. If I don’t do everything now, I’ll never get to. Do you ever feel that way?”
“No. I find it that I have all the time in the world.”
She chuckled. “Of course you do. I wish I was like you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yeah.”
There was nothing she could see in the night. More acutely did her cells perceive his frozen ones, how he rolled on top of her, how his wiry hair tickled her forehead, how his fingers brushed her cheek, how they stroked down to her neck.
“Let me help you. Would you like that?”
“How? Do you have advice?”
“Something like that.” A kiss to her jaw. “It’s not your wildness that reminds me of who I used to be, but what constrains you. I think life holds you back.” His lips over her pulse. “Do you find that statement accurate?”
“Yes.”
“It’s burdensome. I remember when I believed I was surviving on borrowed time.” Jonathan kissed each of her eyelids. “Of course, people didn’t live as long back then.”
She raised her head. “Back then?”
Jonathan’s hands cradled her cranium back to her pillow. “If only I had someone like you to keep me company when I was just another body in a cot, more bubo than human.” Three kisses along her chin. “I could be that for you,” he rasped, his gentle voice cooling her spine. “Would you like that, my darling?”
“Like what?”
“I’ve seen the world. I’ve had the opportunity to study at any university my heart desired. I haven’t had many cares. It is a worthy sacrifice through which I am eager to guide you.”
“Jonathan, what the fuck are you talking about?”
He settled on her chest. Hands clasping her shoulders, nails digging into her skin, his head dipped towards her neck. “Hush. It’s going to be beautiful. We’ll go anywhere you desire. The world will continue on its miserable march, while we can stop and go at our own pace. No rules will apply to us. We will be beholden only to each other. Eventually, you will forget the mortal coil entirely.”
The woman couldn’t move. “Jonathan, stop playing around. Unless– is this role play or something? Because, if you wanna do that, just say so.”
“If that’ll make the process more palatable for you, then yes. Count your blessings, darling. When I first awoke, I was alone. For these past centuries, I walked with no companion by my side. This, you won’t have to suffer.”
Two pricks as sharp as hypodermic needles brushed against her skin, sending her heart into a frantic race. Legs twitching, her hands trembling. A tingling pain fled along her left arm, while her breath ran away.
“Jonathan, what the fuck was that?!”
“No disease. No old age. No death. No pain. The perfect prophylactic. You will feel more alive than you’ve ever felt. You will go places you could never have possibly conceived. What do you say?”
“Jonathan, I’d like that, believe–“
“That’s my girl. It’ll be over before you know it.” Jonathan abducted her into a long kiss, licking along her warm lips. “Think of it as getting a flu shot.”
“Jonathan–”
For a single moment, his frigid, dry mouth hovered open over her flesh. The rigor mortis-stiff hand cupped her chin and tilted her crown back towards the headboard. In that one minute, as his nails grew to scrape against her jaw and those two needles prodded at her pulse, she had never been more aware of her heartbeat. She was alive. She was a real human, not some walking, breathing cadaver put to work until the big boss and the retirement home decided it was time to drop her underground as worm food. It was enough just to be alive. She didn’t need to own everything, control everything, fill every space in her life. There was time and a necessity for emptiness. When the fine needles pricked her skin, pushed through her flesh, and settled deep inside, the human dream died.
Shots hurt because burning fluid was being pushed inside your muscle. Blood drawing was nausea-inducing because something was stealing your life essence from you. In this instance, both occurred, the sensations mixing into the most potent pain-cocktail she had ever sampled in her life. Whatever dribbled down the needle-teeth piercing her like St. Sebastian, it reduced her blood to little more than thin water flooding out of her wound into his mouth. Her previously contracted muscles loosened, slacking into a sluggish warmth her brain couldn’t shake off. As for his lips suckling on her like a newborn, diverting blood from her body to his, he was stealing too much too fast. Her mouth sputtered, any attempt to scream came out a hoarse, prolonged groan like a cry in a dream. If the lights were on, she might’ve seen black spots or tunnel vision.
The next time she opened her eyes, the weight from her chest had lifted. A cold, refreshing beverage trickled down her throat like honey from a hive. Whenever she donated blood, the juice and cookies they gave her afterwards were manna from heaven; whatever this chilled and sweet treat was, it blew blood-bank food out of the water. The woman suckled with all the strength her numb jaw could muster, until the dizzied veil was partially lifted.
A hand cradled and caressed the back of her head and lips kissed her temple. Her tongue traced along the familiar outline of an Adam’s apple, and by extension a neck, she’d become so well-acquainted with. The bubbling fluid, though still as cold as the blue of his eyes, seemed less sweet now. Metallic, acrid bitterness stung her tastebuds, as if she had stuck her tongue to a frozen flagpole and couldn’t pull away without ripping apart her flesh in the process. The tip of his index finger collected a stray trickle of blood from her open wound.
“Your taste, I love it,” he whispered. “That’s enough.”
Once her head was pulled from his neck, a lockjaw-rigor grasped her body in an iron-crushing hold. Falling back onto the bed, her body arched into a bone-aching agony. Her heart vacillated between death-stillness and rapid trembling. Torrents of freezing sweat rained from her hot-cold skin. She closed her eyes because she didn’t want to see what might appear if she were to open her lids.
“Jonathan, make it stop! I don’t want this!”
