About Things that Go Bump

by Kiernan Kelly
10 pages / 4566 words
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc

Prowling the streets of New Orleans is pretty normal for a vampire. Finding a hot cowboy from the Lone Star State isn't. In town for a gay and lesbian literary fest, Travis teaches our vamp just how big things are in Texas, and how good the life of a bloodsucker might just be somewhere outside of the Big Easy.

Sample

Darkness falls, a heavy velvet cloak that is both comforting and stifling at the same time. The growing shadows chase the tourists away between the towering rows of crumbling mausoleums, scrambling to finish their charcoal rubbings of the engravings on the oven crypts. Cameras click frantically, sounding like a flock of crazed woodpeckers, taking one last photo before the light fades and the darkness ushers in things more eerie than the ancient brick tombs.  

Things like me.

Ever cautious, we are taught from the time we can walk to keep hidden, to remain out of sight, safely shrouded by magic as old as our species, until the moon has risen and only its silvery light kisses the tombs.

This gray time, these few fleeting moments between dusk and full dark are the most dangerous for me and mine. They are the times when our glamours are thinnest; when even weak human eyes can see what we seek to hide. Ourselves.

Personally, I’m sick and tired of hiding and refuse to do it anymore. The Elders have threatened to chain me to my crypt if I insist on walking the streets in plain view of the human population, but I don’t care. They can blow it out of their collective, ancient, bloodsucking asses. Three hundred years is a hell of a long time to spend - pardon the expression - on the graveyard shift. I’m out, so to speak, and I’m not going back.

It’s bad enough that we still make our homes in the damp, dark, moldering cemeteries of New Orleans. I mean, how cliché can you get? What’s wrong with suburbia, for corn’s sake? A nice little split level with a pool and a breakfast nook? Would that be asking for so much? For shit’s sake, I’d take a condo. An apartment. A fucking shanty in pissant town, if that’s all that was available. Anything would beat the four by eight foot brick box that’s been my family’s home since we crossed the Atlantic from the Old Country.

I could understand the need for secrecy before, back when you were likely to be turned into vampire shish-ka-bob by some frightened farmer wearing a garlic necklace, but aren’t humans more enlightened in this day and age? Buried up their eyeballs in technology as they are, with a cell phone plugged into one ear and an iPod in the other, one would think that something as simple as a pair of elongated canines would no longer make them shit their pants. How can someone who’s spent eight hundred hours playing Resident Evil be afraid of somebody with a little extreme dental work?