“Mom! Mike Haley told me that I’m actually eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood on Sunday. Is that true?”
“Why yes my love, of course it is.”
The boy burst into tears in a feeble manner that would have surely bought him a thorough whopping on the school playground. “I don’t want to be a canon ball and a vampire.” A web of snot spun from his nose.
“Oh it’s not so bad, hun. This is why he died for you, so that he could exist inside of you always. He’s one of those people who wants to get some teeth stuck in him!”
“But people taste gross!”
A quick smirk was shared between the sisters. Shana prodded, “Do you know that from experience, Luke?”
He offered a sniffling concession. “No, Aunt Shana. But why would people taste good? What kind of person would want to taste another person? Mom! What kind of person would want to get tasted?”
Chapter Four
It had been a decade and a half since Shana borrowed a car without permission. Suze wouldn’t care, so long as it didn’t get all banged up. Regardless, the adolescent thrill took Shana’s mind off whatever it was keeping her up that night. There was no particular fixation that ran laps around her restless mind. Instead it was a nagging dread that kept her staring at the ceiling.
Blown out industrial zones and boarded up houses provided serenity during Shana’s drive, reminders of the impermanence of the things humans create. Liberation lied in the destruction wrought by human neglect, an impulse which remains blind to the very abodes and workplaces that are so temporarily crucial to the waking lives of people. When Shana was in high school, these industrial parks, then only abandoned at nightfall, provided the perfect safe haven for her and the boys she didn’t feel much for. It was a private place to race those other girls through rites of passage. There, a boy put his lips inside her mouth when they kissed. Another fingered too vigorously as if informed less by his own instinct than by his older brother’s VHS porn collection.
The rust enveloping these warehouses’ loading docks, the tall weeds comfortably nestled in the pavement’s cracks were comforting reminders of how long gone that barely fulfilling teenage sex life was. But when Shana said to herself “thank God that’s over,” the dread that kept her up that night had decided to join her in the car.
As if driving through some wrinkle in a dream, Shana found herself pulling up by the wrought iron fence of Lake View Cemetery. Impervious to the bad vibes most feel at a burial ground at night, Shana hopped the fence and started on a stroll. The permanent gray cloud above the cemetery broke, as it always did, just enough to let strands of moonlight illuminate this or that tombstone. Some would have felt terror in the divine moonlight singling out the spot of an individual’s decay. She wandered by the graves of John D. Rockefeller and Elliott Ness. She wandered by the Haserot angel. She wandered by a hole from which a coffin was rudely ripped.
Soon, she stood frozen with something tickling inside her belly. Thoughts became muddled like a radio station turning to static. Had she been more sensitive to her body she would have felt perspiration leech into her socks, her feet growing chilly. But all she was aware of was a sense of dread turning warmer and this new urge to soothe the first erogenous zone her hand could touch. It was her neck, and she pressed the base of her palm against her pulmonary artery as she rubbed the top of her spinal cord with a crude, rough claw formed by her fingers. With each rub, her breasts grew tender. So sensitive were her lower lips that she could feel her pubic hair bristling against her clit, rendering her whole being a cloud of white electricity.
Hot breath streamed out of her mouth, remarkably cold air replaced it when she breathed in. Despite remaining clothed, some force penetrated deep inside of her, not simply like an protrusion in her canal. Instead, it was of some demonic, mystical proportion, pleasuring an entire inside world in some manner forbidden by the limits of human sexual knowledge. Again that white electricity, this time romancing her entire mass like a toaster tossed in a bathtub.
And with a snap of Father Time’s finger, she came to in an alien patch of grass between headstones marked in Latin. Sweat made her face cold, and when she went to wipe some away, she discovered that her hand was just as wet, scented with her secretions. It was all too surreal, and Shana wondered if she ever did take her sister’s car for a nighttime joy ride or if in fact that insomniatic dread made way for a slumber rife with vivid dreams.