“Well, too little, too late.”
“What’s happening to me?!”
“You’re changing.”
The beast shifted off the bed. Through the blood banging against her eardrum, she heard her desk chair squeak against the floor and settle at her bedside. A cold pack-like hand settled on her forehead; she tried to pretend it was the pack of frozen peas her mom used to give her when she was home sick.
“No feeling lasts. Side effects of my anticoagulant may include confusion, malaise, fatigue, a burning or itching sensation around the wound, excessive salivation, vomiting, muscle paralysis, fainting, paranoia, panic attacks, hallucinations, bleeding from orifices, hydrophobia, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Considering this will be your only dose, symptoms will be minor and clear up after 48 hours. If it’s any consolation, you are not currently taking St. John’s wort, antibiotics, or grapefruit, so I am not concerned about interactions. As for the transfusion, I’m pleased to see it was a controlled success.”
“HELP ME!”
“Listen to me very carefully,” he said in his clinical, matter-of-fact bedside manner. “Soon you are going to undergo a painful transformation that you will feel even in your marrows. In this state, you will be vulnerable and unable to care for yourself. During this transition, I will look after you, feed you, and clean up your messes. Once you’ve recovered your strength, I will teach you how to survive.”
“Wh–”
Jonathan kissed her forehead. “Hospital food is an acquired taste, but it will sustain you. Perhaps it’ll even become a comfort as it is for me. When you wake up tomorrow night, you will feel a hunger unlike any you’ve known. You will eat what I bring you, and I will not entertain whining or pearl-clutching. Do you understand?”
Against her neck’s bone-cracking resistance, as if trying to march through a tornado, she turned her head to her palm. The last warm breath she ever took tickled her fingers like a breeze billowing through hair. Life was never hers again save for feeding time.
~
A month after she died, a shiny new nightclub opened. Standing at the corner of Gotham's entertainment district, it spawned a line around the block, but they were allowed to cut it. When you don’t have an ounce of human imperfection, she realized, people can’t find physical or character flaws in you that they don’t like about themselves. That’s how Jonathan charmed the world and got away with everything.
There were no mirrors inside like the club across the street. Black-walled, red neon lights breeded with white strobes. Two-leveled, the ground story dancefloor was glutted with men in business suits and women in furs gyrating, flaunting, pulsating, moving, breathing. Up a flight of spiral stairs, a bar that served any liquor or cocktail a human could dream of awaited, along with a little kitchen that was celebrated for its penne alla vodka.
She and Jonathan sat at the most strategic table, near the balcony where they could observe the overdressed and overstyled bodies below. His blue eyes watched the stairway behind her, following whomever stumbled their way up, while she had a good view of the purple glass bar.
“That man looks like a patient I had,” Jonathan said, fingertip tracing the crystal rim of the drink he didn’t touch.
“Which one?” “The one who put his poodle in a microwave oven.”
“Fuck me.”
The woman hoped they would leave soon. Hair follicles, cologne, perfume, alcohol, sweat, ovulation fluids, semen, garlicky pasta, and sour body odor all mingled into a horrible mephitis that she didn’t smell while alive. She also never noticed the death-stench that Jonathan exuded; someday it would be hers too. Her ears picked up a song she took for granted, while Jonathan tapped his leather-gloved hand on the table, lips folded into a thin line.
–the childhood I lost, replaced by fear
I used to think that the day would never come
That my life would depend on the morning sun
“Have you picked your poison?” he asked.
“I can’t do this.”
“Well, I’m not going to hunt for you forever.”
“Jonathan,” she sighed, brushing lint off her little black dress. “I said I can’t do this.”
Her fellow undead, donning another Valentino suit and his new camel hair peacoat he stole off that yuppie they shared over last night’s dinner, adjusted his Oliver Peoples’ glasses. “Pick someone you despise. It’s easier to eat what you can’t empathize with.”
If she had the capacity to be nauseous like she once did, bile would’ve singed her throat. Instead, all she did was glare at the band on her left ring finger. She wanted to ask him if he was always a bastard or if those six centuries did this to him. Not because she didn’t know the answer, it takes a very specific type of person to enjoy immortality, but just to direct his attention to his cruelty, of course he wouldn’t change, he knew who he was and he didn’t care.
A man pinched a passing woman’s rear. He laughed when she ran into the bathroom like a frightened gazelle.
“So,” Jonathan drawled, leaning back in his seat, crossing one slender leg over the other, “male chauvinist pig it is. Not very kosher of you.”
“Shut up.” She stood up, jaw tensed, hand extended. “Follow my lead.”
“I love you.”
Perhaps a part of her was still alive. In her grasp, Jonathan’s hand finally felt warm, and his lovely face still inspired a near-heartbeat in her silent chest. Besides watching a movie, his eyes were the closest she had to seeing a sunny blue sky again. It could be worse, she finally decided. At least they weren’t alone.
A single man at the bar felt a cold hand on his shoulder. Spinning his stool around, he found two doll-faces, two string-less puppets, two reanimated mannequins standing in the dark.
“Hey.” The woman smiled. “My husband and I saw you from across the bar and we really dig your vibe. Can we buy you a drink or two?”
This kind of death is purposeless consumption. An overfed fish that eats itself to oblivion because its cells remember its opportunistic, voracious, wild ancestors. Only thing is there is no end.