Attack of the Bloody Vampire Ducks

I sat beneath the Eiffel Tower and wondered what would happen if it fell on top of me. Truth be told, I kind of wished it would fall on top of me and bury me and this good-for-nothing manuscript that five publishers—five bloody publishers—had rejected. I probably shouldn’t have brought it with me on this vacation, probably shouldn’t have gone on vacation, seeing as I knew that damn call would come while I was busy enjoying myself, eating French pastries. I was halfway through a chocolate croissant when they called. I remembered the nasal voice of the damn secretary as she told me, over the bloody phone, that my manuscript “wasn’t what Mr. Riley was looking for” and to come back with a “story about vampires, maybe, or werewolves.” I DON’T WANT TO WRITE ABOUT BLOODY VAMPIRES.
I looked up at crisscross of iron far above me and had an epiphany.
I would give them a bloody vampire story if that’s what they bloody wanted.
I got up, took a cab to my fancy Parisian inn, switched on my computer, and wrote this story.

“Quack.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound too menacing, now does it?”
“QuaCK.”
“I’m telling you, not one person is going to be trembling in fear if you keep quacking like that.”
“QuAck.”
“Now you just sound stupid. Bloody stupid.”
The duck stared at his foster father, wondering how to sound suitably bloodthirsty. It wasn’t easy being a vampire duck. It really wasn’t. Nobody really took you seriously, despite the fangs and the black feathers and the red eyes. People sort of looked at you and said either, “What an adorable animal!”, or “Bloody vermin. Shoo!”
“Well, how should I quack?” the duck asked.
“QUACK!” his foster father roared. “Like that. Just like that, son.”
He tried. “QUACK!” he shouted, except he got a bit nervous at the end, wondering if he was doing it properly so it sounded more like “QU…ack.”
“No! No, no, no, no, no! You sound like a bloody petting zoo duck. Perhaps that’s where I should send you, eh? To the bloody petting zoo?”
The little vampire duck trembled in fear. “Not the petting zoo!” he shrieked.
“So then quack like a bloody told you, eh? QUACK!”
Frightened, the duck shrieked, “QUACK!” like his life depended on it (which it did, because everyone knows you don’t live too long at the petting zoo).
“That’s it, son!” his father bellowed. “Now go out there and show those good for nothing humans what a real vampire’s like!” He shook his head. “Sparkling in the bloody sunlight…I say, where do they come up with these things?”
It was easy for his foster father to yell and scream and be all menacing—he was a two-meter long black vampire swan with a pale white beak and blood red eyes. People ran from him. Not the fifty centimeter tall mallard who still hadn’t lost his downy feathers and who was subject to the whims of the vampire swan who had raised him. If his mum and dad hadn’t died so early on, he wouldn’t even have to go and hunt human blood with the adult vampires.
His father gave him a little push out onto the lake where a couple of humans were out for a romantic moonlit boat ride. He nervously paddled up to them, trying his best to appear bloodthirsty like a hell-duck.
The woman leaned over the side of the boat to him and smiled. “What an adorable animal!”
“QUACK!” the duck roared. He was sick and tired of being treated like

Then the battery on my computer lost power. I swore for a good five minutes, cursing the inconveniences of modern technology, and then continued writing on the hotel stationary.

he wasn’t worth even a little tremor of fear, sick of feeling like he was inferior to the other vampires, sick of being belittled by humans and ostracized by his peers.
The woman jerked back, eyes wide.
He paddled closer.
The man grabbed the oars and started paddling away furiously, but they were no match for the master of the water, the lightening-quick vampire mallard. A flap of his wings and he was on board with them. The woman screamed.
How good it felt to hear a scream and know that he had caused it. “QUACK!” he shouted in triumph. He waddled over to the woman and clamped his fanged bill onto her wrist, tasting for the first time blood sweetened by fright.
 
(751 words)