But the sweat was all too real and the granite of the headstones all too rough. She remembered something Baker told her one night as they sat cross-legged in counsel with the bronze angel that guards Francois Haserot’s grave. It was the summer after high school graduation, a summer spent disregarding her imminent adult life: jobs, relationships, taxes, material things. Caressing the edge of the angel’s sword, bronze and erect against the earth, Baker explained to Shana the sexual magic that accumulates in a cemetery so large, so old. Not all spirits die fulfilled, and in fact many die repressed.
The Christian burial ceremony, he explained, is one that reduces souls to ashes and ashes, dust and dust. Could you imagine being laid in your final bed with an incantation decrying you a sexless pile of powder? Needless to say, there are spirits who take this as a challenge, molesting whatever living being they can possess long enough. There have been widows who suffer the most ecstatic orgasms while laying flowers on graves, priests who must hold the Bible in front of their semen soiled crotches as the congregation makes its solemn way post-funeral.
By the angel that night, Shana was privy to her true sexual awakening. She felt she had morphed from a fumbling adolescent to a woman with a body, losing sense for the bounds of romance and pleasure. Baker would treat his tongue like a feather, her nipples like wounds throbbing red around day-old splinters. The flesh of her belly was a text to study, a lush fabric to stroke, not just the pesky space between her breasts and vagina.
No part of her lower regions was off limits, with one long kiss starting just above her right knee, following her lower half’s parabola across her nest to the thigh just above her left knee, and concluding with a gentle, broad lick back up to her lips, with a curt flick of his tongue’s tip against her well-swollen hood.
Much like how she suddenly found herself in alien plot of cemetery tonight, Shana found Baker’s rigid cock in her hand, thick as a copper pipe and rigid as a goose three days dead. Somehow, it was colder than his hands. But she didn’t even notice that it should be full of warm blood, as she was too fixated by its splendor, by the fact that in her hand it felt as if she was holding some ancient scepter, a cherished relic of eons past.
Inside of her, the icy priapism stole her breath, and her moaning was muted as if she were making love in outer space’s immaterial vacuum. Their bodies existed solely in the service of their organs, and the organs in the service of celestial pleasure which makes any living being forget that they in fact exist. Every thrust was a boost further into an erotic fugue state, further out into a cosmos whose stardust was nothing but flecks of ecstasy. That was the night of a revelation, of a new kind of pleasure which she never imagined possible from a penetration so simple, so animal.
That was the night that Baker tried to draw her blood with his teeth. In the exact instant of the most intense climax of her heretofore short life, Shana had to fight off the very man who helped her actualize herself as a full woman. Today, she is still not sure how she deflected the undead’s hypnotizing will, and wonders if it was her pure ignorance of the force she faced. Somehow Baker was subdued, and Shana took her chance to run.
Shana stopped running after just a couple of dozen yards, and caught glimpse of the dejected lover sulking beneath the bronze angel. Drawn not by the sexual magic, not by her nubile urges, but by her own compassion, she approached the very man who just tried to rob her off her mortality. At this point, she had no idea that this is what Baker intended to do during coitus, she just thought he was getting freaky in a bad way.
But that was the ni
ght that Baker explained he was an eternal being, centuries old and deathless. That he fed on blood and desired nothing more than to feed on Shana’s. She looked in his eyes and he in hers, and when Shana kissed his cold lips, chilled by years of lifelessness, he did not try to bite her.
Something about this touched her in a profound way. She made herself vulnerable and was rewarded instead of proven idiotic. The clasp of her earring came undone by her fingers’ swift, dexterous instinct and she hiked her black floral skirt up and pantyhose down to draw the earring’s prick against her skin. The first time she only managed to scratch, so she grabbed Baker’s arm with her free hand and dug deeper. The pain betrayed by her yelp was not a wholly unpleasant one.
