hunger

            When I opened the main door, the shadows fixed their squinting stare at me like deers stricken by a near gunshot, with those bloodstained eyes and bubbling mouths aroused by the exterior midday dazzle, fragmented by my quivering figure. 

            Those closer to the entrance refuged in the darkness of the place, however, when slightly caressed by the spectral hands of the sun. As a natural result, smoke clouds reeking of dead cells were expelled from them, and wandered around for the rest of the meeting as ghosts seeking bodies to own. But while they became distant since mine already sheltered one, I struggled to keep my lungs fresh. 

            They weren't terrified of the sun’s sudden presence because they grew used to it, but that of my inner torch, so I shut the door and sat on the closest chair I could find. They rarely attack now, the letter I got mentioned, but I had remembered that a few people went missing in the city, so I remained cautious in my place as a hunter prepared to shoot. It could have been anyone. 

            I had no clue with whom I had to reunite, since the stranger I’d been exchanging letters with for the last months said they’d be the most normal looking one in the room, but how would I identify them in a surrounding crowd of seamless faces? 

            None approached me to establish verbal contact, they just stared at me with those haunting beacons, that shone in the dark like my sister’s ghastly lantern, as she was engulfed by the ravenous mouth of an iced lake; fading down while I stood in frozen silence and confusion, years ago. 

            The vibration of their cold bodies trying to tame their instincts shook the entire building. Just enough for me to perceive it under my feet. It was their animal hunger boiling up, I guessed, so I also thought that, if I had two gallons of warm blood facing me, my suppressed thirst would take the leash as it usually did. 

            Their teeth chattered as if in the cold. I could picture them crushing their tongue with their sharpened teeth, as their throats delivered a subtle moan for a prey that didn’t have a chance to flee: a sound only heard from starving night animals, at the untranquil and brisk beating of the only working heart in the place: mine. Which pounded so hard against my ribs that I could nibble the bone powder in my dry mouth, so I swallowed my trapped saliva and took the letters out to pretend reading them.

            I instinctively placed my hand on my chest to shield it while my eyes traced the elegant and cursive handwriting, but I couldn't read past the Dear Mrs. Koli…, since their gazes targeted me for interrupting their human-like rituals. They want to feel human again, so they go there and talk about their lives and what they did before turning, the mysterious sender wrote when I asked: what do they hunger for now?” I got them. I had a mission too. 

            Because of the creature's tardiness, I stood up and decided to leave, but a permafrosted hand clasped my right shoulder. I became uneasy at the thought that it would be stuck on it for hours, since its glacial touch trespassed my garments and pierced my skin like the fangs of a rabid dog. Just as frigid and stuck as my tongue and my sister's when licking the glassy light streets in front of our childhood house. I was unlucky enough not to get severely ill. Unlike her. 

            The stranger had fixed his skeletal fingers on my shoulder, so I looked at it in deep ponder to figure out what could have been my next move, feeling my face morphing into a disgusting mask of discomfort: I softly lowered myself down my seat and he understood. 

            "I apologize for arriving late,” the man said as he sat next to me and everyone restarted their activities, “but it warms my heart that you did come.” 

            Heart. Heart. Heart. I wondered if his was still alive under the freezing poison of his curse. 

 

… 

            Conversations of what the creatures cooked last night (even if they couldn't dare to eat it), what the shapes of the morning skies were like, and what uncanny visions they dreamt of, lifted an uncomfortable-to-dive-in mist off the scene. The lights became brighter and cozier on the eyes like the steady flame of a candle, so I finally caught that this place looked like any typical meeting room: pale-dead walls, no windows to remember freedom existed out there, and uncomfortable cheap chairs; but overall, people re-engaging with their humanity. 

            “You’re brave,” he smiled, displaying his tenebrous smile and moving his chair closer to mine. 

            “You know why I'm here,” I muttered, flagging a couple of letters. 

I was never impressed at the accidental discovery of the century: the existence of vampires, not even when he sent me a letter declaring his secret and intentions: he helped humans who were about to die, and luckily for him, I had a terminally ill sister. Other issues

stung my skull instead, including the growing suspicions of my upstairs old neighbors, who witnessed me red-coated in the middle of the night. 

            “When I saw you in that counseling session, you acted really thoughtful, almost stran-”

            “How must I behave when families grieve over their dead loved ones?” 

            “Like you're mentally and physically there.” 

            “I’ve cried enough. But hope hasn’t gone.” 

            “I’ll help,” he finished. 

            He expected a thanks from me, but I pondered on the night before the evening I found his first letter under my door, when a fisherman barely had caught me getting rid of huge bags near the lake. 

