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I’m parked outside your house and I can feel time passing normally. It slips through my fingers and I don’t hold onto it despite knowing that I can.

The street light above me flickers and I think of that song. Touch me, it’s so easy to leave me, all alone in the moonlight.

No, it wasn’t ‘a street light flickers’. It was ‘a street light gutters’. Different, I suppose.

And soon it will be morning.

Whatever. I hate that song anyways.

Your front porch light clicks on and I jump, but it’s only your cat activating the sensor. I see it slink off into the bushes. All your blinds are pulled up and the internal lights are on so your family doesn’t seem to notice the porch light. Lucky. Not that it would matter to me. Well, not really.

I crawl over the center console and exit through the passenger seat so that I can slip around the back of my car and into the thick hedge that guards your front yard.

I want to watch you in your element, sweetness. I want to see the way you are now — without me. I want to see how you are with him, sweetness — your husband.

~~~

It starts to rain and I feel the urge to stop it but I want to see you — because through the window, in the yellow glow of your kitchen light, I see you chopping onions and chicken and all I can hear is you saying how you hate to cook. All I hear is how it’s such a goddamned stereotype for women to be in the kitchen doing what men tell them to do. What men expect them to do.

And yet here you are. With your shiny engagement ring and your sparkling wedding ring and your hollow smile. You’re wearing a fucking apron. And sautéing. And forcing a smile. And doing all the things you swore you would never do.

Never. Ever. Do.

You’re a lying sack of shit, sweetness. You are the scum that I scraped off my toilet bowl last night.

You are the girl I lost hold of.

And you’re all that I can think about anymore.

~~~

Eventually the safety light turns off and I get a better view of you in the kitchen and him pouring a glass of fucking chardonnay. For himself. You cut roughly through a stubborn tomato and it spurts onto your dress above your apron. I watch you try to wipe it off but I see he’s angry. You failed to please him.

I see you eye the wine.

I know you want some and I know he probably disapproves of you drinking at all. If only he knew you and who you really were.

What you want is a shot of tequila. Or an old fashioned. Or some smooth whiskey over ice.

I know what you want sweetness.

He — your husband — knows nothing about you.

~~~

From the hedge I can’t hear you but I can see him exiting the kitchen and taking up a seat in the lounge. He turns on the NFL and I see you cringe as you realise you’re going to have to watch it all night. Your hand shakes. You look across at the bottle of wine and quickly turn back to the tomato-chopping that is your job.

I know you’re absolutely dying for a cigarette.

No. Better. A fucking cigar.

The stink of it. The heat of it. The weight of it in your hand.

A cigar and a whiskey. I know you sweetness.

I know what you want.

I continue to watch as you focus on your tomato and he turns the volume up on the television. The tension in your neck makes me angry and I want to bust in there and save you from your fate. But you made your choices.

I watch him laugh out loud at an advertisement on the box and I watch you shrink further down. And that’s when I decide to stop it.

I stop time.

~~~

Inside the house your husband is the first person I walk by and I mark him an idiot for not bothering to lock the front door behind him. His mouth is open and there’s a droplet of spit hanging between his lips and the palm of his out-held hand. I have a strong urge to take his hand and stuff it into his mouth and twist his legs back the wrong way until they buckle and break.

I stop myself. I know that things can’t be undone.

I focus on you.

You, sweetness. With your apron and your glossy hair and your shiny heels. Right now — you are everything that I know you not to be. You’re trying too hard to fit into his life. You are mushing yourself into a mold that isn’t worth it, a mold that will turn you out like a smooth, self-loathing chocolate bunny rabbit.

I touch your hair and it is softer and cleaner than I remember it to be. I kiss your neck, but it is as smooth as I remember it to be. You are rigid, frozen in time, and so am I, but in a different way. I hold you tight and I rut up into you and all I want is for you to be mine forever.

Is that too much to ask?

~~~

I start time again.

I am in the other room now, your bedroom, and neither of you notice. I listen to your back and forth as I silently rifle through your drawers of clothing.

“Carrots?” you ask.

He’s watching the game. “Hmm. Whatever.”

I hear you dissolve and I know he doesn’t see it.

I see it. I see it in how quiet you are in response.

~~~

I stop time.

I can’t rewind and I can’t fast-forward. I wait a little longer this time, glad that I don’t have to hear your forced words and his uninterested responses. I’m always surprised by how excruciatingly quiet it is when the world stops. Deafening — it presses in on me and sometimes I can barely stand it.