Presenting her thigh and its small crimson spring, Shana warned in a harsh hush, “tongue only, if I see your teeth exposed, I promise I’ll run. I will.” Naïveté is the only explanation for the denial of the fact that she just presented the beast with the stuff off its life. For close to ten tender minutes, Baker slowly lapped up her blood. The wound’s sting was soothed by the vampire’s sensuous leeching. Just as she started to grow lightheaded, the wound seemed to clot and Baker moved up her thigh, expressing his gratitude in the truest way he could conceive. Shana was still sensitive from before and that was the first night on her life that she came twice at the hands of another.
They lay on wordless glow, soaking in the final hour before the sun’s corona would peak over the Ohio horizon. The only utterance was the vampire’s flirtation with his prey, the cooing explanation of the fact that next time, he would not be able to resist taking her blood on his own. His promise was to turn her into his eternal mate. He pointed out the mausoleum he called home and said it would be theirs. What Baker did not account for was Shana’s unusually strong will, a set of instincts that somehow made her psyche impervious to a vampire’s seductive brainwash.
That early summer evening was the last night that they met. Shana told only a few of her relationship with Baker, and even fewer of that night they shared. But she had a recurring dream ever since that Baker sucked her dry through that wound inflicted by the earring, and in the moment that the final drop of her blood was drank, Shana’s orgasm delivered her to the afterlife. It was a flash of bliss that blinded her until she regained vision on the other side of the river Hades.
Equally of note was the fact that she had the habit of storing her dildo in the freezer, a reminder of her supernatural lover’s peculiar endowment. She didn’t exactly hide the toy, and whoever opened her freezer tended to be equal parts dumb-struck and embarrassed.
After laying for a quarter of an hour or so, remembering that distant night with Baker and basking in the afterglow of the graveyard’s errant sexual magic, Shana decided to find the Haserot Angel. She was curious how the bronze had aged since she was an 18-year-old basking in its patch of grass. Little geographic hints in the graveyard conjured the map she had stored in her memory long ago, and she quickly became oriented, finding the angel at the end of a lingering, nostalgic journey through the former playground of her young romance. The angel had in fact not aged a bit, with white corrosion still streaking the green, oxidized bronze in nearly the precise pattern that it had a decade and a half ago.
Shana took the opportunity to meditate on no particular thought at all while basking in the angel’s tiny dominion. Her mind wandered in the same empty, pleasant way it does while drifting to sleep. The peacefulness was broken by a quick shuffling somewhere behind her. The mass of the shuffler was too great to be anything but a large creature, yet it was too clumsy to be the deer that frequent this particular final retirement community. While glancing around, and ultimately pivoting her body to find the source of the sound, she caught glimpse of Baker’s mausoleum. Even though this was the first time she explicitly thought of the old blood sucker all night, she realized that he had very much so been on her mind since she returned to Cleveland, tiptoeing around in there like a guest who was trying desperately not to impose.
She started towards his miniature temple, wondering for the first time want it looked like in there. Was it just a stone pedestal for a bed, like in the movies? Did he have some candles, maybe a book our two? Once again, her wandering mind was brought back down to earth by a coarse scurrying, once again behind her. She pressed on towards the mausoleum and heard the scurry grow closer. Her mind reverted to its teenage tunnel vision. “Could it be him? It must.” But somehow she noticed that the sun had started to lighten the gray on the gravestones, meaning Baker wouldn’t last a second outside.
A quick glance over her shoulder caught a man hobbling toward her, setting one foot forward and dragging the other leg with surprising agility. He was in a hurry to catch up with Shana, and the shape of his mouth suggested the one track mind of a predator with dinner in sight. This mouth had few teeth. Shana stared for a second at his eyes twitching into blinks, bizarre and mesmerizing on account of the fact that they never seemed to close or open in unison. The trance this inspired was broken when she noticed the ice pick clutched in his fingers so stubby that they may as well all have been missing digits.
She ran. She lost him. She hopped the wrought iron fence and dropped her keys twice trying to find the right one to unlock the driver’s door, not realizing that her sister’s car unlocked automatically once the magnetic key fob is within a certain radius. Somehow, the hobbling man found her, emerging not from some hole in the fence but lumbering down the sidewalk, foot forward, other dragged, foot forward, other dragged.
