But I was tired and my loneliness rose up around me like a cage.
I slipped back to the arms of my tree as I heard her ripping your flesh and slurping up your blood. I closed my eyes and held my face against the leaves.
When she was finished, she sighed with pleasure and floated away.
I drifted out from my tree as the sun rose.
I collected your bones and bloodstained clothes.
Behind my tree in the brush, I built a small altar for you.
I lit incense beside it and gave you half of my sweets.
* * *
THE VAMPIRE FROM VONDELPARK
I stole you from the fountain in Rembrandt Square.
You were smoking a joint like you always did there. Your slim fingers pressed it against your thin lips for a moment, and held it down by your leg, indiscreet the way most people smoke joints in this city. It’s legal but not everyone approves. It’s easier to avoid trouble by doing it inconspicuously in a park or standing by a canal. Not many people do it right in Rembrandt Square here in Amsterdam, but the tourists are so busy taking photos of the statues that most people don’t notice what others are smoking along the stone benches in the square, or by the fountain shaped like a giant tan and brown rock. It wasn’t breathtaking like other fountains I have seen—but that’s what made it an easier place for me to live and watch people.
I watched you from inside the water, invisible to everyone who wasn’t looking for something more than the plain looking rock, a place to toss a Euro for luck, a place to sit and listen to the soothing sound of flowing water. I waited a long time until there was hardly anyone around you. The only people in Rembrandt Square was a group of smiling Japanese tourists standing in front of the statues with their cameras on selfie sticks.
I reached up through the spread of water over stone and pulled you down under the soft flow of my liquid world.
Once I have a human being like you in my hands, I can make your body do anything. I myself don’t fully understand it. It’s like, once I touch you, my energy covets the energy controlling your body and then I have that control over you. Even your bones. I can stretch you, break your bones into pieces or turn them to jelly—to something flexible so that you can slide down the pipes with me to where they spill out into the canal.
Then I hold you against the stones and feed.
No one sees this happen. I’m alone down here beneath the fountain. Alone in the pipes. Like you, like any human creature, I must eat to survive. And I didn’t get to choose the things that sustain me.
You taste like cinnamon, cloves, and weed. It’s the weed I crave now. Lately everyone I’ve stolen from the fountain has had a joint in their hands. I’m selective like that. You just taste better. I look for other things, too. A look in your eyes. A hunger. The way your eyes shift. Guilty. Humans always have guilt in their eyes when they’ve done something cruel. Maybe you stole something. Maybe you hit someone. Maybe you just broke someone’s heart. Whatever it was—I look for that in a person’s eyes. It’s the only way to be fair.
Some of my kind steal children, but I’d never do that. I’d never feed off innocence. I was innocent once.
Long ago I was born in sunlight.
I ran through Vondelpark like the wind ruffling the leaves on the arching branches of the willow trees. I ran on legs, not the long muscular body of an eel. Not like the way I am now. I still have my old face, my beauty, but long ago when I was still young, I smiled. I dreamed.
All I have is nightmares and my hair has completely fallen out. I’m bald, but I still have my round lips, my kind eyes, my small nose, my neck, my breasts. Long ago I covered the body that is now naked and I played. I ran through trails in the park, down the wide streets of the city, across the canal bridges. I ran with a skip in my step. I didn’t know of the things in the sewers.
Yet, just like that, I was sucked into the water by something else. A fae or demon. Something with a very long tail. I never saw their face—only teeth. White, blood-stained teeth. And I became something else: a mutable, snake-like body. A girl with the tail of an ugly brown eel. A creature that moves through the canals and the pipes under the city. Alone.
I almost died before I discovered that I could feed.
I could dig my own teeth into you and feel healthy again. I could stop the hunger ever so briefly with the taste of you. Its memory, the memory of the taste of you, can sustain me for a while. I feed and live—watching the sunset over the curved pathways of water lined with bicycle wheels in this fabulous city. This place of art and love and drugs it both does and doesn’t want to be known for. Amsterdam is more than any one characteristic. Its old arms spread wide along the sea, embracing it with stones and boats.
I love my city almost as much as I love the people who are drawn to it, people from all over the world. They’re unusual. They’re rebels. They’re hopeful. They’re athletic. They’re dreamers.
I feed on so many, I usually don’t take notice of one more than another. I’m too busy trying to forget what I am. I barely stay in my body when I feed. I can’t bear it. I hate to steal things.
But you—there’s something in the way you move, how small and thin you are, yet your confidence is as strong as an old oak. Like how little dogs always act as if they’re ten times larger. You puffed up your chest, even in the pipes. You challenged me. You fought in a way most humans don’t bother to fight. You’d never be okay again. I had already stretched you and fit you down in the pipes—you couldn’t have survived much longer than I would have let you anyhow. Humans can be stretched, but there’s no way to shrink them back. Most of them die of shock long before my teeth find them.
