Crystal Odelle

Show Me Your Fangs

“Death is a spectrum,” I explain my decision to Dad.

“San Francisco,” he repeats over the phone like a dirty word. “I don’t want to lose you, baby.”

I laugh off the microaggression. Three years after coming out of the coffin, I know only Corena, a fiend of a fiend on Instagram, who’s had the politicized surgery, the extent of our relationship my “Get hell soon” comment and her black heart reply. I tell Dad my “close friend” respawned without complications.

“No sunny beaches, no warm hugs—no children,” he warns.

“I’ll get to choose my loved ones,” I say, “my immortal beloveds.”

“I’m coming with you,” he says. Since Mom’s disappearance, our relationship lurches. Though long-distance, Dad comforts me better than she did but, like a bad boyfriend, makes promises he can’t keep.

I thank him, say, “Please.” I need to believe we can change.

. . .

“Vampirism is a choice,” Jared messages.

“To be or not?” I type.

He LOLs.

I anticipate the question, have I had the surgery, and his rejection of my unrealized insides. Jared has the name of my high school bully, and when his dating profile asserts M/f relationships as the natural order for millennia, I throb. In therapy, I’ve effectively avoided unknotting my kink for mortals. I’m dying for F4F companionship, yet something about consensual subjugation by an overreactive primate feels intoxicatingly simple.

“Show me your fangs,” He writes.

I hesitate, comply.

“Good girl,” He says, my canines so close up the selfie could be a dog. “Meet me tomorrow, city park—” He instructs. Each word blots my blood, a delicious shudder “—midnight, alone.”

. . .

“ANOTHER SLAYING—Brandi Silvers, 126,” Corena posts on Instagram, citing that anti-vamp legislation has risen “… from only 40 bills last year to over 300.”

“Only 40,” I comment with a blue heart.

“fire-emoji globe-emoji fire-emoji but I’m so happy for you!” Corena DMs a second later. “Who’s your surgeon?”

“Dr. Belfry,” I share, and Corena lays a bed of exclamation marks. Despite the years-long waitlist, our surgeries with the renowned specialist will be performed a month apart.

“In vampire years, we basically have the same birthday,” I say.

“Same mothers!” Corena writes.

Twenty-one heart emojis at my fingertips, and not one captures how the undying meat in me leaps.

. . .

The park impresses me too much. A grove of ankle-deep mist, feeble streetlamp—the shadow world of in-between. The spot is a haunt, bleeding on the edge of daylife.

Up the trail, I spot a gnarled trunk, a lost woman, or—

Jared stands guardian-like before a corpse-pale tree split by lighting. I float well now and worry I’ll startle Him until He points me to the V. I perch, a foot higher, and His hug lands awkward. He asks about my day, and I apologize for reeking of burned coffee beans. Despite my supernatural stamina, I say, evenings at Starbucks for their vamp-inclusive healthcare drain me. Jared interrupts about the perks of His software developer gig. His boots and vest squeak between breaths, as if new leather, a borderline vampire hunter costume, as silly as it scares me. “Do you enjoy camping?” He asks, only to trample me about property and the ins and outs of home buying.

He asks about my day, and I apologize for reeking of burned coffee beans. Despite my supernatural stamina, I say, evenings at Starbucks for their vamp-inclusive healthcare drain me.

The bad conversation is sort of kinky—but does He want to have sex?

“Only mortal sex is sex,” Jared says, less scolding than script and missing my bid. His hobbies, His mortal wife and kids … I don’t want to be thinking about all the reasons Jared’s life bores me. I don’t want to be thinking. I want Him to hold a stake to my heart and order me to serve Him on my knees. I want to be worthless except as a vessel, His flesh puppet to put Himself inside, my pleasure His pleasure forever.

Jared speaks. I nod, expect nothing. I try to be good but gaze past Him. The tree isn’t dead. Two sprigs of leaves flap, a chorus of wings.

. . .

“Are you OK?” Corena messages, linking an article to the news. Dr. Belfry is wounded, a near-fatal slaying in her driveway before a dinner party with friends.

I ravage the internet for updates, risk a razor of dawn.

“My work will continue uninterrupted,” Belfry posts 11 hours later, cheeks granite, lips cracked, desperately needing lip balm, yet safe in her fuchsia coffin. “Unlike mortal supremacists, we will know dignity.”

