Alwyn

His mother is bereaved in the passenger’s seat; her corpse is undergoing anomalously rapid body decomposition—the equivalent of three-months of intestinal digestion in two days—and necrosis. There hasn’t been a murder in this suburban purlieu for the past twenty-five years. He’s driving an ambulance; a merited paramedic, extolled, lauded in due homage.
There is a victim of a machinery accident in the back; nearly severed in two. He’s hotwired to the IV drip; the maximum dosage of morphine, and then some.
“Kill him,” his mother mutters. She is impatient, cloyed.
He doesn’t respond, abiding by red lights. He hasn’t switched on the sirens.
“He’s going to die anyway; what are you waiting for?”
“Will you shut up. It’s late.” He makes an abrupt turn right, cued by his response. “I could do without you nagging me…at the moment.”
“Here we go again. You and your self-righteous…theatrics; I don’t even know what to call it. Must’ve gotten it from your father.”
“I’d have preferably inherited everything from my father.”
“Including the life insurance,” she chortles. She leans her head back and shuts her eyes; they flutter like beetles beneath the lids.
He drives perambulatory, stricken surreal with trauma and gradual desensitization to what one might have once found, discreet at best, pleasures in life.
“Where.”
“Here,” she snarls.
“Could you possibly be more irrational; what am I going to do, duct tape his mouth when I cut the drip and let him die peacefully, in pieces?”
“I’ll do it.”
“No…no, no—” She spectrally vanishes into the back; stifling cotton balls into his mouth and clamp—clamping it shut via duct tape.
“Voila! No fingerprints.”
“My fingerprints are probably on the duct tape.”
“Have I inculcated in you nothing?” She, uninformed as to its location, snatches a bottle of rubbing alcohol and recklessly inundates the roll of tape, alighting it in an illusory manner kicking open the back doors tossing it out and heaving herself forward, trenchantly scathing the doors shut and locking them with the wind.
“You must expect me to expect you to kill him,” his mother mutters this, inebriated and emancipated by death albeit musing forensically. They drive in bucolic silence. He glances at her intermittently, disappointed; familial designated servility—she lives vicariously through him; something he momentarily does not protest or reason. They drive, following the most likely course to induce themselves and those, if ever, in pursuit, lost.
“I don’t.” He stops the car; glowering at the car litterbin, below his mother’s execrable eye contact.
“You’re right, I don’t,” she peremptorily responds, lighting a cigarette. “I expect you to put him out of his misery.”
He, anticipating this response, turns off the engine and throws the key into the cup holder.

“One of these days they’re going to catch me.”
“No they won’t,” she exhales, wheezing and chuckling.
“Yes because the compiling evidence isn’t incriminating.”
“You always had little faith in me. It’s not my fault you pissed away Hopkins.”
He cracks open the car window. “So what. You’re going to just, extirpate it all.”
“Well, I am a ghost, or something. Am I not?” She lights another cigarette off the butt of the one she was previously smoking.
“Or a figure of my imagination.”
She snickers bathetically. “There’s a long line of schizophrenics running on your father’s side.”
He thuds his forehead against the wheel. “So, what. You’re going to coerce me into a serial killer so you can euthanize everybody that’s in remedial pain because you smoked two packs a day on your deathbed.” His voice has wavered to an epicene falsetto.
She’s already mulling over something assuredly impertinent, indeliberately not listening to him. He plugs his iPod into the tape cable. He plays something, that if she were still alive, would have her cat fighting in the air. She’s drifted off into a pensive, nicotine-belated stupor. He thinks about asking her what coffin she’d prefer, if the convenience ever arose. His radio muffles the coordinates of a nearby BLS that might warrant a supplemental oxygen administration. He’s an EMT-P and works off-duty, often driving his ambulance around desultorily; as his mother claims, “wantonly”. His mother glances at him, her brow furrowed in an expression of incentive.
“Now you want me to put down people that choke on their food?”
She scrutinizes him inexpressively, then lulls back into her stupor.
“Sure, why not. It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do.”
“I could, you know, actually do my blasted job and save someone.”
“Save someone!” his mother rallies, nearly jumping out of her seat. “Well I’ll be damned. Save someone, you.”
“I know it must be difficult for you to comprehend coming from such a primitive generation, but in this day and age it’s not even considered auxiliary!”
“Now that’s a word. Auxiliary.” She takes a defamatory drag of her cigarette. “I sure fine raised an altruistic son. An ambulance driver.”
“I’m a paramedic, mom.”
“You’re a godamned ambulance driver. Don’t chagrin yourself with the semantics.” As she says this, the ambulance begins to drive itself in the direction of the radioed locus. He sighs and is cozened by the headrest. His mother’s skin is pruned into raisin, wan, pinned and greased back like a ballet dancer’s hair. She is deathly skeletal; she is dead, he reminds himself. The ambulance drives itself politely, obeying the speed limit superfluously, halting at the instant each stoplight turns yellow.
“So do you have a loved one?” she orates rhetorically. “Do I have grandchildren?”
He subsides, an acerbic remark salivated into the reservoir of his tongue’s remorseful arsenal. He massages his forehead, head forlornly sunk and drowned by his hands.
“You should keep your eyes on the road,” she pesters, bemused by his anguish.
“Shut up,” he snaps. “What do you have in store for this one.”
“The usual.”
“Any preference of opioid?”
She looks at him incredulously. “You know how mothers say they aren’t always going to be there?”
He ogles at the cars passing by; a pariah prone to woolgathering, assuming the lives of others and creating mostly tragic scenarios for them. “It’s not something I recall you ever said.”
She precipitously heaves her face ghoulishly close to his: “What will you do when I am reduced to bone, to marrow, to dust?”
“I’ll be grateful this ambulance no longer reeks of second-hand smoke.”
She lounges back into her seat, perching one foot on it and reclining into the crevice the door and the seat adjoined. “We no longer speak like humans,” she exclaims, exhaling a sprightly amorphous waft of smoke. He looks at her skeptically, expecting her to remind him that she’s dead, or waiting for him to. “Keep your eyes on the road.”
“I would but the car by chance happens to be driving itself.”
“Keep your eyes on the road or I’ll put them there,” she growls.
He laughs, goading her. “Go ahead; put them there.” Suddenly his vision transfers to ground-level, perilously close to the white line that separates the tumultuously commotive lane and the pull-over. She cackles and screeches maniacally, caricaturing a witch. He can still hear her, his body apparently still in the driver’s seat next to her.
“Very funny. Really. This whole having died seems to have exonerated your sense of humor that you so dearly lacked in life.” He says this with the utmost composure, panic-stricken. A BMW convertible nearly spatters one of his eyes, flinging them off the road. It comes to a screeching halt, having ostensibly noticed the stray pair of eyes—a screech akin to his mother’s parodied and hammy cackling. An incoming truck punts the BMW aloft as the driver warily steps out.
His eyes re-socket. His mother is hysterical, face contorted with glee, nearly bawling and slapping her knees.
“You think that’s funny?”
She gives him a look of reconsideration, attempting to strain her laughter. “I thought you said—“
“Oh go to hell.”
“Been there,” she restitutes her state of musing, eyes glazed over gazing out the window.
“How could I have forgotten you’ve ‘lived’ already,” he mutters to himself, shaking his head.

