This was written several years ago and is a precursor to the style that I would later use in Voice of the Blood. It was never finished but I like it so much that I thought I'd reprint it and see what people thought.
She’s gone now. Although it hurts to move, I can’t stop pacing the apartment, trapped but afraid to go outside, or even look out of the square of colorless light that is the window. I wonder if the street below has changed. I don’t doubt that it has, thus I’m afraid to look out and see the changes, as without, so within.
I must be losing my mind, thinking weird things like that. I have to make a choice &endash; either deny that the outside world is the same in the least, or deny what’s gone on inside the apartment for the last I don’t know how many days…
No. It’s real. One of Clair’s platinum hairs is lying on the pillowcase. Though Clair herself is not here, leaving me without so much as a warm hollow to rest in, a hint of girl-smell, she has been here, with me; things did happen.
I pace to the refrigerator and grab the bottle of orange juice I bought Friday night before I went out &endash; that’s good &endash; I can remember Friday. Friday I went to the supply story and got some 20 x 30 paper for my enlargements and some toning solution; I went to the studio and fucked around, I made contact sheets. When it began to get dark, that kind of sweet chablis twilight that means spring’s not far, I headed home, stopped on the way for orange juice, tampons, and TV Guide.
The juice burns the hell out of my chapped, throbbing, kiss-raw lips. It makes me want to throw up. My stomach &endash; Christ --
You know that burst of mental static, that paralysis, that big od Big Dead Time that comes before a great spasm of activity, a crossroads between fatigue and anxiety. I’ve just had one of those. I’d stood in front of the open fridge for an unaccountable hell of a long time.
I’m under the kitchen table now. The tiles soothe my hot cheek and nose. The fridge gapes brightly, like a shocked Presbyterian, spilling light in a box across the floor. I must be ill; I’ve a fever. The orange juice, a few inches away from me on the floor, mocks me.
I went out Friday night, that’s what I did. It was sleeting, not cold, the sky the color of good modeling clay. I got drunk at a bar, packed cheek to cheek with boys in flannel and women who stank of antiperspirant. I was drinking Snakebites. A woman was right beside me at the bar, giving orders to the tender in a voice so soft that he couldn’t hear her, even when she tried to shout. It was her eyes that caught my attention, really, a cool metallic mint green, or maybe robin’s egg, but so light in color that they resembled clear glass, seen sideways in sunlight.
I don’t remember inviting her home. It wouldn’t be like me to pick up someone when I’m on my period. Sure she was &endash; is &endash; beautiful, sure she &endash; licked the condensation from my glass around my fingers, she deftly manipulated the mental hoop piercing my right nipple, but &endash;
She’s back.
I scramble up, overturning a chair. By the time I’m in the front room, in front of the door, the world fragments into pixels and then vague misty white, and I’m out before I can think to drop my head between my knees.
Then I’m back in bed, head in Clair’s lap, and it’s as if I never awakened in the first place. She is wearing a very old split-pea green Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt, sleeves and collar hacked off as if with a knife or a lion’s teeth, and long ago. Without thinking I loop my arms around her waist and hide my face in the silk-velvet crease of her groin.
Gradually, I sleep.
I wake up still under the kitchen table, the fridge door still open. Clair was never here. It is nightfall, and the room has stopped executing that half-turn-stop, half-turn-stop. I’m all right.
I getup and mop up my dried bile-and-o.j. vomit and go to the bathroom. The low light is kind to me, but I can still make up the bruises dark on my thighs, the crook of my elbow, necklacing my collarbone a rosette of shadows.
No wounds though.
She bit me, but never broke the skin. It’s nothing any number of lovers wouldn’t have done. Bruises are delicious. They are the fruit baskets of physical souvenirs, more pleasant than crabs and less permanent than herpes. When I touch the hickeys, I get, at last, a semblance of Clair, a remembrance of her.
The front door is being jimmied. I dart silently into the main room and grab for my flannel robe, so as to be less naked in front of my aggressors. The lock coughs apart and the door cracks; a cobra flash of white, slender, braceleted arm slips through and unhooks the brass chain.
