Summernight

I have lived so long. I’m very tired. But not a physical tired, a tiredness in my very being. I’m tired of living so long…and of living so long in the dark.

It’s summer here in Phoenix, which is where I am making my home for this year; and it’s baking, sweltering hot, even in the dead of the night, which is when I am up prowling about.

The pavement exudes that ozone and dust smell of concrete baking. Everywhere there are fans and AC units humming, until it creates for me a long unending song underneath the other sounds. I sometimes find myself humming along to it…either it’s basic main note, or the other note that threatens always to overwhelm it. I make up little songs without meaning to. The syncopations of the wifi bits and bytes flowing through the air provide a strange and chaotic percussion accompaniment.

Tonight is like many other nights. I am out walking in the darkened city. I walk and walk, not caring where I go, sometimes humming my little tunes that match with the ever-present electric AC hum. I wear all black-- and even dark glasses, for my senses are set to a different, dark cadence and sometimes the streetlights and lit windows are annoying to my eyes.

Suddenly, I walk past a young girl, hurrying on her way home. I don’t want to, but I instantly turn and start following her. I am so quiet and my outfit so dark, she has no idea. She is already wary though, because other humans—ok, let’s be exact then—other male humans are always a potential problem for a young beautiful girl, especially one with plump dark red lips like the most perfect strawberry you ever ate. She also reeks of human pheromones; not that she is aware of this.

She reaches her building and heads up the steps. I follow and time my arrival to hers at the door. She startles and I say, “Oh! Excuse me! I didn’t see you there”…I pretend to fumble with a key and grasp the door handle and quietly force the lock and hold the door for her. “Sorry, after you!” I say. She is still wary, but now believes that I live in the building and so says, “thanks”, looking down and away from me. In doing so, she flashes a pristine bit of her glowing white neck and I must use all my will to not just grab her right then and there.

She hurries past and I stand at the mailbox area to keep my ridiculous ruse alive. She glances at the stairs, but then decides I am harmless and pushes the elevator button.

I finish my “getting-the-mail” ruse and come and stand next to her, waiting, just as she is, for the metal box to arrive at our current floor. It lands with a grating noise, it’s doors swishing open, and I gesture for her to get in first, ever the perfect gentleman. Inside she pushes the button with a four on it, so I choose to push the five button. We stand there, facing the doors, until they finally swoosh shut again and the whole miserable metal box starts its ascent.

I have a complex love/hate relationship with mechanical things. There is something horrifying to me about them. It’s almost as though they are alive, or once were, and now are just metal skeletons forever dancing whatever dance they were made to do. I guess it’s likely because I was born before any of them were made. We used muscle and sinew to build and sow…sometimes our own, sometimes an animal’s, but always it was living flesh trying to push its will out onto the world. These machines still seem…almost like a kind of cheating somehow.

The box I’m in with the young girl quickly fills to overpowering with her pheromones. Not that they act upon me like they would on a human male, but the scent is still rather nice: the smell of life and living and breathing and sweating and procreating and so very…human.

We reach her floor and the box lurches to a stop. A bell rings and the doors swish open again. She moves to pass through, smiling a small “thank you for behaving like a human” smile at me. I realize that it’s time to act, although I find myself reluctant. Even so, I can move so swiftly that I am past her and waiting at the door she was aimed toward when she arrives there with her key out, yawning. She startles, but I have removed my sunglasses and gaze into her pale greenish blue eyes, and she just stands there with her key out. I take it from her gently and unlock the door and guide her inside.

It's a sordid little place. Tiny and rather miserable. It smells of dirty carpet, mold, countless tenants, innumerable meals, cooked with hundreds of different combinations of herbs and spices. I lead her to the sofa and sit her down. She stares at me, shakes herself and tries to orient herself to reality. I can almost hear her brain thinking. “Why is he here? What is happening? Why don’t I move?” Her long dark blonde hair has fallen across her face and she brushes it back impatiently. Her hand moves from her hair, to her cheek, to the base of her neck, then to the sofa beside her; almost like a separate little animal.

I sit down in an armchair across from her. Oh no. I really should have killed her by now. I hate when I have this impulse…to talk to them. I say, “what a lovely little place you have here”, and test out my best “I am absolutely fully human” smile.

She lets out the breath she had been holding and says, “thank you” in an only slightly mechanical way. I say, “I didn’t catch your name earlier…” . She murmurs, ‘I’m Sommar. Sommar Blomfeldt”.

“Oh yes, of course. Sommar…what a lovely name. Does that mean Summer?” She nods.

“I’m, well… Godwyn… an unusual name, I know. Uh, thanks Mum and Dad, right?. She smiles faintly. She actually smiled!

“My last name is completely unpronounceable. Perhaps you could call me G.”

“I’ve never met a Godwyn before,” she says.

I should put a stop to this, but I am strangely weak tonight. I lean back in the chair and release her a bit from my control. She slumps down a little and says, “You must excuse me! I’m so tired suddenly, aren’t you tired?…” She trails off. “Perhaps we should have some tea?” I nod benevolently. “Certainly”, I say. Tell me about yourself while you make it, will you, Sommar?”

She stands and moves over to the wall that’s taken up by the tiny kitchen. She opens cupboards and brings out cups and saucers. She puts water in the kettle and turns on the stove. I say, “Why don’t you take off your coat and stay a while?”. She says “Oh!” and shrugs it off and hangs it by the door. I watch her take out various glass jars of tea.

“Do I detect a bit of an accent? Where are you from originally? Is that…a Swedish accent?”

“Yes!” she says, stopping to smile at me, as she puts together a tea from the several jars. “My parents are from Uppsala...near Stockholm. It’s so lovely there, but I do so much love to explore more of the world. That’s why I’m here, in the United States right now.”