            The vampire gave up after a long silence and drank from a grayish thermos, whose liquid faded it into subtle crimson tones. My stomach gurgled from wondering what it contained, so I looked to the side and kept that question for myself. A bestial erosion ate my inners as I imagined that taste on my tongue buds, but the acids started to make their way up to my throat. If I looked sick, he didn't say anything. So, we discussed for hours the pros and cons in the short and long term of becoming one like him, including about what a huge duty and burden it was to live forever and crave human blood, yet I deeply understood the latter. 

            To confess, I wanted to free myself from my sister. 

​

… 

            The breeze hurt. I captured with my free hand the winds of the blaze that burnt it all, despite that the fiery warmth opened my wounds and brought to me my beloved ones' cryings. They ceased and I was left alone. I'd been suspended in the air for days after the men who attacked the village hung me on a cross, but that other man with strange eyes said the pain would wane with time, as soon as the bite took effect. I knew it’d be meaningless to call out for mom and Roman, since I saw when they were thrown to the firepit and turned to bones. Their raining ashes became ice and snow eventually, so after I healed, I ripped the rope around my neck and limbs; but the sun hurt too. 

 

            I opened my eyes. His hand was still on mine. The scorching hit of that ancient sun persisted in the present. I had savored his visions... his past… the hunger in another’s flesh. Under the shade of the balcony we were, the silky marble he had for skin denoted the frailty of being a nocturnal creature. It seemed to be that any fluttering touch would take several

skin layers off, as if blowing a dandelion and expecting not to let any seed fly away. A few rivers of purple blood also ran visibly along his neck, temples, and thin lips, open to any chance of destruction. So, I wondered how such a fragile-looking creature could have survived wars, illnesses, persecution, and famine. 

            There was nothing in his eyes but black oceans drowning the last traces of human warmth in his existence, but he moved, talked, and stared at me with a starving passion, and he surely did write those letters. He was as alive as I could be and that was enough to process. 

            “If it's not too late, just a bite is enough,” he proceeded to draw out the bright and sharp knives where his human teeth once were. 

            A shivering assault almost reversed my cold emotions, but I had seen and felt what he did centuries ago, when he died and came back to life. He was the same and not, but I didn’t mind about those side-effects since Nina suffered too. Every deal has a price to be paid. 

            “And the most important thing,” he got closer so I could only hear, although I was sure that they all had extremely sensitive ears, “you will desire freedom for eternity.” For a speck of time, I saw myself out there, in the wild, seeking that freedom he always wrote about: I, amongst the men who destroyed his village. Bare skin but blood-covered, dazzled by the fumes of the burnt corpses I danced over, and welcomed by the mist of the forest; whereas up there, the night sky approved my actions. 

            “I've been on earth for more than eight centuries,” he distracted me. I looked around and did not have a way to escape in case I needed to, “My heart has broken and healed too many times by loss and love. I’ve been reshaped by the world as I've reshaped it too.” 

            The sun penetrated the other side of the earth, as if it devoured what hid in the opalescent horizon. A wolf swallowing the eyes of a moribund deer. 

            Not only was the eternal-man safe and sound resisting the flames of our star, but so was I, regardless of the multiple wall signs of vanished people in every nearby building I saw from up there. 

            A strange tranquility in the silence of the evening hushed my awakened survivor's urges though. After all, despite fairy tales depicted him, and his congeners, as cruel animals, all the vice and barbarism I've seen came from humans. I was the proof of that. 

            “I even became a god once, until Christians evangelized my slaves and I became a demon for them all. I could be one though.”

            He laughed in an unusually high-pitched voice, like a bat that chirped to find home. Under the upper lips, his fangs became larger like freshly sharpened axes, and the abnormal ink blotches he had for pupils splattered more in his sclera. I wasn’t in the position to point out things he already knew because I had my very own perversions. 

            I was half-dead too, metaphorically? 

​

… 

            I never talked about if he was or not an insane murderer that looked for his next victim, by taking advantage of their desperation, as I did myself. When someone is so attached to their truth with such pride and tragedy as him, those who take their time to listen to their stories learn atypical perspectives of life, but when you're desperate you will believe in anything. Who’s crazier at the end? 

            “I keep doing this because I want to help people somehow,” his gaze twitched at the vanishing star, squinting with visible effort, “this is the only thing I can do, and if that helps, I will use it.” 

            Silence. 

            “Wouldn’t you like this immortality for you instead?,” he asked, “you’re a nurse Elizabeth, you could help people more than you do now.” 

            I desired a normal life, to be a woman with neither regrets nor unfinished business. Nina was the one who deserved such punishment because I'd gone through enough. “My sister is suffering,” I displayed my tragic expressions to obtain his buried humane parts, “all these years she hasn't gotten better... this is her chance.” 

            He hadn't been able to read my mind, hence my true intentions, because just like asking for permission to get inside a house, doing so also had inescapable natural rules. But he understood my silent doubting and passed an arm over my shoulders. 

