“Tell me something impossible,” she said, peeling back his wrapper of memories like layers of sun-warmed orange rind. The man beside her exhaled through his nose—half-laugh, half-sigh—while his fingers traced the rim of a glass that hadn’t held promises in years.
She, a Psychologist, specializing in forensic anthropology, but keeps a taxidermied, fox in her office labeled “Patient #1.” She has hands that could pick locks for fun; “so why not his mind?” Her fingers tap-tap-tapped against the table—silence stretched until the air between them smelled like ozone, like the split second before her thoughts.
“You ever wonder,” he murmured, “how many times a soul can be exhumed” His question hung there, limp and raw, like meat left too long in the sun. His eyes flickered downward to the fox on her shelf, its glassy stare holding truths better than any polygraph. Damian, was a vampire. “I am older than the fox.”
“You wouldn’t be the first vampire, that I have tickled the ivories; so tell me, how and when you were “turned,” or should I say, bitten.”
“It was 1620 when we sailed from England for the new world, I was a friar among the infidels on the Mayflower, landing on the rock where they say hope never dies,” he chuckled bitterly, dragging his thumb along the edge of the glass until it sang a thin, mournful note. “Only to find out death waits patiently ashore too—just in different teeth.” The fox’s ears pricked toward his voice, as if recalling the same memory.
“I lusted for the blood of the faithful—those who knelt in pews beside me, whispering psalms while their pulses throbbed just beneath the skin. The first was a boy, with ink-stained fingers from copying scripture, he soon became my pâtĂ©. The last I heard from him, he was in Ukraine.”
She asks him to continue, while sipping something red…