“He’s Jewish.”
“What do you care?”
“The last one was Jewish.”
He conjectures what ethics has to do with her sigmoid reasoning.
“They’ll think the serial killer is anti-Semitic.” She looks at him, sincere and inquisitive. “Are you anti-Semitic?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Honey, we’ve already established that,” she giggles. Then looks at him again, this time maternal. “You know, there’s nothing wrong with being anti-Semitic.” He gesticulates tearing out his hair, then throws his arms up, relinquishing them at his sides. “You think there aren’t anti-Germatics?” She peruses her hands. “You know what displacement is?” He doesn’t respond. “Everyone’s got to have something to trigger anger management.” She lugs her gawp at him.
“I’m just glad you weren’t a faggot. You know if I hadn’t been there you’d probably be a faggot. I got nothing against faggots much, just, makes being a mother easier if you aren’t.
“Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.”
She’s permit him control of the ambulance again. He listens, pondering as to why she never mentioned these—if they can even be labeled as bigotry, so insouciantly pragmatic—beliefs while she was alive. She exacerbates his restless heart, and thoughts…mostly of raison d’être, some of the impermeable esoteric concept of morality. In his mind he visualizes bra-cupped shoes with words upon words scribbled on them, skittering about like Phthirius pubis. Transoceanic words; he visualizes himself lying on his couch—this is a recurring visualization—and something macabre and bloodless, with the deathly blanched skin of his mother, swallowing him out of the drab lighting of his living room.
“Aren’t they going to catch onto the daedal phenomenon that all these killings have been correlated with victims mid-transportation to a health care facility via ambulance.”
“Better get a move on it.” She huffs. “Your father would have made one heckuva’ carjacker. Should have been an entrepreneur in the grand theft auto business. Probably would have actually made something of himself.”
“Will you stop whining about dad?”
“Dad? Aren’t you a little old to be still calling a dead man dad?”
“You don’t see me calling you by your first name.”
“Maybe you should try it some time. You might find it liberating. To think outside of the custodial box.”
He pulls over. “What,” he enunciates with contempt, “are we going to do with the body.”
“Mustard gas the damn thing for all I care.”
He glares at her. “Wrong war.”
“Whatever. You know what I meant.” She aphoristically lights another cigarette. “Dump it in the river. “ She apprehends him glaring at her. “What, do you want me to do it again? I’m not always going to be around you know.”
“You never were.” He slams the car door, distraught, careening to the back of the ambulance. He flips off one of the potential witnesses that drives by. Just as he’s about to open the doors the ambulance zooms off, leaving him in the dust. He vapidly, absently watches it trail off, coming to an abrupt halt just as its taillights dissolve out of sight. He can already hear his mother cackling.