So I’ve got to finish them off.
I’ve got to kill you whether I admire you or not.
But what if I did that and then fed you? Would you be able to stay with me? Feed with me? Live with me? I would not be alone anymore. I would have a friend. A companion. Someone to love. A reason to wake up in the morning besides myself. A reason to stop hating my body, hating this thing I’ve become.
I don’t have a lot of time.
The sunset is long gone. I have you in my arms in the darkness against the side of this canal. I hear people wandering past us and the boats creaking on their dock lines. Your breath has been faltering since the fountain, but now it stops. Every other sound seems to stop with it.
Waiting for my decision. Waiting for me to choose.
I could drink and release you. That would be the way I’ve always done it. That would be easy. I touch the pale skin of your shoulders, your bleeding neck. The blood has caked already. I wash it off with the canal water, floating while holding your body, because I can’t drown. I’ve got no legs anymore, I must crawl on my hands and tail or swim, but hey, I can’t drown.
I open your mouth. I bite my wrist and offer it up to your lips.
After a moment, you drink.
* * *
A REAL DOG
I stole you with a look of sweet desperation in my deep brown eyes.
My soft ears lifted ever so slightly above the top of my head. My head tilted to the side. My tiny paw pressed against the cage. I wanted to be free and there you were! Crouched in front of me, a baby yourself—a child staring into my eyes, maybe seeing the real me behind them, maybe not. But you were mine from that moment. All mine.
Your mother said no. Then she said yes. Your father said no. Then he said yes. You were like me in that way. You could make your parents do anything with a certain look in your eyes, your hands clasped together, your feet jumping up and down on the ground. You could do that with your parents.
I can do that with every human being I meet, especially children.
You were special, though. I could tell. I looked into your brown eyes and I saw inside them something inhuman, something fae. I had so little time left. I wanted to spend it with someone like you.
Humans don’t know this, but some of them have a tiny bit of fae blood inside them. It can’t be helped really. Some
times people have sex with fairies and they can’t get pregnant just from that, but when they do have a child later on, there’s a little bit of fae inside the child. It gets passed down to another child. It’s not enough for any of them to shapeshift or become a fairy completely, but it’s enough for one of us to notice it inside one of them. It’s enough for them to see things in the woods they might not otherwise see.
I wasn’t supposed to be in that shelter on the day you walked in with your mother and father. I was trapped. Stuck in the body of a dog. Not just a dog—a mixed breed, a mutt the shelter personnel labeled “lab mix.” I had been too wild, I killed the wrong people, and so I was cursed to live out the rest of my life as a dog as punishment. They left me in a kill shelter, fully aware that if no one adopted me, I would die.
I rode home in the back of your parents’s blue station wagon. I leaned my head over the back seat so I could poke my nose out your window. The air smelled of spring flowers, grass, other dogs, and the sweat of humans running, walking, and riding bicycles. Every scent told me a story I could read at lightning speed. One after another. I couldn’t believe it! Dogs get all this from sticking their head out of a car? What happened when they went into the woods? Why didn’t their heads explode from all this information?
I wasn’t the kind of fae who shifted and could smell things like that. I was an Irish fairy, a stealer of children. But even in the fae world, there’s order. It’s not just all chaos and parties with stolen children. There are always people you can’t ever touch and I was stupid. A silly young fairy who took a pair of children who were so untouchable, they were practically made of gold. And my family, all the fairies I had known for ages, turned on me. They banished me across the sea to America of all places—to a kill shelter in Rhode Island.
You brought me home to a wide-open backyard with a hill and a few tall trees beyond. “That’s Eliza, the season tree,” you whispered into my ear and pointed at a tall oak just beyond the back corner of your brown wooden fence, “I call her that because she always tells me what season it is.”
I couldn’t say anything in response, so I licked your hand. You did seem to have some fae in you, though upon observing both your parents, I couldn’t figure out which one gave it to you. Both of them seemed to love animals and nature but they didn’t give off any sort of fae energy.
I let the mystery of it go to practice running across the expanse of your yard from end to end. I tripped and fell over on my face, getting dirt up my nose with another thousand stories of skunks and foxes and rabbits crossing that dirt over time, that exact place between one patch of grass and another, and a part of me wanted to stay there for hours just sniffing the ground but I heard you calling so I kept running.
You liked to chase me.
Already, we could run round and round together and fall down in a pile. You stuck your tongue out like mine while taking deep breaths, totally unaware that I was actually sucking up more stories about the animals of your neighborhood. Things you could never read with your tongue. There was a wild cat that I wanted to chase so badly, but she hadn’t been around in a long time and would now smell my scent in the yard. Maybe she would never come back. A fox was nearby, too, but he rarely entered that square of open space your father built his wooden fence around. I wanted to share these things with you because you loved all animals, not just me, but the only sounds I could manage were barks and whines.
