by Jared Povanda
- Content warnings: Murder/death, blood, vampirism
“Cherry pie,” she said to him. He answered her by placing a hand on his neck, and she watched as his gloved palm came away wet with blood. She tried again.
“No, you’re right. Silly me. Strawberry-rhubarb jam?” He didn’t respond. Frogs called to their lovers. A man died of seven crude stab wounds a mile back.
When was the last time she had seen him like this? The night before their graduation? He had asked her as calmly as he would ask her about the weather to bite his throat hard enough to break the skin. She remembered the way the long grass felt against her knees. How he sat, numb and unspeaking, while she neared. She opened him up like a soda can, fireworks flaring through a denim sky. She guzzled all she could.
Now he helped her over a rotted log, leather clasped to create sensation without warmth. The two passed twilit caterpillars dangling from silk threads. The sad shrivels of cigarettes arranged on a sunken stump by desperate teenagers. He opened her car door.
“Spaghetti with meat sauce,” he said, but in a way that made it clear to her that he thought this game was stupid, and that he wanted her to know he thought it was stupid without actually having to bear the responsibility of hurting her feelings.
She looked at her lap, stung, and picked at her frayed sweater. Tiny sticks and clumps of mud nested in her hair. She wanted to crank up the heat and melt into white chocolate (which wasn’t really chocolate at all), not understanding what changed. Or when. He was the one who had wanted to “try murder on to see if it fit.” They had planned this together.
He had told her it was going to be like a red popsicle melting at the end of July, and she had laughed and offered filet mignon with a viscous red wine jus.
She never wanted to stop countering his menu choices. She didn’t think she could.
The dash lit when he turned the key, and she couldn’t help fixating on that wicked scratch hooking the skin of his neck. The silence choked, and saliva ballooned her cheeks. Of course it did. That was love, right?
She wanted to lick him clean. To dissolve him—her soft stadium pretzel covered in sriracha, salt falling around her in little jewels of snow as her mouth burned. It would work. A single taste would make him smile again, and they’d go back to joking and planning, and she’d say, “Mountains of ketchup,” and he’d say, “You’re the only person I know who’d want whole mountains made of Heinz,” and he would mean it.
The need to fix whatever was broken had her craving bright acid, deep umami. She sat up and leaned into his space. Her tongue wiggled.
“Next time,” he said to someone who might have been her—before she could swirl the life waiting inside him and call it merlot; before he could see how her mouth grew needy with several new and ready teeth—“I’ll use a sharper knife.”
Jared Povanda is a writer, poet, and freelance editor from upstate New York. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Microfiction, and his work has been published or is forthcoming in literary journals including Wigleaf, The Citron Review, and Milk Candy Review. You can find him online @JaredPovanda, jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com, and in the Poets & Writers Directory.
