Musings of a High School Vampire: How Do You Solve A Problem Like

Amelia,

Yeah, it’s true.   I do think it.   That the chance to play with me across Europe once again will be just too attractive an offer?   Nostalgia for when I was a novice, and you were a monster superior, and the kills were alive with the sound of horror until their death and our dining intervened?

It was always one of your favourite things to take me hunting through history, wasn’t it? –  the fond step-mama and governess, who governed her wayward charge with her own kind of love, and taught ripping and writhing and a quick attack.   And how fast I learnt: suddenly sixteen going on seventy, and we’d shared decades of ferocious fun.   Remember re-christening the Colliseum dust with new blood a few centuries back?   Calling you the original Madame Guillotine in Paris, and then standing there, surreptitiously licking our fingers while your revolutionary namesake did her own dirty work biting into clean white necks?   Making sure the Tower’s Bloody Gate continued to live up to its glorious name?

I even remember that crazy dollhouse hotel in Venice, not so long ago during a little truce of ours, when we watched your favorite fucking movie in Italian and tried not to get the housemaid’s innards on the carpet, all to the inspiring strains of ‘Arrampichi Ogni Montagna’….

And that brings us back to – doh.   The inevitable nunnery scene where I tell you to get to one, and you tell me that I’ll have none, and there is spite and delight and bloody fight, and I escape over the mountains and you hunt for me in vain in the graveyard, and the dust settles.

Until the play begins again.

Only you changed the script last year, and then I rewrote the ending, and then you threw in a twist by eating a friend, and taking an enemy, and leaving a Jonathon – and maybe that’s the answer to the riddle.

But if it isn’t , you can write me some new lyrics when we catch up, once more,  in Europe next month.

I’m sure you’ll be there, looking happy to greet me.

Because this is the finale – isn’t it?

 

ISN’T IT…?

Musings of a High School Vampire: March 23

It was probably about 3am this morning that the Cat and I were both lying on our bellies on the floor, chins resting on our crossed paws or arms respectively, dark unwinking eyes staring each other down.

It was clearly up to me to begin.

“So…”

The Cat blinked lazily, in passing acknowledgement of my existence.

“The one night I figure I’ve had enough grief in physics class and finally do some homework, I just nip out for a quick bite – and come home to this.”

We both look over in silence for a moment at my disembowelled exercise book that has served as both battleground and dinner plate for the Cat’s evening meal.

“Now, I’m certainly not squeamish, and I think we’ve established mi casa became su casa some fucking time ago – and I just still happen to be allowed to live in it…”

The Cat acquiesces graciously.

“But fuck – what the hell is Ms. Hellias gonna say when I hand in my report on the basic principles of quantum mechanics and it literally contains more biological matter than sub-atomic theory?   “The Cat ate on my homework” isn’t likely to cut it, and I’m pretty sure “blood-stained and torn to shit” are not high in the Marks for Presentation criteria, you know.”

The Cat puts back its ears in clear disdain for the current state of the education system in failing to appreciate life’s true aesthetics.

“Maybe I just take in you as my extra credit project, huh?   Donate you to science as the fucking solution to Schrodinger’s paradox, yeah?   Let them open you up and rip out all your innards in a bloody mess – you wouldn’t just appreciate how your dinner mouse felt, then; you’d also be empathizing with my poor fucked-up homework book, you little shit…”

The Cat lashes its tail – once, twice.  

Then it sits up, and – get this.   The furry little fucker yawns.

We contemplate each other for a moment.   Then I say:

“Yeah.   You’re right.   Homework fucking sucks anyway.   Wanna watch television?”

It is a conciliatory gesture that the Cat intimates I can choose the channel.

 

NEXT ENTRY…

Musings of a High School Vampire: Ideas of March

I reckon a good reliable soothsayer would be about the wisest employee choice any self-respecting monarch or world leader could ever make.   Forget the witty fools who you’ve licenced to make fun of you all the fucking time, or the army of bloody messengers who are the pedestrian equivalent of email, and run about announcing useful things like “Some random guy, my lord, is dead.”  

Fuck, no.   I’d want some old dude to hobble around behind me, or some cave-dwelling chick to take a little field trip, whose sole purpose was to warn me about the shit that’s to come and the bastards who are out to get me.

Of course, prophecy is hardly an exact science.   Mostly because it’s all bullshit, as far as I’m concerned.   Five hundred years, and the best I’ve seen is one of our own – she’s now working as a high-class medium in New York or something, telling the rich and famous appropriately mystical and vague things about their fragile, drug-pumped, quicksilver lives.

All it boils down to with her though, is educated guesses from several lifetimes of experience – based comfortably on the fact people are generally dull as shit and do the same old crap over and over again, all over the world, and all through the ages.   Of course, she has to wear a ton of amber beads and gossamer scarves to even make that much legitimate, mind you.

I’d stick with the limping elder with the quavery voice, myself.   Much more theatrical.   Covers up the fact that all he does is what the hack horoscope fiction writers do in the local papers or on late night-infomercial phonecalls: simply imply something ambiguous enough for your audience to do all the work interpreting for themselves.  

Come on – if the guy was any chop at all, like he couldn’t just fucking say to Julius: “Beware your best friend stabbing you in the back tomorrow, mister”?

Ultimately though – the moral there (before Brutus and his buddies made the original Caesar salad) is about keeping your enemies close, but your friends closer.   And with the reprieve of Brix and the return of Kane, I seem to be doing both quite nicely.

So I’ve beworn the Ides of March.   But when you consider it was Kane who came here ready to fucking bury me, not to praise me – and I made him unwillingly lend me his ears for a bunch of half-truths (having unwittingly lent me his girlfriend for an early demise)?…    

I’m thinking it’s probably he who should be doing as the Romans did by getting sage Ides in his head – and watching his back.

 

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