Thirsty Read Free

sirens blaring. Everyone is staring.
    The doors open and police hurry out, surrounding the car. Some hold pistols aimed at something inside. A cluster of officers surrounds the back left door, and they are taking someone out.
    The vampire is a young woman, or at least she looks young. She is fair haired, and her hands are bound behind her by cuffs on a heavy metal bar. The crowd moves forward to see; she glares sideways at them. They press against the barriers. The police run up and down, motioning them back. People are screaming foul names at her, calling her a murderer and a witch. Some high-school kids are holding up a little mirror, slanting it, ducking to try to see if they can catch her reflection. “You bitch!” one man is screaming at her, bellowing so loud he leans across the barrier. “You bitch!” On the other side, an old woman is crying, sobbing — “My baby! My baby!” Two police officers are holding the old woman back, and I do not know whether her baby is a victim or the vampire herself.
    The vampire stumbles up the steps. She is being pushed by one of the policemen. Someone throws an empty Coke can and it bounces softly off her head.
    She turns on the highest step and looks at us. She gazes across the crowd, her mouth tight and closed.
    Then she looks at me. She is staring at me.
    I turn around to see if there’s someone gesturing or someone who’s caught her attention, but she is staring just at me.
    She knows me.
    For a moment we pause there. Her eyes scrape from one side of my face to the other, registering a cool kind of hatred and an accusation.
    She looks like she wants to say something, to shout something.
    She starts to raise her hand as if to point.
    We stand there, staring at each other, for a moment. She moves her lips.
    However, she does not want to show her teeth before the crowd. She is proud. She keeps her lips closed, drops her hand, and turns to go inside to her last death.
    She goes in. The doors swing shut behind her.
    She is gone.
    The police say there is nothing more to see.
    My brother is complaining that the lynching was anticlimactic because it was held behind closed doors. He says that there was nothing to it and that the news blew it out of proportion into a big sob story.
    “She knew who I was,” I say gravely.
    Paul doesn’t understand me. He says, “It doesn’t take much to know a buttplug.”
    When we get home, Mom and Dad are back. The dinner did not go well.
    “It went great,” says my mother. “Especially when your father charged it to his credit card and it was refused.”
    “That’s not fair, honey,” my father says.
    They start yelling at each other, and Paul and I step away silently and go upstairs to our rooms. Downstairs my father is saying, “You didn’t have to say it in front of the kids, sugar.”
    “Don’t you call me sugar! Don’t! Or honey!” my mother protests.
    My father should have known better than to call her a condiment. You have to earn the right to call my mother a condiment.
    But later I can hear them going to the same bedroom to sleep, as I lie awake. I can hear them as I stare at the ceiling. They are getting into their bed.
    I can hear them breathing and my mother snoring. I am the only one awake.
    My head is under the pillow.
    For a few months now, I have been feeling hungrier and hungrier. Food does not seem to fill me up.
    “Got a hollow leg?” my mother asks.
    At night, I have been especially hungry. Sometimes I can’t sleep well because I’m so hungry. Also, I have been feeling strange little percolations in my chest. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. It’s a desire for something, but I can’t tell what. It makes me uncomfortable sometimes during the day. It has been disturbing my sleep occasionally at night. It is like a leaping or a squelching or an anguish about nothing at all. Maybe it’s love, these percolations, that’s what I think.
    But maybe it’s not love at all.
    That night, after the lynching, after I