Musings of a High School Vampire: Re-nais-sans

Venice is like us.

Dead and decaying, but impossibly alive.   Every waterway smells of things too old to live that have forgotten how to die, while the skins of buildings peel and wash away, and aging has become a kind of crumbling, rotting, unsettling, beautiful immortality.

At the core, Venice is doomed – a corpse of a city living on the blood of passing tourists that it drinks greedily and scorns eternally.   Its symbol, the winged lion, is itself a phantasmagoria: the regal superior killer, born aloft and preserved in dirty gold or terrible green bronzes that have wept black tears all down themselves.

 

I’ve decided.

Amelia wants a new – companion.   A dead surrogate, a deathless playmate – a replacement Jonathon.   And she wants one who is of my acquaintance.

Harmony.

Brix.

Kane.

And I know who to choose.

 

Remember last Halloween? – maybe it was when it began.   Only a year ago.   Or maybe it was older.   Is older.

Down winding side streets, echoing only with the plish of restless canal water nearby, is the mouth of a Venetian alley where the hour is such that corners have become sharper, and doorways deeper, and shadows darker.   Down that narrow throat, one door is [ajar].   Our door.   Amelia’s and mine.   Or was, when we played here half a millenium ago.

[I enter].

And for the first time since coming to Europe – I’m suddenly hungry again.

It’s in the blood.

                   stair.

             the

Ascend

It creaks, like old bones, and the plaster walls are feathery to the touch.

     
           aloft.
Aloft,

I am always fucking climbing to read Amelia, aren’t I?   But now – now debts will be paid.   She’ll owe me.

(I’ll even do it myself.   So hungry.   Can I wait?)

It was a hard choice, but I made it.

 

Open         the swollen, scarred bedroom door -   into   the   belly   of   the   beast…

 

Too late.

 

Look.

Brix is on the floor, pained – pathetic, his wrists and shoulder ripped open.

Blood…

…

…

And crouching over him, her mouth horrifying

and bloody

and horrified

is Harmony.

 

She looks up.

I hear the air constrict and flex behind me.

And then Amelia clutches me and her teeth are in my neck, and you

 

 You?