            “Take as much time as you need Elizabeth, this is-” 

            “You’ll know my decision tomorrow night.” 

            I interrupted and left the balcony since I needed to meditate. Although the world’s play had reached its end under the veil of the moon, my hunger continued to chant in the dark. I was not a monster like them, so I could put out the flames inside my stomach whenever I wanted. 

            As I crossed the meeting room, the creatures aimed their attention at me, as if static in time. They didn’t move but their soulless eyes along my path, so I opened the door and went

back to reality. I took the same bus I used before and after every shift to head towards the hospital I worked in. 

            For the first time in my life, I had the chance to move the pieces on the chessboard I'd been forced to inherit and polish. For any normal person I saw on the streets, there lived the many Elizabeths I would be: a clothes seller, a bus driver, a newspaper vendor, a cook… 

            My depraved hunger would leave its place for a normal one, but when I stared at the back of the front seat, I was reminded of my nature, since a little girl asked through a flier: Have you seen me?, with a perpetual smile. The same smile without the two front teeth that vanished when my axe hit her low. 

            My stomach gurgled. 

​

... 

            It was a dark night. The city’s physical emptiness impaled my heart. A sole row of streetlights led me towards my destination as if the world seemed to be aware of my existence. I took different shortcuts to arrive quickly. I crossed an alley smelling like rotting meat and beer cans, where a homeless pervert used to live before I led him deeper with a spicy promise, but he ended up drowning in his liquids and severed genitalia. 

            The Saint Januarius Hospital was perfectly framed at the end of that alley. It was a tasteless white health center that resembled more to a funeral home where patients rarely came out, and that was surrounded by bare trees and scavengers waiting for leftovers. There was the purgatory where my sister spoiled for more than two decades, rising under a half-eaten moon. 

            I wouldn’t encounter any problem visiting her since I was a care-taker there. It was unusual though, since most workers would never step foot in the building outside of their shift hours, but not uncommon for nurses to take advantage of their position somehow. I had seen it all and done it too, especially when I stole morphine and sedatives to tranquil stray victims, and blood bags when my stomach didn’t bear hunger any longer. 

            “Reynfield’s syndrome,” I heard the doctor’s cracking voice in my mind, his eyes becoming unfathomable and distant before me, “clinical vampirism.” 

            I walked as confidently and fast as I always did to avoid questions, and no one seemed to mind about me either. 

            I knocked three times when I got in front of her door, expecting her to say in her child-version voice: come in, Lizzie, yet I got no reply but the steady buzzing of her oxygen

ventilator. The room was filled with ribbons, balloons, stuffed white doves, and chocolates that no one would eat. In the bed, there was no Nina but a corpse unwillingly dying for the second time, unaware of the prayers and gifts that wished for her recovery. 

            A washed-out lacerated painting had replaced the beautiful features she was known for as a kid: silver skin dulled by the fluorescent ceiling lights, protruding eyeballs moving fast under fine veiny eyelids, what's she dreaming of?, a visible heart fighting to beat in her breast, and colorless hair strands glued to a skull carved in perfect shape. She was a skeleton lacking muscle and fat, hollowed deep down a destroyed soul. An alive human fossil. 

            Seeing her like that rejoiced me though, since a painful smirk would arise on her face occasionally. The love she even got in her eternal sleep set my core on fire. Conscious or not about it, my life was tied to hers like a puppet to its puppeteer. My family and acquaintances had obliged me to wear those invisible strings as perpetual cuffs, eradicating my fate like alcohol seething an open wound and bubbling my DNA; cleansed permanently. “You're strong and healthy. You belong to Nina,” they would say. However, thanks to Avram, I had found the match that would blaze the slashing and tangled strings around my body, and suffocate the monster inside until death. For freedom. 

            Either turning my sister into a vampire so she could heal or waiting for a few more years for her to pass away. Those were the options, and although they both tempted me, I wouldn’t tell him about it. 

            Or, I could deal with it with my own hands. 

            That last one though, would persist in my brain throughout the years. The impulse to sedate her in the woods, take her heart out to make sure she wouldn’t revive, and leave her on the river to drift away and fade in the mist along with the others, never waned. Solely after that, I would flee amongst the hysterical souls of those who killed and were killed generations ago, and wonder if I had done enough to take my place up there in the night sky, with those staring souls; while my unnatural hunger would be fetched as it’d rip the spirit out of the chest, in a thunder bath. 

            Yet, I always weeded that tumor out because of the bit of love for her in me, due to the few good memories: the lake, where everything started and finished. So, when I saw the image of both Nina’s, the bedridden adult and the little girl in the picture on the nightstand, something sparked in my mind. I had all I could need in her room, so I closed the door.