“Enough, Jenny,” he says. “He’s dead.”
A lot of people think that when vampires die, they explode or catch on fire. That’s not true. As death sets in, our kind subside slowly into ash, like a bowl of fruit ripening into mold and rot on speeded-up film. We all stand in a sort of triangle, watching as Mr. DuChamp starts turning slowly black, the tips of his fingers beginning to crumble.
You start crying, which seems ridiculous, but Charles takes you into the other room and talks to you softly like he used to talk to me when I was little.
So then it’s just me, witness to Mr. DuChamp’s final end. I take the little broom from the fireplace and sweep what’s left of him among the scorched wood and bones.
When you and Charles come back out, I’m standing there with the broom like Cinderella. Charles has his arm around you. You look blotchy and red nosed and very human.
“We’re going to have to run away, Jenny,” he says. “Mr. DuChamp’s master knew where he was. He’ll come looking for him soon enough. I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out what happened.”
“Run away?” I echo. “Run away to where?” I’ve never been anywhere but here, never lived anywhere but in this house.
You explain that you have an uncle who has a farmhouse upstate. You and Charles plan to hide out there. I am welcome to come along, of course. Charles’s creepy little sister.
This is what Charles always wanted — a real girlfriend, someone who will love him and listen to music with him and pretend that he’s a regular boy. I hope that you do. I hope that you will. You might be stuck with each other for a long time.
“No,” I say. “I’m okay. I’ve got somewhere else to go.”
Charles furrows his brow. “No, you don’t.”
“I do,” I say and give him the evilest look I can manage.
I guess he doesn’t really want me to come to the farmhouse, because he actually drops it. He goes upstairs to pack up his stuff, and you go with him.
The remains of dinner are still on the table. The glasses full of wine. The four plates, only one of them with food on it. The remains of our last dinner party.
When I’m done cleaning up and I’ve said good-bye to you and Charles, when you’ve given me the address in case I change my mind, when you’ve hugged me, even, my neck so close to yours that I can smell your blood through the pores of your skin, then I’m going to get ready, too.
Six girls is nothing to me. I can ask them to help me find my mother in parking lots, to look for lost kittens, to pick me up after I fall from my bike and skin my knee. I don’t care if they scream or cry. It might be a little annoying, but that’s it.
The hardest part is going to be driving while sitting on a phone book. But I’ll figure out a way. If I want the job, I’m going to have to show the master I’m just as good as DuChamp. I know every detail of the story of his rise to power. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Everything he did, I can do.
As I leave town, I’ll drop this letter in the mail, just so you know what my plans are.
Thank you very much for coming to my party. I had a lovely time.
Slice of Life
by LUCIUS SHEPARD
I’ve never done it with another girl, but Sandrine gets me thinking how it would be. She’s got the kind of body I wish I had, long legged and lean, yet with enough up top to keep boys happy. Her nose is too big and beaklike for her narrow face, but after you study on her awhile, it seems to settle in above her generous mouth, becoming part of her beauty. The light that shines her into being, reflecting off God knows how many shards of mirror, makes it difficult to judge — most times she’s scarcely more than a sketch with a few hazy details — but I figure if all her color was restored, her hair would be jet-black and her eyes dark blue like the ocean out past the sandbar on a sunny day.
She says I’ll never leave her, that we’re two of a kind, and who knows, maybe she’s right.
If you’re born in these parts, in one of the sad, savage, broken towns along the St. John’s River, now reduced to cracker slums. shells of old mansions with fallen-in roofs and busted-out screens on the front porch and people inside gray as the weathered boards, moldering amid live oaks and scrub pines. Surrounded by a prefab debris of bait shops and trailer parks and concrete block roadhouses where redneck coke dealers shoot nine ball for crisp new hundreds and bored fifty-dollar hookers sit at the bar wishing for a Cadillac to bear them away on one last windy joyride. Towns like this, towns like DuBarry, Sandrine says, they stain you with their colors and make you vulnerable to their deceits. You can go to Dallas or New Orleans or somewhere they speak a foreign language, you can live there the rest of your days, but that won’t change a thing. No matter how far you travel or how long you stay, you never feel real anywhere else and you’re always living a measly cheat of a life that makes you think you’ve got to get over on folks even when you’re doing just fine playing it straight.
I’ve never been south of Daytona or west of Ocala or north of Jacksonville, so I’m no expert, but maybe Sandrine’s got a point. People who return to DuBarry after years of being away, you can see the relief in their faces, as if the pressure is off and they can’t wait to start dissolving in the heat and damp of the town, like the pigs’ feet atop the counter down at Toby’s, mutating in their jar of greenish brine.
Take Chandler Mason.
After graduating from FSU she headed for New York, where she hired on at ESPN. She started out reading the news on one of their sports talk shows and before long she landed a job as a sideline reporter for NBA games; then, a few years later, suddenly, with no reason given, she was back in DuBarry, strutting her stuff in designer clothes. Whenever she strolled by, the men sitting in rusted lawn chairs out front of Toby’s would develop a case of whiplash. Following a whirlwind courtship, she married Les Staggers, an ex-marine who teaches phys ed and algebra at County Day, and popped out three kids, put on fifty, sixty pounds, and now when she passes, the men in the lawn chairs say something like “Must be time to water the elephants,” and share a big laugh. She goes on a liquor run a couple of times a week, weaving an unsteady path to the ABC store, wrapped in a cloud of diaper stink, and on Sundays she accompanies Les to Jacksonville Beach, where he’s a deacon in some screech-and-holler church. Otherwise she stays home with the blinds drawn and her brats yowling, drinking gin-and-Frescas, the TV on loud enough to drown out the twenty-first century.
Sandrine says that’s the best I can hope for, unless I help her, unless she helps me, and I can probably expect a whole lot worse, considering my reputation.
— Go fuck yourself, I tell her.
— That’s all I ever do, says Sandrine.
This matter of my reputation has come under fire from predictable quarters. Boys who I won’t let touch me write my name on bathroom walls and talk about the things I’ve done with them, things they’ve only heard about. They go to singing “Louie, Louie” whenever they see me coming. Louie’s short for Louise — it got tacked on me in grade school for being a tomboy, and ever since they started with that dumb song, I’ve been trying to convince my friends to shorten it further and call me Elle. Not that the singing bothers me so much. but it’s annoying and I think Elle’s a name I’ll grow into someday. Old habits die hard, though. I expect I’ll be stuck with Louie for as long as I hang around DuBarry.