This Flesh a Tomb

I’m told that all the best stories begin with “Once upon a time…” but this one does not. To be honest, I can’t really remember when it began. Perhaps there was no specific starting point, no white painted line with a curvaceous young woman waving a checkered flag. In fact, I can’t remember a time before, perhaps I was always depressed. Since I cannot begin with the beginning, I’ll start with the catalyst.
The afternoon wasn’t dark, and a storm cloud had not been seen in over a week, so to say it was a dark and stormy night would be to lie. A few friends and I had decided to go see a movie, some horror film about vampires. One of the group, Ian, was a boy on whom I’d had some school-girl crush for well over a year. He was quite a bit taller than I, a few inches at least. If I remember nothing else about Ian, I will remember his height, such a protective height.
I don’t remember where the other two were at the time, but Ian and I stood outside the theater, waiting for the time to pass us by so we could go get decent seats. We talked about everything and nothing all at the same time. I dropped subtle hints as to how I felt about him, and he never seemed to notice.
All of a sudden, a terrified voice shattered the quiet chatter,
“He’s got a gun!”
Before I knew what he was doing, Ian pulled me into a corner, as if he were trying to press me into the bricks themselves. All around us I could hear gunshots and screams. A little girl cried out for her father, but I didn’t listen for a reply.
“Ian, I’m scared!” I cried as I buried my face in his chest.
“Shh!” I was scolded.
Another second, another gunshot; I’d lost count after twelve, and the multiple guns shot repeatedly still. I screamed as I heard a bullet whiz past my ear and was pelted by a tiny shower of tinier pieces of brick.
When my need for air halted my scream, I realized that the shouts and shots had ceased and were replaced by crying, a few children wailing, and a sick bubbling sound.
“Ian, Ian, what’s that?”
When no reply came, I looked up and screamed again at the sight before me. The gurgling came from Ian, gasping for the air that never reached his desperate lungs. Crimson blood bubbled gruesomely from a gaping bullet hole in his throat.
I wish I could say I had played the heroine, covered the wound with some life-saving material, be it ideal cellophane or even a shirt. Instead I cried for help, begging for somebody to call an ambulance, all the time believing one could arrive in time to keep Ian from suffocating in the sun-warmed air.
I wish I could say I had stayed calm, calming Ian as he drifted peacefully away as heroes of books and movies do. Instead I clung desperately to his arm as he clutched his throat in a vain attempt to old in the air. Ian’s eyes rolled back into his head and his tongue fell out of his gaping mouth.
“Ian!” I screamed, “Ian!”
He collapsed.
“Ian!”
His body twitched, his entire body wracked by spasms.
“Ian!”
Straddling the now motionless Ian, I crudely mimicked the glamorous looking CPR of movies, sickened by the bubbling blood that was my only response.
I felt something warm and wet on my leg and would have screamed if I could have, but my voice was coarse and broken by sobbing as that last sign registered in my brain.

That was not how it began, but I never could keep myself afloat after that. I neither ate nor slept for days after that, would you? After the first couple sleepless nights, I would occasionally pass out, but would be wakened moments later by the haunting memory of that sunny afternoon. The two others who went with us took it badly as well, but I was the worst. By some miracle my parents forced me to eat after those first few days. Even then I ate little, and slept less if I didn’t take the sleeping pills I’d been ordered to take.
I can’t really understand why exactly, but I grew to believe that if the day had been less sunny, Ian would still be alive. I grew to hate the sun for stealing Ian away, to hate the light of day. I took the pills early in the morning, usually before dawn and then slept until late into the evening. I walked at night, wandered the streets until, invariably, I would find myself at the cemetery next to Ian’s grave, regardless of how I tried to avoid the place. “Loving and loved.” It was a pitiful epitaph. Ian deserved something more, something better.
After the first month or so I stopped buying flowers. I simply stole time, or cut them from the ground. I watched over time as the white of the flowers I stole most often grew less dissimilar from the hue of my own skin. By the time August came around, children spoke of a ghost, a girl ghost, who wore shorts and a sleeveless shirt and sat near a boy’s grave until dawn. They were wrong, of course. I always left before dawn.
Then one night, on my automatic walk to the cemetery, a tall figure appeared in front of me.
A silken voice so like a hundred harmonious church bells came from that solid shadow, “So this is the mournful ghost, a mere human girl too lost in herself to look up and see.”
“What do you want?” I asked, slurring my words. My voice scratched its way through my throat, not used to being used; I hadn’t said a word in over a week, perhaps two.
“Oh, no, my dear! It’s not what I want, but what you want. It was always all about you, you made sure of that.”
“Get out of my way.” I pushed past the inhumanly tall shade and continued my nightly journey, but again he seemed to materialize before me.
“Manners, my dear! Now, what is it that you want?”
“To be with Ian. Move.”
The shadow hissed and a flash of silver caught my eye less than a moment before I felt a cold, steel blade rest against my collar bone. “You test my patience, my dear.”
I think I may have blinked.
He hissed again and I felt a cold slap on my face and found myself on the ground more than a meter from where I’d been standing.
I simply lay there, seeing no reason to get up.
Two strong hands clasped my arms and lifted me to my feet, but did not release me once I was steady.
As the dark figure hissed a third time, I saw white fangs gleam in the dim light of the moon. A brief flicker of fear shot through me then, and perhaps I even struggled, I don’t remember. I know only that I feared pain, not death.
Two razor sharp points tore the flesh of my neck and I would have screamed if not for the soothing feeling of those two frozen lips stealing the warm blood from my veins more smoothly and more swiftly that I had ever stolen flowers from a garden.
The figure pulled away and the sting of the fangs began to register in my nervous system.
“I…I’m not dead.”
“No, my dear, you are very much alive…in the strictest definition of course.” He wiped some blood from my still bleeding collar bone with his finger and bade me taste. I did.
“Can you taste how bitter you’ve become? You are unpleasant even to one like me.”
A strange sensation came over me then, one that I’d not truly felt without chemicals in far too long. A look of shock passed over my face when I recognized it.
“I’m…tired.”
The shadow let out a satin laugh then. He pulled out that silver blade, so intricately and ornately engraved, and slit his wrist.
“Drink, my dear.”
I did.

How could I describe to you such an experience? That blood was a drug, the only piece of heaven I have ever known. I drank and drank, knowing I might kill this angel who had broken my silence, and not caring in the least. I drank hungrily, sucking pitifully when the flow became strained.
“I said ENOUGH!” The silken voice cried as the wrist was taken away from my searching grasp.
“Give me more!” I commanded.
“There, my dear, look behind you.”
Sure enough, a young boy hid behind a tree with a camera, probably trying to get a picture of “the ghost.” I stalked towards the boy, who stood motionless, terrified.
That was my first kill. I have killed every night since then.
The following day, I did not sleep. Instead, I died.
It is an odd thing, dying. The first to fail were the organs I would need least: appendix, pancreas, those such things that are unpleasant to speak of. My heart stopped after the others, and finally, the bladder released.
My mother had been watching over my death the whole time, not knowing why her child was dying so quickly, until my heart stopped, and then she left. I was glad she did because I cried when I felt the inevitable bladder failure. I remembered that sunny June day at the theater and cried.
That night, I left home for the last time. I did not know where to go, but I thought the cemetery would be a good place to begin. I need not have worried though. Soon enough, my satin voiced angel of death came for me.
“My dear, you’ve returned. Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”