The kettle just starts to whistle and she grabs it and opens the spout to stop it from becoming too loud. I watch her pour the boiling water into the two cups she’s prepared. I see the steam rising. I smell the released fragrance as the leaves begin to steep. I realize she’s still talking, but I’ve lost the thread of what she’s saying. She brings the cups over on a small white rectangular tray and sets it on the coffee table between us.

My head feels thick. I try to listen to what she’s saying. She sits across from me once more, on the sofa, and I peer past the steam rising from the cups. Her face is….beautiful, almost too beautiful, as if she is glowing from within with some kind of brutal force. Sommar. She smiles at me and continues speaking. I catch a word here and there.

“City.”

“Bread and wine and fruit and you know.”

“ Endless fields of grass.”

“A small clear stream flows past there.”

She seems to grow more ravishing each moment. I see plants growing around her. I hear birds chirping and fluttering. The plants grow more and more abundant all around her as she speaks. Vines grow up around her and over the sofa and up into her hair and they are snaking toward where I sit across from her. Still she is talking. She is wearing a flower crown.

“Too hot to really do anything but just lie there.”

I see a pale blue-green butterfly flying slowly around her head as she continues speaking.

I feel my head lowering to my chest. My eyelids are heavy. The butterfly continues it’s slow flight, creating letters in the air, but I can’t quite make out its message. Sommar laughs, her perfect white teeth catching the light. She smiles at me, insanely beautiful now. I say, “What are you doing to me? Are you some kind of…witch?”

And when I say it, I know that it is true. She is exerting some kind of spell over me. I wrench my eyes from her. I take hold of the longest fingernail growing from the smallest finger on my left hand and yank it with all my might. It comes away in my hand. I let out a cry. The pain is atrocious. My vision is momentarily white with it and then I shudder and I am back in the seedy little apartment. I blink furiously. My finger starts growing a new nail. All the plants start tentatively growing back around Sommar.

I must get out of here. I try to stand, but Sommar waves her hand and I am pressed back down into the sofa. She says, “Oh come on G, why don’t YOU stay a while? I wasn’t sure that vampires even existed. I smelled you tonight, before I saw you—from blocks away! The smell of an abattoir, of a battlefield. You reek of blood. I smelled you and then I saw you, and I knew what you were. It’s so clear, as if you were wearing a little sign around your neck…Hello, I am a vampire.” She laughs to herself and some of the vines start growing faster around her and burst open little pale blue flowers like popcorn popping.

I struggle, but am unable to do much more than keep my eyes from completely closing. She stands, the plants and vines around her fall away from her and begin growing over the sofa, over the table, they race everywhere in the room, crawling up the walls, up over the refrigerator and the stove where she stood a few moments ago.

She walks around the coffee table to me. Birds are flying somewhere above me near the ceiling light. She crouches and looks into my face and then blows air into my face as though she is blowing the skeletal seeds off a dandelion. I reel backward, my head snapping upward. She cups her hand over my mouth, saying something. When she takes her hand away, she shows me two canine teeth in the palm of her hand. She smiles and says, “Sorry, but I need these, G.” She slips them into a tiny leather bag on a string and then puts it on over her head.

“Wait,” I say. “Wait.”

She ignores me and moves back to her place on the sofa. It’s hard to recognize as a sofa now, it just looks like a multitude of plants, but she is able to sit back on it as though it has not transmogrified.

“You know every place has it’s own magic, G... I find new ingredients everywhere I travel. Arizona has yielded some interesting new bits and pieces: javalina foot, eye of gila monster, brittlebush…but I never expected to really get these!” She lifts the small leather bag around her neck and lets it fall again.

I must leave here. My tongue probes the empty holes where my teeth were. I wait for them to begin regrowing, but they remain empty sockets. I try again to rise, but I sit there, completely still.

I begin to sense the coming of the dawn and must get back to my sleeping place—below a crummy, crumbling building a few miles from here, buried in the dirt in the crawlspace underneath the boiler room. I must go now.

Sommar senses it too. She turns the full glare of her beauty on me again and makes a motion for me to stand. And suddenly I am standing.

"Yes, it's about time you should be going. It's been so enjoyable though. Thank you for your visit."

She goes and puts her coat on, shooing away a small swarm of butterflies to pluck it from its hook amongst the vines and leaves growing up the wall.

“Come,” she says. I float after her, somehow walking through the plants, seeing swarms of insects and fat bumblebees now, flying among the flowers. For a strange, prolonged moment my whole world is watching a single slow bumblebee flying, teetering, from one flower to the next. And then I’m past and following her out into the hallway. She shuts the door behind us and we are back in the regular building hallway—it’s not suffering the fecund effects of the apartment inside. Just an ordinary dirty hallway in an ugly dark building and it’s a relief. She leads me down the flights of stairs. I can do nothing but follow.

We reach the foyer and I see out the glass of the doors that the sun is just beginning to rise. She stops and again turns the terrible force of her beauty on me. It hits me like a palpable thing. It is…hard to look at. She glows with some kind of radioactive pulsing energy—like the sun itself. She says, “Sorry G. looks like you’ve reached the end of the trail here.”

She gestures to the door and I walk to it. I resist, but only in my mind.

I think suddenly of a time when I was still a human boy, eons ago: when a sheep in my flock fell down a cliff and was dashed on the rocks below. Its legs broken, it cried out over and over and over for rescue. I put my hands over my ears and began to gather the rest of my flock to leave. There was nothing I could do and I found myself wishing it would hurry and die.

There is nothing I can do now and my brain cries out like the poor dumb sheep, over and over.

I will myself to stop, even as I reach out and grab the door handle. The sun is rising. I step out from the just-paling blue shadows of the building, through the door, and into the light.