Somehow, I feel worse. A healthcare worker slain, an insurance claim denied, a flight delayed—the care I need balances on a pyramid of catastrophes.

I call off work—mental health day. Not leaving my apartment probably doesn’t help. Corena’s account is deactivated after she posts, “Everyone’s fiend. Most don’t want to accept their immortality. It’s ‘scary,’ too ‘unnatural.’” Reddit says previous research on daylight and mental health represents a mortal-bias. “How do vampires have sex?” messages another chaser.

Dad calls. I dare answer. “Booked my flight!” he says. His country boy lilt lulls me to sleep, tales of a labor-worn retiree who once threw Mom’s cat across a room for pissing in his boot, now nursing boney-ribbed strays from a rocking chair in his double-wide in the hills of Kentucky, his babies.

. . .

Corena cheers while I dump Jared, a long response to his Easter barbeque invite—how kind He is, how vegetarian I am, how misaligned we are. “Good luck on your journey,” he replies, as if to say, “You won’t get far without me.”

Last night, Kansas banned the distribution of prescription vampire medication and out-of-state “smuggling.” “I’m not sad. I’m furious,” Corena writes. Legal, illegal, she’ll survive.

“We’re stronger than we think,” I say.

“Do you think I look like a vampress or could ever look like one?” Her eyes violet pools, curved wands her thighs, in the unfiltered selfie she shares, I see a sad twenty-something with pocked skin and an eating disorder. “Be honest,” she says.

“What is a vampress ‘supposed’ to look like?” I say.

“YES,” Corena shouts at the mortals who call her batty and fellow fiends trolling her a vampmedicalist. “As if dysphoria isn’t slaying me enough. MY relationship with MY body is MINE. Why can’t anything be a valid thing to want?”

I want to be honest. I admit dicing meals into crumbs to scatter around my plate to appear to eat, how control over my body feels necessary to survive until surgery. I know other vamps who binge, and we might seem unstable, revelers in excess. We’re coping in an apeirophobic world. I’m left gasping, “Do you think media representation influences our performance of vampirism?”

I know other vamps who binge, and we might seem unstable, revelers in excess. We’re coping in an apeirophobic world. I’m left gasping, “Do you think media representation influences our performance of vampirism?”

Corena blames the parents. “I saw in inpatient ‘care’ how so much of what families focused on was what the child looked like (healthy v unhealthy) rather than the actual emotional problems due to parental rejection or disgust.”

“‘They watch us dine on empty plates and drink from empty glasses,’” I quote Interview With the Vampire, the movie I watched religiously as a teen until my immortality dusked on me.

Corena heart-eyes, says, “Call anytime for a nibble.”

“I’d taste you,” I say.

“I would drink you dry,” she jokes.

Are we joking?

“You’re like, the best friend I have, lol,” she says.

“I would move to Kansas for you,” I say too much.

Before I can dispel any psychic damage, Corena dashes offline with a sparkles emoji, a trail of pricks and possibility.

I queue the soundtrack, tie a pillowcase around my neck, open a window. My cape doesn’t wave. Hope alone chills me. 309.8 miles away, facing cornfield, crow caw, and moonlight, I picture Corena doing the same. I see us from a distance, a mortal view—our mutual delusion, their revulsion—then higher, where nobody calls home.

Violins shriek, grieve. “Libera me,” begs the choir.

We’re not not-normal, I think. We’re not.

. . .

The day before my surgery, Dad calls. I take an early break and pace outside the Starbucks. “Down on my back again, kid,” Dad groans from a hospital bed. At his age, any time could be the last. I consider a flight change, him or me. My manager is cool about me leaving work early to decide if I’m cool losing hours toward healthcare eligibility. A streak of tears and frustration, storming out on the fucked-up system and myself, too, I don’t hear the boot steps before He grips my shoulder.

Jared brandishes sharp white wood, backs me against a hedge. I didn’t respect His thoughtful date spot, His grill mastery, His superior desire for a mature relationship. He reaches back as if to lunge but bares His neck. “Is this what you want?!” I recoil from how wrong He is. He yanks me into his arms, and it’s easy, how thirst can be a refuge, how I empty him.

People shout—a vampire, a man dead. Call 911? I think. Dad doesn’t pick up. Corena does. I tell her everything.

“We’re going to make it, baby,” she says.

Where will we go? How will we survive?

“Fly,” she says, and I believe we can.