You
Whatever they decide
Beneath the half lemon moon I skirt the edge of a yard filled with fountaingrass, chopped and dead on the lawn. The moon throbs—a pulse on the cosmos. I see clear and plain, for half a mile til the field becomes broken silhouettes between trees. I see better in the dark, better in construction paper blackness, best when I’m hungry.
The wages of sin is death, so I move on tiptoe when I cross between home and City. I found a way outside it, into the beyond where the City can’t reach its rotting fingers.
I’m an outcast wading through finger grass. In moonless night everything is black.
I hear low voices, then set to running. Overhead an arrow splits sound and sticks a tree. They will do anything to stake me to Gilgol. While the prison grows and the City festers, I am on the lip of a wave pushed to the outer limits, farther into the beyond.
I’ve been made a creature of the night because of misunderstanding. They looked me up in a computer and decided who I am. Now they give. Chase.
They see a vampire, but I’m merely a boy with sight, running endless night since my feet touched dust, weary, with bones of molten mercury. The trees rattle and I’m trapped among yellow pages graffitied with handwritten scrawl: perdition perdition per —
I catch breath while my eyes glow golden, ringed with green. I’m what they made me. A man in a hat in an empty church. Looking to a liar for truth.
When the world stops speaking, I stop listening for the world to speak. My problem is conditioning. It’s not that I’m an ex-convict, alcoholic, poor father. Not that I’m a vampire. But that I’ve been told to die so many times I believe it’s happened.
I inspect the skin of my hands, cross-thatched and green, then itch scalp and skin that flakes like flotsam. Then I run again.
I know people trap children and call them monsters. I know the City gives chase, and expects gratitude because it once stopped me from walking myself into a pane of sunlight.
I’m a boy. Have always been only a boy. But running through charcoal forest, I could be anything. A shadow is whatever you make it, a mannequin dressed in black, a felon, a killer. Outcast. I say please a thousand times until my teeth drop out my mouth, until my mandible goes loose, but I’m stabbed with pitchfork accusations.
YOU.
A word that stands alone, upright without help, pregnant with the guilt of the observer who put it there. YOU dirty man. YOU sinful slug. YOU worthless. YOU disgusting. YOU failed.
I am the man in black, vampire to many, boy to one. I am youth stampeding through blue-moon streets in the City’s behemoth belly. I break past bracken and scrub brush, push through invisible placenta separating classes. I bring words to kill inequity. I bring sun.
The mob lives in fear of the City. It is all they know. They till it, sow it, and reap it. They praise the familiar and chide the unfamiliar, wearing cloaks to hide truths. They slink in darkness and spread tales to replace truths. This is the way of the City and the people who inhabit it. They will weaponize your past. When that fails they will call truth a vampire.
The night is heavy but I wear it, then go alone, skulking beneath lambent light. I traipse over grass flattened into sideways bunches then cross between memorial benches through cemeteries. I have a home on the prairie away from the City. I move alone and sharpen my wits to preserve the myth. I am just a boy. Also. I am a vampire.
Hey, I’m Roman. I’m working on my debut novel, 20xx, a work in magical realism. I write on Substack.
“They will weaponize your past. When that fails they will call truth a vampire.”
Jesus …
Yikes!