The hallway light blinds me like the headlighs of an oncoming truck. Two figures are silhoutted UFO-visitor style, but instead of bowling pin-headed, onyx-eyed beings from beyond the outer stars, two young people emerge from the glare, one a bit taller in a puffy down jacker, and the other, cowled in a black leather car coat and haloed with silver.
"Gosh, it’s so nice and dark in here." Clair’s wood-flute voice returns the darkness, closing the harsh incandescence out in the hall. "Do you mind if I plug in the night light?"
"You could have knocked," I say shakily.
Clair kneels and sockets the night-light, which I remember, a cheap celluloid dip-painted Jesus Christ, hands spread, robe making angles wings out of plastic drapery. Apparently, she brings it with her everywhere. "There," she approves, turning her hands in the glow. "Much better."
"Or called. Or left me a note of explanation. Explanation, damn it!" It’s always horrible how much I sound like my father when I shout. It makes me cringe inside.
Clair’s paste-jewel eyes flicker up at me, then around to her companion, who slouches comfortably in the center of the room, as if things are so right in the world that he has no need to even seat himself. "Moira," Clair says brightly, "this is my brother Christopher."
"Hi," says the boy in the down jacket. He is perhaps Clair’s brother by blood, or only blood-brother: the same glass-toned eyes, this time decidedly green and darker like ripe water, something alike in the pixie faces and eyelashes and fascinating mouths. They have the same haircut, too.
"What’s he here for?" I ask, looking full into him. I am no longer shouting. It is a process, this, this calming down and observing that I do. I find it hard to stay angry at Clair for more than a few oments. I got frustrated with her sometime in the warm dark past between Friday and now and yelled at her somewhat, but even then she only laughed softly at me and crawled off the bed toward me, nuzzling my neck the way a sleepy young animal does. And so I let her do as she wished.
"I don’t know," Clair shrugs in response. She has crooked teeth, the cuspids grow forward and sideways over the other teeth. It brings her face from the merely pleasing to the absorbing, the mesmerizing. "He’s a good boy, aren’t you, Chris?"
"Do you mind if I take off my coat?" he asks me.
I say nothing, sinking down onto the frothy miasma of churned layers of black sheets and white sheets on my bed. The white sheets are spotted and streaked here and there with my blood, mostly old and brown, dark outlines. However, that is not all.
Christopher, down shell shed, sits beside me. Underneath the fatty coat he’s starveling thin, the sleeves of a black T-shirt cut off at the shoulders. It was his wrist I saw coming rhough the door to undo the chain. His arms are bound here and there with twists of black leather thong and thin silver bangles, the kind sold by the dozen by Pike Place Market street vendors, biting into the white skin.
"I’ve been alone for a long time, you see," he intones quietly, touching the end of my robe. "As has Clair. We are very glad we found someone suited to us."
My uterus jump-starts in my belly and I wince at the twinge. Clair is sunning herself in the light of Jesus Christ, a contemplative smile on her face. "I don’t even…" I murmur, forgetting everything I planned to say in a second. Christopher’s long witch-fingered hands lay along side the edges of the flannel and slip between my closed thighs, nails sliding through the crisp hairs, a touch like ice. He withdraws his hand, the three peak fingers coated with brown blood, and licks clean his fingers one by one.
He has the odd teeth as well; it looks like a dental flaw, something correctible with braces. It’s cute, for heaven’s sake. They’re Disney blood-sucking fiends. Is that why I haven’t moved? Is that why the nipple with the piercing suddenly feels heavy, weighted, catching the very quality of the air?
Clair stands up into shadow and takes off the leather jacket, tossing it onto the floor. "See, Christopher?" she says, "she likes us. And she tastes good."
She is plumper than the boy, she has breasts like mangoes, like Chinese dumplings, bound in place with a dark velvet brassiere that looks tarnished against her skin. She has, even, a little belly, with an appendectomy scar, and the big awkward hands of a potteress or a gardener. "Do you usually just kill people when you’re done with them?" I mutter under my breath.
"Don’t you remember?" she asks.
"I can’t remember anything really."
"We just got together," she insists. "We fucked." Christopher’s fingers are inside my cunt now, not quite fucking me, but caressing, stroking, maybe drinking my blood through the skin. His eyes are angelically closed. "That’s just it."