The majority of your knickers are sensible in a repeating trio of beige, black, and dark blue, but right at the back of the drawer my fingers find a pair of socks that aren’t soft enough. Your vibrator.

I wonder if he knows, at the same time realising that, of course, he doesn’t. I bet he can’t even make you come. Does he try?

A range of pills inhabit your mirrored medicine cupboard and I pocket a few just for my own amusement. For later, after I go home and pretend like I’m going to sleep.

Your makeup is a neat yet excessive collection of overly expensive brands that fill a deep drawer under the sink. I remember you wearing dark eye liner and smudged mascara and I remember, every Sunday morning, with the help of a coffee and then a cigarette, you’d pluck the stray hairs of your eyebrows and complain how women would never be set free from all the fucking expectations.

Still, every Sunday morning, you’d pluck away until you were down to the filter and the skin above your eyes was red and puffy.

We fought more than was necessary but you were always my best girl, sweetness. If only I could rewind.

But all I can do is stop.

~~~

Your house is nice but it’s not you at all. Plush carpet (carpet is dirty and I don’t vacuum), eggshell walls (yeah…I don’t scrub walls), and too many bedrooms for what is needed in my opinion (who needs this many room?! It’s only more space to clean).

You were never the domestic type.

That song is still playing in my head.

And soon it will be morning. Touch me, it’s so easy to leave me, all alone in the moonlight.

I don’t even think those lyrics are aright. Morning is a long way off, but for the moment I still have time stopped, so it doesn’t matter.

Back in the kitchen I’m tempted to lift up your dress to see how you’re keeping things for him. That’s too far though. Instead I take a glass from the cabinet, pour some wine and place it just next to your chopping board. I press my face into your neck and you smell just like the girl I know you are. I pull your hair and your head cocks back and I remember how much you liked that.

I take a step back and admire your long, curling locks that hang from your tilted head.

I start time again.

~~~

You start backward but immediately catch yourself and straighten your neck again. You drop the knife and he calls from the living room when he hears it clatter on the bench.

“Everything alright?”

You cough. “Yes baby. Just slipped. Sorry, get back to your game.”

He doesn’t respond and that’s when you notice the wine. From behind, I watch you hesitate. You continue to chop your tomato and I know you want the drink — you want to let go and give in and give up — and he laughs in the living room and I see you tense up again.

I’m breathing as quietly as I can, and there’s no reason for you to expect me to be behind you, but still, my nerves and the exhilaration of even being here in your house is making me thump hard with adrenaline. My heart beats in my chest. I worry you’ll hear it.

You don’t. You don’t even turn. You place the knife down almost silently and lift the glass to your lips. You drain it. I wonder if it’s sheer want or terror that makes you do it.

You put your glass back down and I can’t help myself. I stop time and refill it. And then I get close enough to brush my lips against your neck and I immediately regret it. I want you. Badly. I want to pick you up and take you out of this awful house and away from this man who doesn’t love you. I want to hold your warmth close to my own and go back to the days we had. The days where we would be high or drunk or just inebriated in one way or another. I want to fix you but I know I’m probably the one who needs fixing.

I stop myself. I know that things can’t be undone.

You’re halfway through the second glass when I stop time.

I take it from your hand and empty it into the sink. I wash it, dry it, place it back in the cupboard, and arrange you to chop the tomato — as if you had been chopping it the whole time.

I want to brush my finger across your lips and hold you close to me. Close enough that you could feel how much I still want you. It’s always been you, sweetness. Yours is the name I say when I get there.

Every time.

I can’t rewind and I can’t fast-forward. I know I shouldn’t have come here at all, but just like you, I find it hard to help myself.

I walk out of your front door and I don’t look back.

I make it to the end of your garden path and out onto the street. The moon is bright above me and I’m singing that fucking song in my head again. A streetlamp gutters. 

 I’m looking back at your house. I start time again. I don’t notice the black Leviathan and there is less than a second before it hits me. I am man against RangeRover, and I lose.

Christmas Eve



I died in the light of the morning. 
You died the next day.


Maya had bought the sweater with money from the last truck driver. It wasn’t for the warmth, though essentially that was good for keeping up appearances, but for the dirty great reindeer stitched to the front with the googly eyes and glittering antlers and stitched sequin nose.


She had always loved Christmas and even though last year hadn’t been ideal, Maya was determined to resurrect her longstanding habit of festive happiness. Or whatever.