Days turned into years.
I watched you grow tall. I watched you play in the yard with your friends. You dressed me up for Halloween every year and placed a party hat on my head for New Year’s Eve when all of your cousins came over and your grandmother watched you while your parents went out to parties. I never realized that a dog’s life could be fun.
As time passed, I began to forget about Ireland. I stopped dreaming about the rolling green hills, the sheep, the crashing waves on gray rocks, the children I stole. The glittering beauty of a grove of oak trees with their branches laced together, where we used to leap and whirl, where we sang songs and ate wild berries long into the nights.
I lost my last memories while you were still young—about eight or nine, I suppose.
They held the faces of those two children. Royalty. They had blue eyes, freckles across their cheeks, and red hair down to their waists. Twins. I was so happy to steal twins. I held their tiny hands in mine. I brought them over to the place of streams and mist, woods as old as time itself, the grove where we danced. As soon as a human child sets their feet down in that place, they can never go home.They’re gone from the human world forever.
My last memory of those twins was their wide eyes once they knew what it meant to follow a fairy into the woods. To cross a barrier that couldn’t be crossed again.
They weren’t afraid like other children. They didn’t cry out or try to run. They just gave each other a secret smile and began to dance like us. They spun round and round until the other fairies came and saw who they were and saw me dancing alongside them.
Then everything went black.
I woke up in a cage, feeling drugged and tired. I scratched behind my ears with my paws and realized I was not a fairy anymore. My beautiful form, my tattered dress of leaves, my long hair, my sparkling skin—all of it was gone.
I cried for days before you came and brought me home.
By the time you were ten, I only knew the smells of your yard, the neighborhood, the feeling of your slim arms wrapped around me, the feeling of your couch below me. It was like sleeping on a cloud! I only knew dog things and ate dog food and once caught a rabbit in the yard but when I tried to bite into it, the taste of the blood and hair and skin repulsed me. I had been trained away from my own nature by human conditioning. But through it all, I didn’t mind. I was genuinely happy, even eating that crunchy dog food from a bag.
You hit me sometimes. When I couldn’t do what you were trying to make me do. I didn’t even mind though. I forgave you faster than you forgave yourself. You were a child and somewhere in my body, somewhere close to my dog heart, I remembered how deeply I understood children. You were impulsive. When you wanted something, there was no patience—there was only that burning desire that had to happen in that exact moment and not a minute later. You were so creative that if adults didn’t rein you in or stop you from time to time, you might have stayed awake all night telling wild stories with your toys, or wandered off and never found your way home again, only seeking adventure after adventure.
You were convinced I was not just a dog—that I was something greater, too. I was a lover in a past life of yours. I was your brother. I was your friend from another place. I was human trapped in a dog’s body. I was your soul mate.
You gave me so many love names and I claimed them all with my brown eyes locked onto your brown eyes—together. Nestled in the richness of that love story you wrote for us, I forgot that I was still going to die. Not the next year or the next, but before you were grown—I would die.
I spent your teenage years hiding behind the couch or the side of your bed because you hated your parents with such a passion that I was terrified to get between you. I never knew when you would fly off the handle at them and start screaming or throwing things. You and your mother were both deaf, but you read lips and rarely used your hands to speak. You two were chained to your voices and you never knew when you were being too loud. I don’t know how your father could stand the two of you.
I didn’t understand all that yelling. I heard your words, I listened, but it seemed to me that if you all just kept your mouths shut, you’d be happy again. You could be like you were when you were six and driving home with me in that blue station wagon.
In the summer of my dying, your mind lost its sharpness.
You still hated your father for drinking, which I could never understand because in Ireland, drinking was something every man did. Every single one. Your mother nagged you so much that you ignored everything she said and drove off to spend time with your friends.
> You wouldn’t leave me, though.
You knew I was on my way out from the limp in my step, the fact that I couldn’t race you in the yard anymore, the vomit I spilled onto the hallway carpet in small, thick piles. You were furious. You were determined to keep me alive, to keep me by your side. You brought me to concerts at a park in the city, even though all that noise and human chaos made me a little sick.
I tried to hide my weaknesses from you. I tried to lift my head and rest it on your leg and not let it be too heavy.
How strange it was—to be the stolen one.
Because in all those years when I thought that you were mine, that I stole you—maybe not your body but your heart—the truth was that you stole me. You took my puppy body in your arms one day and held me and you never let go. I had never known a love like that, not with other fairies, and not even with the children I stole.
I belonged to you.
I didn’t want it to end.
I was trapped in a dog body, but my dog body set me free. It made me want to live on and on as long as you lived.
It was late August when I couldn’t stop gagging at night. Sometimes my little stream of yellow vomit didn’t even come. Sometimes it was transparent bile that left a sour taste in my mouth. I was so hungry, but every time I ate, I threw up.
You never left my side.
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