Shana tried the door out of panic, and was startled when it flew open. Realizing that this was a significantly nicer car than her own back on Long Island, she looked for the push button ignition and pushed it readily. She thought that pressing the button made the passenger window shatter, but instead it was the gimp’s ice pick. The car was suddenly in drive, the gas pedal as close to the floor as it would dip, and the stumpy fellow growing smaller in the rear view.
Chapter Five
When Shana awoke in the guest bed, she was sure she had dreamt it all. The incubus-induced orgasm, first off, was so like the ones she experienced in dreams about Baker. The angel not aging, the warehouses falling into cartoonish disrepair, the man with the icepick... Cleveland was a city of lucid strangeness, but never one of pure unreality.
It smelled like Suze had percolated some coffee in the kitchen, with the burnt Arabica’s scent bleeding through the walls of the house. Shana followed the aroma, one that ensured an easy transition into the day. She poured the coffee into an olive green mug, dug the almond milk out of the fridge and prepared the drink that would lull her back into this earthly plane.
Luke wandered in. “Morning, Luke.”
“Morning, Aunt Shana.” The boy was wholly distracted by his monomaniacal quest to for another bowl of Guava Pops. This required shimmying up the counter to reach the cabinet that was supposed to be off limits to him. Shana was too amused to stop the boy from obtaining his forbidden second serving. He grabbed the box successfully, and even replaced it in its exact position so his mother would never guess it had moved a hair.
“Bye Aunt Shana.” The boy wallowed out of the room, cradling his spoils.
As if on a conveyer belt transporting members of the same bloodline, Nate sauntered in. He was looking healthy these days, regardless of the spare tire that middle age so often affixes to men. He shot Shana a familiar smirk and nod. “Coffee still hot?”
Shana’s response took the form of a petite sip. Nate gave another little nod and poured himself a cup of steaming Joe. “How it’s it to be back in Cleveland hun?”
“Oh it’s better than being back in Indiana.”
“Most things are. I remember passing kidney stones being better than going back to Indiana.”
“Sounds like things are well between you and Suze.”
Nate took a long sip, too long for how hot his black coffee was. “Well sure.” He took another sip, this time taking a moment to savor the flavor. “Just don’t understand
where this new religious bent of hers came from. The exercising too, I guess. But at least I don’t have to get dragged to the gym every time she gets the itch to work out.”
Shana just kind of shrugged and sipped again. They sat on silence for a spell. Nate broke it. “Hey wanna check something out?” Shana followed his lead.
It was the car. It was fucked up.
“Looks bad, huh?” The dreamer had no response. “Police came by and took some shards of glass that had blood on them. Took an icepick too and figured they could use the prints on that with the blood from the glass to find the guy if he was already in their database.”
“But...”
Nate let it hang for a minute, politely waiting for the rest of the thought. After long enough he helped her. “But nothing was stolen, is the strange part. No sign that he entered the car either. Cop said sometimes homeless people will break in to take a nap or jerk off. No signs of either.”
Shock was the only feature on Shana’s face.
“What? You didn’t know homeless people jerk off?” Nate had a hardy laugh and gave her a light punch on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry hun, insurance covers the whole repair and even the tow truck to get it to the shop. Of course I doubt Suze is going to feel too good driving around in the car that some freak soiled with his blood.”
“Yeah, freak is right.”
Chapter Six
June in Cleveland was an easy time. The wind from Lake Erie provided good reprieve from the balmy late afternoon heat and lighting at night lent a romantic, sporadic glow on the people sipping beer on porches. The warm nights would bring people out of their houses, which was both good and bad. Good if those people were the neighborly types who wanted to chat about the progress of this or that plant in the garden. Bad if they were the meth-smoking, child-beating types who brought their paranoid quarreling out to air for the entirety of an unwitting block to gain a quick, thorough education on. Kids from those families were usually the ones to whack mailboxes with a bat, or nail a squirrel’s tail into the soil on their patchy, yellowed front lawn.
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