9-10-09, 3:04 pm

Synopsis: A bizarre allergy to sunscreen has caused vampire Dennis Spectre to lose his taste for blood. Instead, Spectre must consume vegetables, fruits, and plants in order to survive. Torn between a nostalgic longing for his former sanguine ways and a fledgling pride in his metamorphosis, Dennis finds himself an outcast in human and vampire world alike. With only his poetry and his strange urges to sustain him, Dennis embarks upon a lonely search for redemption that takes him from all-night supermarkets to the Minnesota wilderness, from a prestigious Ivy League college to a guest appearance on Jeopardy. Taunting him throughout his travels are a pair of flamboyant vampires whose nocturnal world Dennis at once longs to embrace – and to destroy. 

I.

I caress your skin, textured and rough under my pale hands. Your eyes button-like and unseeing, unaware of the mute tyranny of my gaze, my hunger. Your color is as warm and earthy as mine is cold and waxen.

A perfect potato.

I drop you into a plastic bag and lovingly secure you with a TwisTie. I place you in my shopping cart as gently as a new mother lays down her infant in a bassinet. You join my other captives: exotic orange beets, a flirtatious cauliflower, melancholy eggplant. My hunger is dizzying, and I must fight to hold it in check. My craving, like my very being, belongs to the darkness, too intimate and terrible to satisfy in the brassy, overlit presence of a dozen or more late-night shoppers at this 24-hour Almacs. I am paler than they are, and, I like to imagine, endowed with the kind of intangible hauteur that is a characteristic of my species. I cannot disappear, or turn myself into a bat, but I am a vampire, beyond good and evil. Though due to a strange, perhaps passing affliction, the warm juices of fruits and vegetables, and not the silvery elixir of blood, impel me along my lonely nocturnal forays. I am a predator. How these unsuspecting humans in front of me in the “Quick-Check” lane, unloading frozen fish fillets, breakfast cereal, and bathroom tissue would scream in terror had they the slightest inkling that an amoral monster stands within their  proximity. Inwardly I compose a poem as I wait, trying to stave off The Hunger:

Alone in a crowd My darkness hidden by your light My vengeance hidden by your Innocence We are infinities apart Both of us In our way Alone, so alone in a crowd Alone, and with no-—”

Lost in reverie, I am startled by the abrupt nudge of a plump middle-aged woman in butterfly glasses from behind me. “You gonna unload them groceries?” she snarls. Her gruffness amuses me. As though I were simply another shaven-headed, slacking college student daydreaming about an upcoming date or worrying about an overdue term paper! I am slight of build, my features bland and pleasant, and I used to have to shave my scalp nightly to achieve my brooding, austere look. But ever since the affliction, my hair grows so slowly that I haven’t needed to recharge my Norelco in months. Yet I – “Move it, kid!” the woman goads me again. With a sigh I fancy must have struck her as enigmatic, I proceed to lift bags of produce from my cart and place them on the conveyor belt. On the checker’s computerized register, words and numbers flash: “loose onion, .39,” “bunch celery, .89,” “Brussels sprouts, $1.29.” “Hey!” My nemesis in the butterfly glasses is squinting into my cart. ”You got fourteen items, and this lane is for twelve or less!” The checker, a gawky aproned fellow with a huge Adam’s apple, tries to mediate. ”It’s no big deal,” he says with an awkward grin. He continues to tally my purchases. Russet potato, .42. Before the unnervingly hostile matron can object – does she see through me, know me for what I am? Some part of my psyche screams – the checker punches a button on the register.

“Eleven dollars and fifty-seven cents,” he recites.

I freeze. Where had I miscalculated? The checker regards me expectantly, or is that a flicker of unease I glimpsed, however briefly, in his watery hazel eyes? I have only a ten-dollar bill and a few stray pennies in my pockets. ”Christ-frickin’-Jesus,” mutters the woman behind me, as I agonize over which of my prey to set free. The power of God Himself surges through my veins, humbling me, torturing me. After what feels like a tortuous eternity, I release, with a perverse blend of regret and exhilaration, an onion, an enticingly aloof bunch of radishes, and a tub of tofu whose gorgeous pallor rivals my own. ”I will return for you, my loves!” I silently resolve. The cashier rings up a new total. Nine eighty-seven. I hand him the ten and sneer with an icy arrogance, “Keep the change.”

--Karin S. Coddon is a frequent contributor of fiction and non-fiction to PoliticalAffairs.net. Her latest novel is the The Shadow Man.