She sufficiently covers his tracks...her tracks, with whatever cabalistic means. He’s recently indulged in an old habit; lightweight, Valium. He drives, quizzical as to how his mother never sleeps; she’s dead. Dawn is suspending forth like a blimp in a simulacrum of an armadillo. She’s dead.
“You’re dead.”
“You’re doped.”
“You’re dead.”
“What’s the difference.”
“That you’re dead?—”
“Between being doped and dead.”
He pounds the driver’s wheel in delirium. “Could you convert the ambulance to autopilot; I’d like to doze off for a bit.”
Her icteric eyes perforate his inordinate elusive guilt, his addled compunction. She abides his plea, behind a sylphlike Shoji screen of smoke.
“Your grave will be right next mine,” she premonishes. “A drag here, a pill there. Do you know how many people showed up to my funeral?”
“I must’ve been too preoccupied to count.”
She capriciously changes the topic, “Do you know when you were a child I couldn’t get you away from the oven. I thought perhaps you had been possessed by the demonic incarnate of Sylvia Plath. She stuck her head in the oven, didn’t she? And beforehand…she left milk and cookies out for her children. I still can’t interpret if that was a selfless act; habitual. If she was really thinking about that her children ate breakfast before she stuck her head in the oven. But what kind of mother feeds cookies for breakfast for their children?
“It must have been during the afternoon. A snack for them, after school.”
“You hated poetry. You always, so pedantically I can still hear your dogmatism, would…sputter these diatribes about how poets were just failed authors, or was it musicians, I don’t remember.” He sighs at the blathering ambiguousness of the conversation.
“The burn victim, in the back. She’s not Jewish.”
“Thank God, the public may rest in peace! There’s not going to be a neo-Nazi insurrection after all.”
“Do you know what I don’t understand?” she asserts. She waits for him to say: “What.” “Vampires. They already exist. They’re not mythological.”
“Mom for Christ’s sake can you spare me your reflections right now. I know you’re dead and you’re curiously looking back on your life but I happen to be alive and it’s disconcerting to say the least.”
“Mosquitoes. How are they any different than vampires?”
“Well, theoretically, for one, they’re insects, not humans.”
“No one ever necessarily labeled vampires as being human.”
“You just effing said they were not mythological—”
“Just because they might not be human doesn’t mean they’re mythological.”
“They’re mythological because they’re existence is founded upon a myth. I thought the prefix gave it away.”
“And that woman! She’s not going to recover; those burn wounds are three degrees, and what not. She might live but she’ll be just as dead as me.”
“If only you had been so thoughtful when you were alive I might not have ended up a goddamn EMT.”
“You ended up a goddamn EMT because of your misogynistic lush of a father.”
“You nailed it. Dad was a fa—a cross-dressing fairy; played for the other team, a pri-ballerina-madonna. I always wondered what those bras and panties were doing in his suitcases when he came back from his business trips.”
She lunges her face forth, nearly causing him to drive off the road. “I’m going to to liberate her from the deathless life she’s going to endure.”
“Have you lost your—”
“We already went over this. I’m going to bless her with the divine sanctity of vampirism.”
He jams his foot headlong into the emergency break.
“Mosquitoes for effing’s sake don’t kill people.”
“Oh yes they do hon. They spread all kinds of fatal diseases. Malaria. They kill between one and three million people each year.”
“They don’t do it intentionally. The females consume to reproduce; if I’m not mistaken that’s the highest human hierarchy of need.”
“Thank God for cancer and AIDS.” She begins to chant in dramaturgically highfalutin Mephistophelian burlesque. “I feel the diabolism embrace me! In that, I’m-still-in-my-thirties-and-this-time-I-think-this-is-really-what-I-want-to-do-for-the-rest-of-my-useless-life manner.
“And besides. You’re lackluster, dismal company, if I may say so myself.”
“You may say so.” He gives her a look of admonishing indignation, preparing himself for her next ruse. She evaporates into the back, crooning over the patient in her usual state of semi-furor.
“Alwyn, you know.” She wavers. “You know, you know,” she staggers, waving him off. She begins to bellow necromantic incantations, orchestrating the orientation of the undead raptly, raptly! with her arms. Alwyn gazes forth listlessly, longing to be on his living-room couch, watching low-budget horror films, drugged as to not squirm at the most gruesome of scenes.
“Now, now…any vampire names come to mind?”
“Dracula,” he snorts.
“Something Bella…If you were a girl, I’d have named you Bella-something.”
“Stop reading children’s books.”
“No.” She thwacks her arms in the air. “Would you rather me…would you rather me,” whispering, “read self-help books?” He lolls his head to the side as she cackles in pretense. “I think I shall name her Enid. What do you think, Alwyn? Is that a fitting vampire name?”
“Never heard of it.” He glances back at the corpse and not to his astonishment, desensitized to his mother’s fanatics, it is in immaculate condition. Its eyes flicker agog; psychomotor skills in check akin to a chicken with its head cut off. Floundering limbs. She lurches upwards, wrenching her hands through her hair, pinning it back until her neck is near exposing an Adam’s apple. She takes an inquisitive, puzzled look at his mother, confounded.
“Darling, darling…I have revived you.” The vampire mouths something contortedly but no sound emits from the already rooted and sprouting fangs. “I have revived you, from a caustically wretched death, or much, much worse, my dear!
“You are obviously bewildered…you might not even understand a word I’m saying! Likewise, as much as my son would—we need to conjure you some clothes—here, here darling; something plain, inconspicuous.”
Enid eyes his Alwyn’s mother suspiciously, reluctantly complying to her insistence.
“Okay, now, to transmit the feat of the English language. It’s not all that difficult, really, you’ll grasp it in a matter of moments; just lay your head back and relax. There, there…I will commence immediately.”
Enid drifts off into an expressionless trance, her eyes glazed over, pupils and irises both absent, fluorescent sclera. She sways and teeters in all directions for some time; Alwyn has lost trace of it when she sputters vomit onto the windshield and surfaces back into reality. She’s briefly disoriented, then hisses, her fangs protuberant; Alwyn, reminded of elephant tusks.
“Fangs made out of ivory! I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”
“Apparently,” Alwyn sighs. “You never had much interest in the supernatural, aside from anything.” He reconsiders. “Though I don’t find it surprising that you chose ivory.”
“Am I…?” Enid, timidly wrapping her arms around her chest.
Alwyn wonders if she’s implying if she’s alive or a vampire. Her eyes, a seething garnet glow, the equivalent of twenty-five watt bulbs sustaining a dim-lit cavity. “You’re alive. Whether you’ll want to be or not is another matter.”
“What do you mean?” Enid immediately establishes an affinity towards Alwyn, glancing uneasily at his mother, who, like herself, looks rather decomposed.
“My gratuitous mother has brought you back from the dead, in which seems to be…vestal condition.” His mother chortles at his choice of adjective.
“So…I am…I am alive?” Enid pleads.
“No.” Alwyn rustles, ravenously snatching at his pills. “Well, yes. You are alive. You’re just not…”
“Human,” Alwyn’s mother chimes in gleefully.
Enid falters, her eyes imploring at Alwyn for a thorough explanation.
“My mother—and I might as well introduce properly now, seeing as how I don’t think she’s going anywhere any time soon—thought it would be amusing to bring you back to life at the price, of which she perceives as a gift, of being a vampire.
“Oh, and her name is Agnieszke, and do not worry if you cannot pronounce her name because frankly I can’t either.” Enid ingurgitates, inhaling deeply, the traumatic absurdity of her supernatural predicament. She draws a blank, examining the ambulance in disbelief; much like a bewildered ghost, adapting to the earth it no longer has corporeal relation to.
“You will subsist primarily on hemoglobin and the flesh that will inevitably get caught between your teeth.” Enid wincing at each evocative word squeamishly, pale as a: Alwyn visualizes an albino squirrel. He has the impulse to reach back and put a hand on her shoulder; dearth of third degree burns she is…peculiar looking, flagrantly loveable in her bodily flaws. Sallow eye pits, forlorn and bloodshot eyes, gaunt, one ear nibbled on as if by a scavenging fox. Blonde blonde, blonde hair; uncanny, near intimidating in its wiry, straw tumbleweed condition. It rather resembles a bees hive, an ant mound, and a desperate vesper for aid…
Her hair, without her knowledge, seems to be changing colors right before his eyes: from flaxen to pale auburn to near-blinding gold to shimmering, incandescent white.
“What of my family? My younger brothers and sisters? My mother, afflicted with Alzheimer’s; a father who supports the family with his insatiable liver. Who will take care of them, now?”
Alwyn pulls over, unstringing his head lolling against the headrest. He regrets saying this the moment aforethought: “You. You, and me, and my vivaciously unruly mother, precariously emancipated her own pitiful life…in death.
“How old are you anyhow. You look incontrovertibly younger than your age.” Enid blushes, muffling her cheeks with her palms.
“Blimey I’m frigidly cold.”
“How old are you. And what are you, British or something.”
“No but I was attempting to convince you that I was—“
“How old are you.”
“Twenty-three.” Alwyn’s mother hoots—the fortuity and…and the irony!—the hoot’s original context lost and indistinguishable, his mother in jest; comparing her knee-jerks. Alwyn’s age. “Twenty-three.”
“Is there anything wrong with being twenty-three,” Enid squeaks.
“Oh no, no my dear. Twenty-three is a splendid age. I can’t recall it myself.” She taps her finger hurriedly on the seat-arm. “Isn’t twenty-three that age where one decides to go to graduate school and what not?
Enid, her voice shaky, attempts to respond but is curtly interrupted—“So you’re broke but you talk big. You talk,” her arms inflate and her voice booms, trailing off into a mumbled resentment, “big.” Enid, goggled and perplexed, feels a sharp, cramping pang of hunger in her abdomen; she clutches it, groaning, swelling into madness while attempting to shovel it out with her nails…shovel, and she digs, and she digs, and she heaves, and vomits and vomits and vomits, her eyes clamped shut until she trips over the stretcher and glimpses that the vomit, the vomit, she was vomiting up blood.
“What…what is going on. What…”
“You need to feed, else you will die,” Alwyn’s mother gloats triumphantly. “Alwyn, get a move on it. Find some unconscious frat boy. They’ve got as many colleges as they do in this city as they do Starbucks.”
“The ambulance is still on autopilot,” he sighs. “Can’t you telepathically locate some—“ he winches, “guy, and maneuver the ambulance to him on its own.”
“Well, there’s always—“
“Please, haven’t you had your fill of haunting me; threatening to feed me to a vampire isn’t exactly—“
“I would never eat you,” Enid squeals, drooling a viscous piano wire of blood from her besmirched mouth. She groans into a spine-rattling shriek, her fingers having perforated her abdomen. She gazes up at him beseechingly, palsied with intestinal distress and the claustrophobic vacuum of total and utter helplessness. She howls, and howls, and howls. He impulsively reaches into the glove compartment and pulls out a plastic bagged syringe, instinctively hobbling to the pharmaceutical cabinet while Enid reaches out to him precariously, droplets of blood seeping from every pore on her body. Instantly he feels a surge of intrepidity and plutonium rippling through his varicose veins; a loaded syringe: he lunges forth, plunging the syringe into her jugular vein.
She spasms, struggling, swaying dreamlessly, her body an atonic feather. Despite the overdose of morphine she is still conscience, though temporarily painless. Before his mother can interfere he grabs for another syringe, tears open the bag, loads it and shoots up, albeit a much lighter dose. Blood trickles down his arm and he races to her mouth, where she gazes at him angelically, her savior, and begins to suck the blood from his arm like an infant breastfeeding.

