A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

“Why am I here?” the man asked for the umpteenth time.

I had had enough. Maybe if I answered him, he would shut up. It was less messy and wasted less blood than pulling his tongue out.

I turned down the lovely Jane Sevelle as she continued her newscast on SNN, and spun my chair around to face the man. His face went white at the sight of me and he cowered back to the far side of the cage.

“I take it you aren’t being rhetorical or philosophical,” I said. “Though I have an answer for that, as well.”

He whimpered and I took that for agreement. He meant the cage.

“I should think it’s obvious,” I told him. “If you weren’t in the cage, you would run away. And then I would have to catch you again. It’s so much less work this way.”

“You’re a … a serial killer?”

“Moralless,” I agreed.

“More or less?” he repeated.

I just shrugged, then smiled at him. “Actually, I’m a vampire.”

I loved the way his face changed from fear to fascination. “Really?”

“Really.”

He moved back to the near side of the cage. “You don’t look like a vampire.”

“Met a lot of us, have you?”

His face flushed a slightly less shade of pale, and he said, “No. But … you don’t look like a vampire.”

“Nevertheless,” I replied.

“You didn’t lure me or seduce me or anything. You just walked up to me on the street and banged me with a rock on the side of my head.”

“Seduce you? Have you looked at yourself?” I held up an index finger. “One, you’re a guy, and outside of certain books I could mention, most vampires aren’t gay. Nor are we particularly celibate, but that’s a whole other conversation.” I held up a second finger. “Two, even as a male you’re nothing special. I have to confess I’ve never understood what women see in men–like Burt Reynolds or Adam Sandler; what the hell is up with those two?–but even without a set of ovaries I can see that you’re about average. Maybe below average.”

“Hey!” he said, affronted. “I do OK.”

“Do you?” I asked. “No wedding ring, and you’re so obviously married that you probably don’t even realize it. I’ll bet you leave your ring off in some ill thought out attempt to seem eligible to a woman or women at the office. And they still snub you without even noticing you.”

He had no response to that one.

“A word of advice,” I added, “the wedding ring actually makes you more attractive at the office. Just a tip, though I have no intention of letting you out to try it.”

He was looking at me again, studying me, watching my mouth. “You don’t have fangs,” he said.

“Nope,” I agreed. I waved a hand at him, wiggling my fingers. “And I don’t have claws either. Or superhuman strength. Just an appetite for blood. A need, really. I like a good steak as much as the next man, but it just doesn’t have the necessary … vitamins, I guess.”

“You don’t dress like a vampire.”

“And you don’t dress like a cow.”

“A cow?”

“Red-blooded food, yes.” He shrank back to the far side of the cage again. “I dress like an American,” I added, “just like you. Only maladjusted teenagers with an overdeveloped sense of angst dress ‘like vampires’. Or goths with a poorly developed fashion sense reaching the back of their closet.” I leaned forward in my chair, and gave a quick look back and forth, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “And even Dracula didn’t dress like they show on the movies,” I said in a stage whisper. “He dressed like a down-on-his-luck nobleman–which he was. Bram Stoker thought reality needed a little … well, embellishing. We all thought it was a laugh, at the time, but the joke has long sense worn thin.”

“You knew Dracula?”

“Knew, yes. He’s been re-dead for a long time.”

He was silent for so long I thought I might be able to get back to my news, but then he asked, his voice small and tight, “Why me? Why did you pick me?”

“You were at the right place at the right time,” I told him. “And you looked promisingly unmissable. After a few centuries of picking targets, you get a feel for that kind of thing.”

“But I have a wife…”

“Sure. And she might even miss you.”

He sighed then. His sort always sigh when I say that. And they always say, “No, she probably won’t.” Which does help me know that I picked the right target once again.

Another few minutes of silence. Him, I suppose, reflecting on his rather pointless life, and me thinking of how much I was going to enjoy giving his life a point, after all.

“Do your fangs show up when you … you … feed?”

“Nope,” I said. “I told you. I don’t have fangs.”

“Then … then how do you …?”

I picked up the pump and showed him. “With this.”

His face became almost as pale as mine at that point. “Does it … does it hurt?” he asked.

“Like hell,” I told him.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.