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  —I can’t move yet from where I am, I say to the vampire instead. —I need more time.

  —To what? asks the vampire.

  —To breathe, I say. I don’t know how to explain the harsh frozen light of morning to a person who sleeps away all the days, how sometimes all you can see is the lines surfacing one by one at the corners of your eyes. The vampire’s nights have no metronome ticking out the seconds he has left. We don’t, at sunrise, have much in common. Things human bodies do: piss, shit, stink, bleed. Hope.

  —Do you want another drink? the vampire asks.

  —Thanks, I say, gathering up Rosamunde and Marcus. —I have to work tomorrow. I should probably go. I give him back his coat; for a second I think he will tell me to keep it. But unlike me, it is not replaceable.

  —Good night, the vampire says, and smiles. —I’ll see you in the evening.

  * * *

  But the next night the literary agent takes me to a literary party. I am wearing my favorite shirt, which is not a shirt you would notice, but it reminds me of home and summer and the smell of grass in sunlight. At the party I realize the shirt is a mistake. Instead of happy, I look poor. The host is an editor. The party is in his apartment, which is the size of my entire building floor. Beyond his windows, the city glitters. His furniture is taupe and rustic. I drink a glass of wine in the corner and watch writers circulate, pretending I am at the zoo. The writers preen and adjust their plumage. The writers prance. The writers engage in mating displays. The writers congregate at the watering hole, wary of predators. The writers would not hesitate to leave the weakest among them behind. I eat a bacon-wrapped shrimp off a tray and a tiny piece of toast covered in salmon and a single fried dumpling filled with pork. After a while the caterers avoid me. —Of course you’ve read Infinite Jest, a writer says to someone behind me. —But the essays? I turn around. The writer has an unflattering beard and shoes the vampire would not be caught dead in.

  —Hi, I say. —Do you want to get out of here?

  —Do I know you? the writer asks, and I shrug.

  —Do you really care?

  * * *

  I don’t know how I will tell the vampire. I have never been busy after work before and it’s not like he has a phone. Will he find another girl just like me? Is he already well aware of the eternal fungibility of human lives? It’s too late to ask the writer’s name again now that we are on our way to this bar he knows on the Lower East Side where his old roommate is the bartender, and later on it doesn’t matter. Drinks keep appearing at my elbow. I find myself telling the writer all the things I can remember about my childhood.

  —I was also misunderstood as a child, he tells me eagerly.

  —I was not misunderstood, I say. —I was superior.

  —Oh, Rosamunde! he laughs.

  —My eyes are violet, I say into my drink, —and my powers are strong. He doesn’t hear. I thought I would be relieved to touch another person but instead I am only resigned. I pretend that if I turn my head the vampire will be waiting for me patiently just inside the door. You silly thing, you went to the wrong bar, he’ll say, taking my hand, and we’ll walk out together into the brutal burning world.

  * * *

  Rosamunde with her amulet, her sky full of stars. Rosamunde, a vessel waiting to be filled. Rosamunde, a blank slate, a mirror, a girl made easy to long for. Rosamunde who will never, not ever, be as sad as any of us.

  * * *

  The writer has Bukowski on his bookshelf but at least his apartment is warm. He brings me vodka in a dirty mug and I let him fuck me. —That was great, he says afterward, and I think of something the vampire said once about the infinite human capacity for self-delusion.

  —You were human once, I said.

  —Being human, the vampire said, —is a skill it is useful to outgrow.

  —You’re beautiful, the writer mumbles, a snore already flaring in his throat. I wait for my heretofore undiscovered powers to appear. The writer’s radiator clanks.

  I think about what I will tell the vampire tomorrow. —I would have left before morning, I will say in a casual, sardonic way, —but the heat in his apartment worked. The vampire will present me with a powerful locket, or inscribe upon my forearms a magical tattoo. The vampire will offer me a talisman.

  —Now you have the secret, the vampire will say. —Now, at last, you have been seen as what you truly are. The vampire and I will go outside so he can smoke and he will be wearing his new Rick Owens coat, and I will tell him he should get a fauxhawk, and I will tell him I am going to buy him one of those Rastafarian hats to put his dreadlocks in. —Certainly not, he will say in disdain, until he sees that I am joking. I’ll tell him to start a fashion blog. When I cry he will touch my shoulder once and take his hand away. —It’s always hard to watch you people, the vampire will say. Of all the demons I know, the vampire is the most real and the least unkind. Maybe we will still be friends when I live on a farm with chickens and a goat and a big brindled dog that loves only me. I will write a novel about my time with the vampire; a caper, or a noir. We could solve crimes together.

  * * *

  Maybe even I will survive this cataclysmic age.

  * * *

  —If we lived in the country together we could see the stars, I’ll tell the vampire, snuffling.

  —No more whiskey for you, little dreamer, he will say. He’ll take away my glass and I will lean into his shoulder, and in that single breathless moment the night will seem less large.

  About the Author

  Sarah McCarry was born in Seattle. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and has written for Glamour, The Stranger newspaper, the Huffington Post Books Blog, and Tor.com. She has published essays in Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Seal Press) and Voices of a New Generation: A Feminist Anthology (Prentice Hall). Since 1999, she’s written and produced the zine Glossolalia; it’s currently in the permanent collections of libraries across the country, including Columbia University, Barnard College, the Multnomah County Public Library, and the San Francisco Public Library. In August of 2009 she started the personal blog www.therejectionist.com. The blog currently has over a thousand followers and gets over 20,000 hits a month. She has bicycled alone across two continents and worked as a domestic violence advocate, a circus performer, a clearcut surveyor, an archivist, and a letterpress printer. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings, and About a Girl. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah McCarry

  Art copyright © 2016 by Jasu Hu