Enid wakes to the rasping voice of Alwyn’s mother. She perks her head up, ridding herself of the visual grogginess indicative of insufficient repose, then reaches into her mouth and warily, incredulously fondles her newly erected fangs. To her surprise, corporeally she feels nothing out of the ordinary.; shellshock, she muses. Is it really so unbelievable? Merely a sophomore at the local community college where she lived, with unextraordinary marks; if this was…merely, merely a dream…then it wouldn’t be significantly different from her former reality, which consisted of her merely…merely dreaming. She lowers her head back down onto the stretcher pillow, dazzled by the overhead fluorescent lights; she can’t seem to reason properly, disoriented, speech derailed; the deluge of pain in her stomach churning back like a contortionist creeping up a stairwell.
She vaguely recalls a somber, morosely handsome man, with a surrendered complexion and a mop of unkempt hair. Her mind abubble with fragments of memory—a siren, the voice of the old hags incantations, a dim-lit adumbral and garnet thought-racking throbbing glow. She tries to piece them together, beginning with what stork dropped her into the ambulance in the first place; she remembers being befuddled, examining the tapestry of creases in her palm; best to just scapegoat date-rape, she restlessly lugs her head to the side, hoping not to stir anyone’s attention.
“You okay back there miss?”
The words gargle from her mouth—the same claustrophobic feeling; another fragment of memory chips into place—and splutter out as if palpable matter; aside from the accompanied mucous saliva
“I think…so.”
His mother chuckles. Alwyn scowls at her ignobility.
“Well you won’t be for long,” he muses out loud. “You probably want explanations, but honestly,” he glances back at her earnestly. “Just stick with the answers.” She doesn’t respond, instinctively conditioned to the dour charisma of his scrambled advice. She blushes quite noticeably.
“She’s blushing,” his mother teases him.
“Would you stop it? I’m devising a scheme to keep her alive.”
“You’re contriving, hon, not devising. And I have a…a hunch that she will be your most prized asset.”
“When you’re gone.”
“When I’m gone,” she smirks.
“She’s a human being, mother Himmler—“
“Nonetheless an indispensable asset.”
Enid listens to their familial squabbling intently, amused, occasionally stifling a laugh.
“Alright, look, she’s not going to make it to the nearest hospital in time for me to hold up the local blood bank.” He pauses. “You don’t feel any…primitive predilection towards any blood-type…do you?”
She flinches, though descries the underlying hospitality in his voice.
“I’m AB. What I fed you last night. Will that do for now?”
“Most certainly,” she flushes.
“Alright. This should tide you over for now.” He lurches out of the driver’s seat, rummaging through the medicinal drawer. “Where is it, the morphine.” Enid immediately begins scrounging about the floor, flattening herself where the flung over stretcher once was. Alwyn’s mother sighs.
“Won’t you ever—“
“Read my mind—“
“Excuses, excuses!”
“You were raised by alcoholics, I know, they know; you’re terrified of substance. Fitting, as you have none,” he snarls.
“I found it!” Enid squeals, clenching an amphora unctuous with insulin. He spares her a glimpse of vaporous sympathy—empathy? she ponders. Obviously having not have obtained the appropriate remedy, she collapses onto her knees and continues obsequiously searching, adapting to the augmented senses that supplement vampirism.
Alwyn’s mother hurls the morphine amphora behind her, over the seat, impassively, ruminating with an expression of Fall on her face.
The amphora levitates before it shatters against the ground, then whorls into pristine condition, clinking and curtly rattling with the same impassiveness as Alwyn’s mother.
“Do you need to borrow a belt? Or would you prefer a tape measure; if I’m not mistaken there’s one in the passenger’s seat compartment—”
Already having loaded the syringe, he jabs it into his jugular.
“Feed.”

