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Vampyric Pick-Up Lines
by Matthew Lee Bain
“Your breath...is as rancid as the innards, of a rotting, road, carcass; with just a subtle, suggestion, of cinnamon. And your scent, is that of venison blood, fresh from the wound. Your shape is as drawn and rawboned as a suicide victim, happy to be dead,” he paused, in postmortem praise of her, magnificent beyond description.
“Go on...” she murmured.
“Your lipstick is dried blood, draaawwnnn of a vagrant’s veins...he suffered. I can tell by searching your vixen eyes, glazed with the shroud of 100 demises.” He took her lithe hand in his.
“My darling, surely this carnage trapped neath your gnarled nails is ages old.” He placed a kiss just behind her knuckles upon the back of her hand. “I think that you, my ashen angel, and I should share our blood; warm each other in an embrace fit to dethaw a hypothermic cadaver. Reveal your thoughts.” His manner was anxious yet staid. She was impressed. The vamp evaluated him: his hair was a miss-matched crop of black spikes; his pupils sparkled in the blackness of the bar; a carnal grin stretched across his hairless, perfectly pale countenance.
“Do you know that what you have said is the most flattering outgiving I have heard in recent times,” she snickered, the pointed corners of her mouth rose up into her bone-white cheeks.
“Is that a yes?”
“Ita vero.” She swept her thick braids of deep-red hair over her exposed shoulder.
“I assumed you spoke Latin. I as well but surely not as elegantly as yourself. Greek?”
“Minime.” She took a sip of her drink.
“Nor I. I should’ve learned the romance languages back in their popular times. Now they’re just one of the many corpses that make up the charnel foundation of modern english.” He turned away from her, toward the bar, to venture into the depths of his own drink.
“You know, they say that evil knows no love. Therefore, we must not be truly evil, for tonight we will feel...such love as never experienced by the diabolic...or the dead.” She flashed her wicked smile at him, “Ille inferi etiam amanda desiderium.”
“I prefer to think of us as damned rather than evil, but your invite is too prosperous for me to turn down.” With that, he began to get up from the bar. He put some coinage on the bar in his parting and extended his hand to her. As they made their egress together, he noticed another male seated in the dim corner of the underground establishment. His face had recently been rived apart, and the scar tissue had not fully regenerated. He stared at the couple until she eyed him. Upon reflex, he promptly looked away, showing the backside of his bald head.
Once outside, “What’s there to recount of that one?”
“Let me tell you, of all the barbarisms I’ve had bumbled into my ears, never has there been such uncouth coarseness, than from that one.” Her eyes turned to bright ruby.
“Do tell.”
“On the week of the last, he came up to me, and the fool actually said, ‘You and I should get together, and I’ll tell ya Mortisha, my blood isn’t the only thing I want ya to suck’.”
He began to howl at the thought of it.
“I might tell you, I didn’t find it that amusing. Some beings have no culture, even after decades of learning, centuries even.”
“And his gash?”
“I turned to him, and he was giggling like a child, so I let my claws extrude; I let them come out so far that they tore my flesh, but I didn’t care. Then I backslashed that vulgar vampyre across his brazen face. My claws tore through his cheek and severed the side of his jaw from his face. There was so much of a mess on the bar, I had to payoff the bartender to make good of it.”
“Good for you, doling out discipline where discipline’s due.” They continued to stroll until they came to her haven. Up they went, climbing rusted fire escapes to the top level of the building that was as dead as they were. Her room was empty save a couch and an old rotted coffin which lay in an adjacent room.
“It was my grandmother’s. After my family died, years back, I decided to retrieve it from the ground.”
“And her body?”
“It had long since been assimilated by the earth’s children. By the way my name is Gwenneth.”
“Ah, I am so sorry for not asking, I was bound by the idea that sordidness like your’s was beyond appellation.”
“You adulate me so,” Gwenneth blushed, the only vivid color that she could claim aside from her eyes.
“I am Basil,” he bowed before her. After a moment’s discussion they sauntered together, quickly displacing garments. Eventually entwining in each other’s arms, they lay down upon the couch. Their stark, chalky forms chaffed against one another. The dry, dead skin began to wet itself as blood found its way out of their empty endocrine glands. The love they made was fit for the morgue, fit for cold slabs; their gelid flesh stole the only warmth the couch harbored. Her nails dug through the white flesh of Basil’s back, leaving bloody criss-crosses, a temporary scarification of desire.
Hours were taken before orgasms were reached, and those orgasms were explosions of red; crimson decorated her insides, making her colder than before. Dry of any other fluids, there was nothing but blood to share between them. One climax was not enough, and they continued for hours, while the sunrise drew near. The dead are in no hurry.
Later on, while they lay together in Gwenneth’s coffin, Basil stared at her slumbering beauty. He thought of the dreadfully pleasant evening they had shared. It could’ve been blundered easily by his word placement within the bar. Tonight his eldritch elegance had served him well. Basil was glad that he had not acted on his primary impulse, spewing out the first phrases that came to mind. Something like, “Would you care to join me in a fitfull bout of necrophilia grave girl?” or “Does the ossuary between your thighs have room for one more bone?” He had learned decades ago that these were not beguiling at all to dead woman. If it weren’t for regeneration, he’d have the scars to prove it.
© Bain, 2007
The Matthew Lee Bain ship is slowly but steadily approaching its thirty-second year at sail on this dreary and otherwise uncertain sea of life... Other than that, he writes fiction, studies literature, and practices Tae Kwon Do.
His most recent poetry credits include: The Missing Fez, Penny Dreadful, Haz Mat Review, Children, Churches, and Daddies, Pegasus, and Scavenger's Newsletter. His most recent fiction credits include: Nocturnal Ooze, Happy, Reflection's Edge, and TQR.