Status Updates From A Kiss With Teeth

Wake up babe new dilemma just dropped: are you a vampire or are you just autistic?

“Paul needs a normal family. We agreed.”

“He needs a father more. One who’s not too scared of himself to be there.”

“I miss when we could be dangerous to one another.”

“I’m a monster.”

“You’re just more literal than most.”

He wants to be her monster. To transform her life in its ending.

She’s young, her life still a web of dream, her love just touched by sadness.

Vlad is over-empty, a great mounting void, and the world rushes to fill him.

This is no way to be a father. No way to be a man.

But Vlad was a monster before he was a man.

Even if someone beneath looked up, what is he? Wisp of cloud, shiver of a remembered nightmare, bird spreading wings for flight. A shadow among shadows.

“I am tired. I start to forget.”

“Or remember,” she says.

“I always remember.”

“This is only for now,” says Vlad’s wife. “Once your work gets better, you can watch again. And play.”

“Okay.” The boy is not okay, but he knows what he is supposed to say.

Vlad wants to teach Paul to sharpen his pencils with a knife, but sharpening pencils with a knife is not common these days, and anyway they’d have to collect the shaved bits of wood and graphite afterward. The old ways were harder to clean up.

The following week Vlad returns to the school. Entering through swinging doors, he measures each step slow and steady. The shoes, he remembers to squeak. The eyes, he remembers to move. The lungs, he remembers to fill and empty. So many subtle ways to be human, and so many subtle ways to be wrong.

“Perseverance is important,” Vlad says. “In this world you must make something of yourself. It is not enough to be what you are.”

Then Paul does the next, and Vlad practices meditation, remembering cities rise and fall.

She folds him in her arms, and he feels her strength. In the bathroom mirror they remind him of chess pieces, alabaster and mahogany.

She smiles.

Vlad, cold, afraid, smiles back.

Her brow furrows, and he would kill men to clear it.

Five years to train himself not to look at images mortal eyes could not detect. Sometimes at night, Paul’s gaze darts up from his homework to strange corners of the room, and Vlad thinks he has failed, that the boy learned this nervous tic from him and will carry it through his life like a cross.

Vlad does not like the thought of crosses.

Vlad does rehearse. He has practiced thousands of times in the last decade. It took him a year to slow down so a human eye could see him shift from one posture to the next. Another year to learn to drop things, to let his grip slip, to suppress the instinct to right tipped teacups before they spilled, to grab knives before they left the hands that let them fall.

They throw and catch the ball in this empty not-empty field. Vlad throws slow, and Paul catches, slower, humoring his dad. Vlad sees himself through his son’s eyes: sluggish and overly skinny, a man walks and runs and throws and catches as if first rehearsing the movements in his mind.

They live in a crowded city of towers and stone, a city that calls itself new and thinks itself old. The people in this city have long since learned to unsee themselves.

Blood, he remembers, oceans of it. Screams of the impaled. There is a sound men’s breaking sterna make when you grab their ribs and pull them out and in, a bassy nightmare transposition of a wishbone’s snap