Drowsy, groggily recovering his senses, still meagerly high, he glances down at his arm; there are two fang-like insertions; deep wounds around which his skin has become bloodlessly ashen. He wades off again into drugged stupor, desultorily adrift amidst a repository of ideals and the rippling visceral quality of his opioid-induced dreams. Enid crouches close beside him, her hand clasping his inner arm, taken back observing the depraving effects of opiates in person for the first time. Panicky and lightheaded, she suppresses the vertiginous urge to vomit.
It takes him another couple hours to regain total, albeit sluggish, consciousness. Enid, out of habit, clasps his forehead to gauge if he’s feverish. To her astonishment, he’s riddled with goose bumps, teeth-chattering and shivering like a vagrant lamb. He immediately springs back into a state of porous vulnerability, startled by her diaphanous, unconditionally nurturing disposition. He jolts backwards again, banging his head against an alloy shelf, reeking of formaldehyde. She gushes forth, smothering him with compassion “are you okay are you okay?—”; he dismisses her with a condescending spasm of the wrist; condescending in that she in no way would be able to comprehend his languish.
“I’m fine.”
“Boys,” she mutters, giggling.
He is momentarily repulsed by her buoyant curiosity, so inured to his mother’s ghost, then cursorily thanks her. He scrambles to his feet, dazed; he collapses, unable to see three feet in front of him.
“Pssst you! You are wobbling like Bambi! Come here…”
“Did you get your fill?”
“Yes, I am fine for now.”
Alwyn’s mother smirks.

Alwyn, driving dreamily, “I miss you, Mom. I really miss you.”
“Hah. Now you wish I was still alive?”
“No, not you. Mom. I miss her. I don’t know you.”
“Eh. I got old. Brittle bones. You miss a mound of dust.”
Enid, splayed out on top of the stretcher, is entranced by the music on Alwyn’s iPod, rollicking her head side to side.
“You were probably one of the best mothers ever to be taken for granted,” he sighs. “You know that?”
“I’m sure.”
“I have no one left in my life, haha. Not a single person. I drive this ambulance, well, I used to; now I’m a serial killer’s roadie.”
“Sounds tough.”
“What are you eating?” He glances at her in disgust.
“Roast beef sandwich with horseradish,” she says, inattentive.
“Looks like a larynx for Christ’s sake.”
She chuckles. “You’ve seen too many dead bodies.”
“Could you at least use a napkin or something? You’re getting it all over the place.”
She looks at him with blank incredulousness. “Look Ma, I’m dead!” she bellows, decorating the ambulance with the sandwich; splat against the windows.
Enid, startled, watches a slither of horseradish gradually inch its way down the adjacent window, much like a centipede. She lowers and fixates her gaze as to make it appear as if she’s not paying attention to the two of them.
Alwyn breaks abruptly and pulls over. He sighs, repressing his vexation, and sinks in his chair. He glances behind his shoulder at Enid. He cannot tell if her eyes are pleading with him not to strand his mother on the highway. He’d like to think they are.
“Get out.”
His mother simpers, eyeing him with a wistful, reserved compassion.
“Alright.” He glares at her incredulously. “As you wish!”
He cocks open her door using one of the contraptions on his side of the car.
“You can open my door from your side of the car? I guess you’re not the only one with mother issues.” She chuckles, a sigh that encompasses the mother she could have been, and sifts through the door without opening it (as apparitions have the convenience to do).
The stretcher loading area of the ambulance is immediately transforms into a living-room, and an elephant falls from the sky into it much like a piano.

“Mother, there is an elephant. In the living-room. In a living-room. In a living-room that probably doesn’t belong to us.
“Everything belongs to us now!” his mother dismisses him with a wave of her hand. The elephant is pink. The color of a teenage girl’s sneaker. Enid huddles in the corner of the room, trembling with hunger.
“What are we going to do with her,” his mother mumbles.
Alwyn nudges next to Enid, stroke her hair. He embraces her, trying to keep her from trembling. She can smell his blood, but nuzzles her head beneath his and grinds her teeth. It’s difficult when you have fangs.
“We could take that chair over there, saw off one of the legs, sharpen it, and voila, we have a wooden stake! And what do we do with wooden stakes?” His mother croons. “Or,” almost showing the slightest bit of compassion for her son, “we could let her gorge on this…poor, poor pink elephant.” The elephant wiggled its trunk.
“Won’t it attack her?”
“Not if I’ve got it under control,” his mother taps her temple, “with my mind.”

Stepping out of the…mansion his mother teleported them to in the middle of no where, Alwyn sighed and breathed in the…God the stench was horrible. Something macabre was about, aside from Enid gnawing on an elephant. He went back into the mansion, locked the door, and consulted his mother.
“Where the hell are we?”
“How should I know,” his mother replied, barely paying any attention to him.
“Have you…smelled what it’s like outside?” Enid looks up, quenched yet wary.
“I would but my senses are a little…rusty,” she snorts, gray snot dribbling from her nose. Alwyn winces. He turns around and glances at Enid. She nods. Together they head towards the front door, nearly touching each other in closeness; Enid shivers.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” his mother mutters under her breath, turning away from the window.

