Alright, I know I'm not supposed to summarize or anything, but I'd just like to say that this isn't a one shot, and I'm working on some more. I'm curious for feedback about the style etc of this beginning...
I think I also owe you a head's up that this story has vampires in it.
Enjoy.
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It always begins on a dark and stormy night.
A horrible, smothering, city night in a damp and miserable place where the sky reflects a damp and miserable orange light from the streetlamps below. Neon signs lay green speckles of reflected light across the wet roads. Drizzling, warm rain, like God felt like taking a piss all over you.
I was wrapped in a cold wet jacket, trudging through puddles. Headed towards a little yellow pretzel shop, stomach painfully empty.
Inside the walls were all yellow and the counters were all orange. There was a giant smiling wooden pretzel on the wall, and a menu painted above the counter on a slate, to look like it had been handwritten with chalk. I just wanted a regular pretzel. I just wanted to have a regular pretzel and run home and go to bed. Unfortunately, a tall man in front of me was trying to bargain with the cashier over his pizza-stuffed-pretzel. On the menu they called it the “New York, New York.”
“Have you even tasted this stuff?” He waved the half eaten pieces in the stoic cashier’s face. “This tastes like friggin’ ground human flesh!”
A human flesh pretzel. How graphic.
Some memory was unfolding itself in my mind, recent and red.
Stringy carnage dangling through long black blades; white flesh squeezed into blistering dark blooms.
“Look at it! Look at these chunks! I swear to god this tastes like blood. Try it!”
Red sauce bubbled out of the center of the chewed pretzel, like bones from a severed wrist. Like purple splatters on a concrete wall. Fingernails peeking out of the mouth of a grinder. And so much black, black blood. Flesh being stripped down to sinew that clings like spider webs to rust-rotted machinery. Stretching them around and over like a taffy puller.
The tall man’s face blurred suddenly up very close to mine. “Don’t order the pizza pretzel, man!”
“I’m sorry,” I told the cashier, “I need to go now.” It was true. I was going to throw up.
“Look what you did!” He shouted at the man as I left. “You’re driving away my customers.”
Dark wet sky, trash ridden alley. Me by the dumpster puking my guts out. Black, pulpy tangles of guts. Splintered ribs pouring carrion into a corner. I might have blacked out for a second.
The girl’s name was Rosita Ortez. Rosita fell into a meat grinder, and it ate her whole. I watched. We pulled open the machine’s belly to get her out. There was a great squealing of metal on metal as we dismembered the machine, hoping she’d be curled up safely between the blades and crushers. She was pulled apart like taffy. Black blood, purpled flesh and fingernails. Her ground human flesh hanging from the blades like streamers. Fresh fodder for pretzels. They decided that she had broken safety codes and gotten herself killed. I testified at the hearing. Afterwards, after the judge pounded his gavel and Rosie’s family got nothing, I went over to see her mother and sister. We all stood in a circle and cried together. I had only spoken to her a few times, but it’s remarkable how close you feel to a person after you’ve seen them die. After we stopped crying I just wanted to go home, but first I decided to get a pretzel.
Back again to the alley. I finished retching and wiped hot bile off my chin. I was covered in cold sweat and rain, and wanted nothing but my bed. Somewhere to curl up and die in. Succumb to fever, call my mother and let her wash my forehead with cold water until all memories of Rosita Ortez’s cracked fingernails had disappeared. Then I could blame the pile of old breakfast stewing on the ground on a disease. At least a disease with a name.
I stood up straight with closed eyes. I pretended I was a shadow-person, ready to float home, shifting in and out of existence until I had made my invisible way back to a warm bed and a cold cup of water.
A mound of a person with clicking shoes and a rain slicker pulled around its face loomed suddenly behind me.
“Got a light?” it said in a deep male voice.
I’d like to say that these words would echo in my brain for eternity, with chilling realism or crystal clarity or something like that, but the truth is that my memory of that night is foggier than I’ve let on. I’m not sure exactly what it was he really asked me, but those words will do.
“No, sorry.” I never looked up. I never look up when I don’t have to. Someone told me once I have the eyes of an insane person.
I should have looked. The stranger grabbed me with hands like talons and threw me back towards the wall. I can remember screaming “NOOOOO!!” to him, as if I had been hoping that this exact thing wouldn’t happen. He bared fangs and saliva at me, both fierce and hot, then ripped back my shirt and tore through the flesh of my neck. I remember that my veins made a popping noise when he punctured them, and that I gasped but didn’t scream. I lay and choked in my blood for what seemed like hours. He held me down and watched me, his mouth a meat grinder of blood-soaked blades and flesh. He dripped blood into my eyes and I waited to die, heart fluttering like a crushed bird’s. My life ended, I suppose. The night, the street, the pretzel, Rosie, rows of jagged fangs and blades, tore Jimmy Hugh away with a pair blunt claws to the neck. Tore the head off my soul, or something. All the while my bleeding body heaved with death rattle after death rattle, refusing to die, to let me outside. Outside to enjoy the fresh air, get some exercise. Meet some other kids your age. I was locked in tight.
So I fainted instead, and lay unconscious in my own vomit with a stranger still straddling me in the dark.
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I'm experimenting a bit with the style and voice I'm using for this, so feedback would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for reading!
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