sophie vampire story
sort of kind of l*sbian v*mpire er*tica
The Brooklyn Review has published a short story of mine called “Rules For Vampires.”
It’s about a very beautiful very chaotic woman who is sick of the hassle of being human and would like to become a vampire instead, please.
It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written; I debuted it at Ariél Martinez’s wonderful monthly queer reading series Perfume, whose theme that month was FERAL. Thank you for getting me to write, Ariél!!
There’s one other woman at the gym like me. She makes noises like her throat’s a portal to an evil dimension. Her shoulders make me think she could drag me across the floor by my hair. Her name is Rebecca, which I know because she answers calls mid-squat with “This is Rebecca.” I squat next to her to listen to her be cruel to people I’ll never meet.
In the locker room I pretend to be frowning over a complicated situation on my phone to hover near her as she undresses like she’s field stripping herself. When she’s naked she looks like she’s in pain. Her body is deliciously sterile, without hair or crease; I think if I came at her with a knife it would shatter against her white white skin. Her breasts look like they were added on after the fact, like she sprang for them as premium features. I want to press and twist and see if they detach into my palm with a spring loaded pop. She’s on the phone the whole time. She keeps saying “That’s ridiculous” and “That’s completely ridiculous.”
Rebecca activates the part of the brain that makes men sacrifice their lives for a horse.
There’s another woman in it too. You can kind of imagine how that goes.
I really think fiction is just the best.
I recently tore through Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton, a novel about a fictionalized version of Brian Wilson that the narrator imagines as a closeted trans woman trying to become herself by making her masterpiece album, and Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas, a novel about the toxic codependent friendship between two theatre teens, one a lonely dyke and the other a deeply closeted trans man. Both really beautifully articulate the particular hell of the closet and the agony and ecstasy of escaping it.
Also I read a bunch of the Black Company series by Glen Cook, which is pulpy low fantasy about dirtbag mercenaries hired by freaky nasty evil sorcerers to pull off impossible jobs. They’re constantly being double crossed and caught in the middle of petty feud between immortal freaks and have names like Croaker and Goblin and Raven and One-Eye. I eat it up like candy because I’m dumb as dust and life’s too short for smart books.
I hope you had the best Halloween of your life. Bye forever.
xo sophie