Alwyn follows the stench into an umbral forest; not far off from the entrance passageway there’s an abandoned tractor. From the looks of it, it hasn’t been used in awhile. The two of them continue on, Enid shivering. The wind picks up and they are engulfed in a dark navy, almost as thick as fog. The stench, that of a three week plugged toilet someone still pisses in. Alwyn, afflicted by sloth himself, and also working as an ambulance driver, knows these smells. This one, however, is mephitically unfamiliar. Enid latches onto his arm.
Eventually the navy becomes so thick that it is impossible to tell what direction they’re walking in. The pathway has trickled off; the stench has become so noxious that it hampers their other senses; edible, even. Enid steps on something that makes a hissing yawp; it feels furry against her foot.
“What is it?” Alwyn whispers.
“I don’t know,” Enid whispers back.
“Why are we whispering?” Alwyn whispers.
“You started it,” Enid chuckles.
About three yards away Alwyn discerns a little boy with shorts on; one eye completely white, the other completely red. His hair is the color of corn stalks. He’s barefoot, his shirt tattered, one shoulder torn off. Alwyn sticks his arm out in front of Enid, as if she’s about to walk a red light. The boy seems to be drooping; drooping, his head lolling in circles like that of a puppet’s.
“I’m the dead one; I should be sticking my arm out in front of you.” Alwyn doesn’t respond. He’s watching the boys red eye, which seems to becoming darker and darker, into garnet. Suddenly the boy opens his mouth; he doesn’t just open it—his mouth expands into a black, viscous hole. He makes the hissing yawp sound; a furry, ineffable limb bursts out of his head, spattering a mauve, vile blood. The limb, shaped like a crooked ‘L’, flails blindly. Tentacles then burst out of the boy’s crotch, squirming hideously; feelers. Another limb bursts out of the left side of the boy’s abdomen, this one bulbous, dripping with the same mauve ooze, squealing at an earsplitting pitch.
What’s left of the boy remains in tact, albeit flopping mopingly. The boy…abomination wobbles hesitantly; its limbs stop stiffen. It seems to be conveying that it means no harm. In doing so it shambles forlornly. Enid already pities the poor bastard mutant. But that eye…
The machination makes a squishy, garbling sound. Enid approaches it like a stray cat.
“Enid…”
“Oh don’t be such a ninny. I have preternatural vampiric powers, remember?”
“…For some reason I don’t think you’re the only one.”
A red laser beams out of the darkened eye like that of a sniper targeting its mark. Then the boy reverts to his former state.
“…” Enid glances at Alwyn quizzically.
“There’s something…I really think you should see ,” the boy laments. Alwyn rolls his eyes; Enid glares at him, dissatisfied with his lack of compassion.
“It’s behind you.” Alwyn notices for the first time that the ghostly boy seems to be staring through him; that the red beam perhaps wasn’t actually targeting them but…
Enid abruptly whirls around.
“There’s nothing there.”
“Look closer,” the boy pleads. “Look…closer.” As he says this, he leans in closer to Alwyn, nearly whispering into his ear. “Please…please.”
“Darling…there’s nothing there. See?” Enid stands where the boy is staring, gesticulating that there’s nothing there, and yet, he seems to be staring beyond her; he never designated exactly how far behind it was, whatever it was.
The boy rolled his head onto his shoulder. “Closer.” The boy’s eye darkens into an even deeper hue of garnet. Alwyn and Enid both turn around this time, gazing suspiciously into the dense, navy mist risen up from the ground. The trees, as tall as redwoods, if not taller, towered into the heavens. At the very top—at least as far as the eye could see—the trees converged together, creating an optical illusion like that of staring into a kaleidoscope.
When they turned back to the boy, he’d vanished.

They’d walked until they were enervated, decided it was pointless walking any further, and sat down next to each other. It was getting darker and Enid claimed she could hear…things, slithering and crawling about. Alwyn, apathetic induced via trauma, dozed off. Every time Enid heard something she would nudge him half-awake again, only to swat her off again. His hair was tasseled; he looked homeless. He told her a story about a music box. At the end of it he trailed off; it wasn’t very profound. Enid, eagerly and earnestly intrigued, listened to the circulation of his blood; he seemed to get her mind off of things, most likely because he was always on her mind.
“Tell me about your childhood,” she asks him; he looks into her eyes and sees that nurturing lust that women always give him. He’d rather not think about his childhood, mainly because it was so…dull. He’d spent most of it sitting in his room, trying to kill the time, and just as well himself. He never had many friends, if any at all, and those that he did were fickle and fleeting in his life. He’d dated numerous times during high school; the kind of relationships he thought would last forever and based his whole life around them, only to be left behind.
“There were no children in my hood,” he replies, avoiding the subject.
“I didn’t have much of one either,” she says, taking a small branch from the ground and drawing in the dirt with it. “I was pretty much a mother at the age of thirteen.” She reconsiders. “But I’m sure you’ve heard that one before.”
“Yep,” he mumbles, morose. “To be honest, I hate talking about childhoods. There’s an entire industry of memoirs written by people elaborating on how horrible their childhoods were. Yeah, well, everyone had a horrible childhood, and if you didn’t…some people even have pretext childhoods, because they believe their own wasn’t horrible enough.
“I’m sick of people telling me I have to get over things. I want to get under them.” He glances her enviously, wondering how she’s more optimistic than he his—she’s the dead one. You’d think it’d be the other way around.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you can’t get over something that’s…intangible. So why dwell on it. You’ve got to do what you have to, to cope, right? Even if it means killing yourself in the process, I suppose.
“I’d rather just be under my own skin. Or…yours, for example.” He hangs his head between his knees. “What about you? Tell me about your childhood.”
“Well if I told you I’d just have to bite you now, wouldn’t I.” She laughs.
“What, you have some deep, dark secret that everyone else doesn’t?”
“No, but I am a vampire,” she beams at him. She seems imperturbable to insults, even in the slightest. It vexes him.
“We should probably get a move on it. Whatever you hear lurking out there,” he says dourly. “I can almost feel it…gazing at me.”

