“Stand by me.” With a twinkle in her eyes, she whispered, “love the khaki, but ditch the artifacts of clothes, they are so passé.” She was standing in the window watching the silence of the rain, falling, thinking about her new “trashy romance,” yet to be published looking down at her hands and long talon nails like rivers reaching for veins, as the rains intensified with the sound of thunder, flooding her mind with lines of text for an erotic vampire novel.
The muses danced on her fingers as she thought—”her lips touched his penis, milking his soul through his cock”—before she snorted, “Too cliché”—inhaling an illicit dedication to another line.
“Her fangs ran down his thighs like braille in a storm”—as the wind rattled the pane, rattling her thoughts, “wondering how many throats have been chosen, bitten open.” How many bodies had been savored, now ensconced in their own cedar chests, upstairs
Mingora flexed her hands, imagining the scrape of nails against bare skin, the shudder of a victim (no, a *lover*, the manuscript insisted) as those talons traced the dip of a spine. “Too tender,” she muttered, and deleted the thought—Waiting for her mortal husband to return home with a portmanteau, from a business, co-op in Saginaw, bearing decayed carrion flowers, and whatever blue-collar musk lingered on him after twelve hours driving the interstate. Blood was better fresh, but fiction demanded compromise.
Outside, headlights cut through the downpour—her husband’s Kia, rattling up the gravel drive. She licked her lips, with a single thought, wanting his pulse under her tongue, without a single metaphor.