"No," I protest, pushing his arm away with one leg. I feel drunk and tired and slow, and my body hurts terribly. It feels like flu, the completely debilitating sort that has you raving in bed with fever for a week. "Obviously that’s not just it, or you wouldn’t be here now, with him, you wouldn’t have brought him."
"You don’t like him?" Clair asks in a heartbrokenly sad voice.
"That isn’t the point…"
Christopher smiles, licking the back of his hand. "Obviously," he says reasonably, his eyes on faraway vistas of pleasure, ":it was, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And neither would you."
"So you do kill &endash;"
"Don’t worry," says Clair. She is now bubbling with sexy laughter as Christopher settles me onto my bed. I feel boneless, my inner parts raw. She caresses my forehead with her iceburn fingers. "We need you. We would never hurt you for anything else in the world."
She turns her head and accepts a blood-blackened Christopher witch finger, up to the knuckle, in her mouth.
Morning comes. Without sleep it hurts me physically. Christopher draws all the blinds in the house and it alleviates the pain, a little.
They have sucked me quite dry. There is barely even any of my feminine wetness left to lubricate their various curious probings. As dawn was purpling the sky outside, Clair had licked her finger one last time and sighed, "There isn’t any more." My answering laughter sounded like a paper bag being crumpled.
They don’t sleep when the sun is out, I guess. Christopher is asleep, fatter, sated, stinking of my fluids, a little of his own. He comes clear juice, like tears. His prick is like an overtall, inquisitve child, twitching against his long ivory thigh, even while he sleeps. Clair, wearing my sweater and jeans, paces like I did yesterday, biting her nails with her crooked teeth.
"I don’t have blood anymore, either," she says suddenly. "Both of us are robbed of gender."
"Do you miss it?"
"It’s like childhood. You forget what the bad parts are like."
"So you &endash; just go from woman to woman?" My eyes are mostly closed. She’s a purple and blue-jeans blue and silver floating glow in the air, darting back and forth. Tinkerbell the vampire.
For a while she says nothing. I feel embarassment, even from across the room, in an exhausted delirium. "It’s different for you, Moira," she says. "You don’t even know the have of it."
"I just want to know if you kill people. I want to know if you cross that line. Cross that and everything’s different." I struggle my eyes open a little bit more. Clair’s sitting in the chair by the window, staring at the blinds.
"We try not to," she sighs. "We don’t have to."
"Why am I different? You needed to rape me thirty times first?"
"Moira!" She is horrified. "I could have killed you. Instead I transformed that into an act of … of pleasure. That was very precious to me. And precious to him."
I glance over my shoulder at the sleeping Christopher. He is frozen in the half-curled position of the contented child, incredibly still. "Well, it’s over now," I point out. "All my free blood is gone. What now? Kill me? Leave me?" I watch her big hands clench the cushion of the chair.
"I &endash;" Clair runs her hand through her rumpled silver hair. "It depends on how you feel about us. Not just me. Christopher and I am are for always. He’s my little brother. I think he’s kinder than I am." She grins at some private joke.
"Did you turn me? Am I like you now?"
Clairumbra, the light in shadow, loses some of her smile. " I don’t want to do that," she says.
"Do I have a choice?" I can’t sit up anymore. I want to close my eyes and sleep, but I can’t. I can’t help groaning, though, and how much it hurts to tell my muscles to relax. It’s agonizing.
"You aren’t finished." She stands up, her hands shaking, then gets into bed in the middle where there’s a small space, just her size, between me and Christopher, and she strokes his forehead as she leans against me. They had fucked the night before while I lay stunned in a matrix of orgasm and cramp, their matching wet-velvet bodies slipping and cresting and riding on each other’s waves. Somehow, I now believe in their relation through family as well as by appetite.
"I don’t want to die," I say to her. "Really, I don’t."
"I don’t want you dead," she replies.
She kisses my dry, cracked lips. When I look again her eyes are uncanny, glazed with the preoccupation she often has, I’m sure, thinking of the riches buried underneath my daisy chain of bruises. Her breath is warm and soft and damp on the underside of my chin. I might be able to fall asleep now.
obviously, this isn't finished.