“So you hated the boys that’d tell you who you were.”
“Yes.”
“And you let me guess—you’d have online conversations with those boys that’d ramble on and on, acting overtly nonchalant and throwing them an ironic or sardonic doggy bone every now and then? If so, I was one of those boys, thank you very much.”
Enid laughs heartily, hugging Alwyn, who’s still wary of her biting into his neck when she catches him off guard. As they’ve walked directionless through the oblique submarine forest, she’s pricked tender, vulnerable spots, exposing a few digressions, reminiscing here and there.
“I was always one of those girls that needed to be with a dependable guy, except I wasn’t dependable. And I remember…I couldn’t be happy unless I was with someone. You know how they say true happiness comes from within? Well, from the men I dated, that was literally true.”
“Ever tasted hospital food?”
“No, why?”
“Because that’s where I’m taking you on our first date after we get out of this hellhole.”
She laughs again. She always seems to be laughing; jovial.
She touches him gently on the wrist. “You’re an addict, aren’t you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I…I think I know what it feels like to…I think I can empathize with you.” She pauses, reaching into her mouth and stroking one of her fangs. “All I think about is blood; or rather, my next…fix, as you say. I can smell your blood. I can even feel it circulating throughout your entire body. If I was going to suck you…I mean—oh God—I mean, bite you, I’d know exactly where to do it.
“Your skin is so…pale and pallid, like mine. It’s almost as if we’re one in the same.”
He shakes his head in disapproval. “You didn’t have a choice. I did.” She draws nearer to him, from behind. “It’s ironic, you see, because I use painkillers to kill the pain, which kills me, but also kills the time. I figure I’m going to die anyway….I might as well clock the timer above my head a couple years ahead.”
“Don’t say that. You’re so negative! Just as you made the choice to victimize yourself, you also have the choice to change into whoever you want to be.” She trots slightly in front of him, heedless of what lies ahead.
“Sure, then I guess I’m out of change. A penny. A nick. A dime.” Enid is bamboozled by his drug allusions; in mid-response she bumps into the boy with the red eye. He’s still drooping. The boy reminds Alwyn of one of those modern-art paintings, the ones where they just take the paint and splatter it all over the canvas and let it drip. Mammary art, he calls it.
The boy’s dark eye reddens again, this time royally.
“We are so fucking lost,” Enid begins to relinquish, shoulders chuckling; she slaps her knees.
“You’re a vampire,” Alwyn utters, “you don’t slap your knees.”
“Well I just did. So there.” Now she Is standing hyperbolically akimbo, chin up.
Alwyn fixates on the boy’s eye darkened eye. The iris overlaps the pupil and the sclera. He realizes that, he is indeed, looking closer.
Closer.
The trees seem to be closing in on them; surrounding them. The nimbus begins to thicken; Alwyn gropes blindly for Enid, who is still laughing. Blinded by navy, he thumps against one of the trees. It…groans. It’s groan must be some call to arms for all the trees start groaning. Some yawning. Enid shouts out to him, but he’s already spinning, groping for something to latch onto. The ground is shifting in a circle. As the ground shifts, the trees draw back, then reform, then draw back, reform, on and on ; Alwyn trips over something heinously furry.
Closer.
The boy seems to be vacuuming all the surrounding flora into his eye, uprooting the trees; they collide and splinter.
“Captain! There’s a hole in the plane! I don’t,” she breaks off, “much longer!”
“Okay, play time’s over,” Alwyn hears his mother’s jaded voice.
Suddenly they’re sitting in the living-room again; the pink elephant, bleeding to death: brainwashed doll crumpled in a corner of the room.
“You murderer!” Alwyn’s mother points at Enid accusatorily. “You killed Errgie!”
Enid, trying to imbibe the absurdity of the past fifteen minutes, merely rolls her head back onto the carpet.
“You should suck that titty dry honey, there’s only so much blood goin’ around these parts,” his mother mimes a southern accent.
“What the fuck was that? One second we’re in an ambulance with a vampire we’re trying to resuscitate, then swept off away to a obnoxiously drab living-room in a mansion that just happens to be in the middle of a forest that only Stanley Kubrick could machinate.”
“You know, I had an abortion once. Well, we did. Before we had you,” his mother ruminates, ignoring him. She glances over at the pink elephant. “It’s become rather pale now, don’t you think?”
Enid snarls at Alwyn’s mother, bearing her fangs. She tramples over to the elephant and drains it as softly as she can, sinking her teeth into its barbaric neck. It tastes…like human flesh.
“We ought to get going,” Agnie drawls. “You are a serial killer. You might as well start acting like one.”
“And you are the one that’s living vicariously through me. Which means—”
“You know that little boy you encountered, in the forest,” his mother interrupts him. “While you two were lacing each other.”
“Yeah, what about him.”
“He’s your older brother.”

He keeps the sirens on so he can cut through traffic. When they reach the highway they pass a McDonald’s.
“You know, I haven’t eaten in days,” Alwyn recalls, languid. “Maybe we should pull over. Get a bite to eat.”
“I’ll be staying in the car,” his mother scoffs.
“It’s an ambulance,” Enid snaps at her. “I’m…getting hungry as well; I believe I will accompany you.”
“Here we go again,” his mother reclines on the head-rest. “I’m exhausted anyway.”
When they get out of the ambulance Enid puts her lips to his ear and whispers, “You know when I said I was hungry I…”
“I know.” Nearby a Lexus is blasting a hip-hop song so loudly that their voices are inaudible. Alwyn hastily scans the perimeter of the parking lot, then takes Enid by the hand, hushes her by putting her finger to his lip as they both scurry over to the SUV, heads dipped down.
Closer.
Enid snuck around back the car; if she was thinking what Alwyn was thinking, it wouldn’t be that difficult to pull off. She sauntered to the front left-side window, and Alwyn could hear her voice change to that of a licentious harlot; it bothered him, but he kept quiet, ducking beneath the front right-side window.
He heard the car door open. He heard her meekly moan and mount him; Alwyn, envious, began grinding his teeth. He heard her kiss him and something inside him snapped; he knew what he was doing was irrational and—it was irrational. He crept back to his post, hands over his ears.
Moments later there was there was a gobbling, heaving sound; someone trying to breathe. He heard the blood spurt against the windshield. The man in the driver’s seat was, to Alwyn’s fortuity, too stoned to notice that his best friend was being chomped on by a vampire. The music was still blaring, so even if the poor guy had managed to scream, no one would have heard it. Alwyn got up to grab the man in the driver’s seat attention while Enid viciously lunged for his neck, eviscerating his jugular and digging in, her head shaking violently.
Alwyn walked into the McDonald’s, no longer hungry. He looked back at the Lexus only to see Enid licking the blood of the windshield.

“What is it?” She cuffs Alwyn’s hands in her own. “You probably think I’m…disgusting.”
“…That’s not it.”
“You just watched me…murder two innocent people.”
“I didn’t watch.” He picks at a french-fry. “I just listened. I’ve seen worse. Back when I used to…drive the ambulance, legitimately. When I drove dying people to and fro, to the hospital, stop at the bar with the paramedics if the victim actually…died.” He squashes the french-fry. “Snag a drink or two.” He picks at another french-fry, tearing this one in two. “Sometimes it’s harder to watch someone dying than it is to watch them being killed. And you become inured to it over time, anyhow. Everyone just, dies, you know, one way or another.
“I remember when I had to drive my dad to the hospital. He was a songwriter, a pretty well-known one at that, in the industry. I mean, he’d write songs, and then celebrities would sing them and what not. He hated doing it. He’d always wanted to be an author. I figure that he figured he had a family to support; authors, you either make it or you don’t. And if you make it it’s usually because you’ve written some sob story about how shitty your childhood was.
“When he wasted his first liver, I managed to…get him a transplant. Skipped him up on the list. I had access to parts of the hospital I probably shouldn’t have.
“And no one really wanted to see him die anyway, being famous and all.” He grabs a handful of fries and starts splitting them into little pieces, one by one. “There are two things that never change in life. The first is a bad liver. The second is a bad liver transplant. He wasted that one, too.
“He didn’t say anything to me when I was driving him to the hospital. He was too busy dying. He might have made it, if I’d turned the sirens on, drove faster. But I didn’t bother. I knew even if he survived this episode he’d just have another in a couple weeks.
“So I drove to the bar as he died. I let him die, as I threw back vodka shots. ‘Pour me another,’ you know. I kept drinking until I knew he was dead, then I called one of my buddies to finish the drive; told him he’d died on the way; he hugged me, everything went by real smooth. I was too drunk to drive, so I just passed out on the stretcher in the back of my ambulance.
“The intercom woke me up not long after.”
Enid gets up and sits next to him, leaning her head on his shoulder. He twirls her hair, toying with it fondly. Her breath smells of hemoglobin.

“Enough already. What are we letting her sleep on our kitchen floor for. She’ll just get us caught; then I’ll have to break you out of jail,” his mother, nearly snoring, drones. Enid is taking the lives of two lovers in an abandoned windswept parking lot overlooking some beach.
“Do you even know where the fuck we are?” His mother scoffs.
“No. I just drive. And it seems to be working just fine. None of us have been caught yet.” Alwyn glances at his mother, half-asleep. “Not that you have anything to worry about.” His mother shudders in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position.
“You love her, don’t you.”
“Maybe I do. What’s it to you.”
“Because when it comes time that we have to kill her, I’m wondering how you’ll object.”
“We’re not just going to off her,” he growls. “Should off you; finish whatever business you came for.”
“But then…then you’d be in jail! Who would protect you from them.”
“I’d rather live in jail for the rest of my life than continue on like this. I’m twenty-three and the worst years of my life are already over. I’ve got nothing to lose.” He spits out of his mother’s window. “For some reason I think it’s you who’s the one that does.”
His mother laughs. “How astute your misery renders you. You know others better than you know yourself!”
“Stop being so melodramatic.” He chuckles. “I doubt your heart is healthy enough to have sex.”
“If I even have one,” she sneers.
He looks at her, awed. “You know, all you do is scoff and sneer and whine and complain. You’re more misanthropic than I am. Can you even smile? Smile. Try it. I dare you.”
His mother glances at him, all of a sudden sincere. “Was there anything I could have done to make your life any worse off?”
They both stare at Enid wobbling out of the car, her mouth and neck sopping with blood.

The next couple months passed by inexplicably fast, in the same manner. Angie would hijack the ambulance intercom and they’d abduct victims, sometimes even the paramedics if they had showed up already—Enid would suck them dry, then hurl them out of the back of the ambulance. Alwyn was becoming increasingly jaded and even his mother seemed less enthused by the macabre. In contrast, Enid was becoming more voracious until the point that her hunger became insatiable. Alwyn began injecting Enid with blood to shut her up.
His mother and him both knew this couldn’t last much longer, and Alwyn’s feelings for Enid were etiolated. They both decided one day that the whole ordeal was superfluous and Angie conjured a double-barrel shotgun loaded with silver shells and blew Enid’s head off while she was asleep, during the day.
“You seemed to enjoy that.” Alwyn remarked, shaken.
“Yes. Yes, that I did.”
“If you hated her so much then why did you bring her back to life in the first place?”
“I didn’t think she was going to become such a nuisance,” she muttered, dismissively. “And anyway, I didn’t want my only son to fall in love with an undead woman.”
“How considerate of you.” But his mother didn’t seemed to be listening to him. Alwyn got the impression that all this drifting off of hers was her coming to the realization that she was actually dead, and no matter how frustrated she got, she couldn’t bring herself back to life. Alwyn pitied her, naturally. She was his mom and all.
“So why did you come back, anyway.”
“I wish I knew,” his mother said, almost lamenting.
They both sat there, silently, one with business to finish, the other with unfinished business. The decapitated corpse of Enid splayed out on the grass supplemented the dourness of the situation.
Alwyn stared down at his hands. “You know, mom. Maybe you could help me.”
“How can I teach you to be any less self-sufficient. I’m already dead.”
Alwyn grabbed the wheel with both of his hands, glancing at his mother rhapsodically. “Well, we ought to start sooner or later, otherwise, I’ll be dead before you.”
They both laugh, and Alwyn accidently drives over Enid’s corpse.