She supposed she looked ridiculous in the sweater, but still, she'd bought a small, unsweetened coffee and set up camp at a grimy table in the corner. The girl behind the counter had been giving her the eye ever since. Jesus, Maya thought to herself, what was she gonna buy, a cow burger? Even that probably wouldn’t have satisfied the stupid slut who was still glaring Maya down like she was about to steal the cash register or just plain solicit right there in the diner.


After a while the girl behind the counter was distracted with one thing or another and Maya found herself free to get back to the hunt. More than a dozen truck drivers were milling around in the warm interior of the diner but one in particular had caught her eye. He was tall, lean, barely older than her, she guessed, and though clearly minding his own business over a cup of steaming soup, Maya could feel him buzzing with human need — he had already noticed her — she could hear the blood pumping through his veins.


Dark curly hair, rough fingers...her mind ran over their course surface and there was an echoing sound that boomed around her...a scraping so loud...


An unbuttoned flannel over a dirty grey shirt, hat on, its brim straight as an arrow but just as dirty as the shirt. A beard that sprouted in a thick carpet on his face. Maybe four days worth.


Maya could smell him on the air between them. Her hands were starting to shake from hunger.


***


She was tiny. And pretty.


He had seen her across the diner as soon as he came through the doors into the warmth. Out of the cold.


He had seen her, looked away immediately, and then found that he had memorised her in less than that moment. Jayden sighed. He was getting tired of failing to surprise himself.


Don’t think with your little brain, brother. That’s what Jimmy had always told him. Troy burned for Helen. Jimmy was probably the only voice of reason he’d ever hear.


Jayden had told his Mama that he would be good out here — where it was cold and isolated and the women were ‘strange’ and always ‘wanting to tempt him' -- and he was going to hold himself to that promise. The women that he’d encountered hadn’t really been like that, so he could never understand what his Mama was so afraid of. They were just women. Some were truck drivers, some were prostitutes, some were housewives who served him hot soup in cups at diners along the interstate.


This women, well, she was more girl than woman... She was tiny. And pretty.


***


Time passed for this man. Tall Beard. More boy than man, Maya thought to herself.


She watched him lift the cup of soup to his lips and time passed for him and his beard grew and she swore she could hear it growing. Time passed for this boy but it didn’t really seem to pass for Maya anymore. Sure, it had been a year, but she only knew that because Christmas was here again. She wondered if that made her like everyone else, with her hair and fingernails that continued to grow and her lack of surprise when night turned into day, over and over again.


She felt like the same Maya. She felt unchanged, as if her self was persistent and the world moved and grew around her in its own way. Perhaps it would have been different if Baby was still alive.


The only thing that was different was the fact that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. It wasn’t a blatant change that the people in the diner wouldn notice — the girl behind the counter, the tall boy with the beard — but it was definitely a change.


The bruises on her elbows and knees, and the dark circles under her eyes, these were more visible when she was hungry, and tonight she counted four days since she had last eaten. She needed more money. And she needed to eat.


The sweater had been frivolous, Maya could admit that to herself, but the improvement it had made on her mood was more than worth it in her opinion. The coffee tonight had been a dollar which left an even eleven dollars tucked into the back of her winter leggings.


Maya sipped her coffee and tried not to be envious of his plump, pumping arteries. Tall Beard. She could feel the heat of his blood coming off him in waves. The heat seemed to mimic her own want; her terrible, unforgivable need.


No big deal — just two consenting adults who needed what the other had.

Sure, Maya wanted it to be true, but she knew there was no way Tall Beard would consent to what she needed tonight. She was going to have to take it from him.


***


Jayden was tired but his heart seemed to be working harder than his body could manage, and a lot of his blood was funneling straight down to his...


Well. If he was being honest, that had probably started happening as soon as he’d seen her, really. Big dark eyes, with bags above her cheeks that were screaming lack of sleep, dirty bangs across her face, swimming inside a too- big Christmas sweater. There was something about her — like a car crash that you just ached to look at — this girl, with her big eyes; she was a magnet.


The soup was definitely not enough. Jayden bought an egg salad sandwich from behind the spit-guard for $4.50 (it was probably old and dry, but whatever) and wished he was anywhere but this truck stop diner in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. In less than a day he’d be gone from this place, just like he was gone from every other place, but still.


He was already rock hard in his pants underneath the table when he looked up to see her face, not a foot from his own, as he finished opening the sandwich packaging. How had she come over without him noticing?


“Hi.” She smiled at him, but God, she looked pale enough and weak enough that she might just pass out.


Jayden smiled in reply. "Hi yourself." He motioned for her to sit down opposite him in the booth, which she did. She did not, however, accept the half of his egg sandwich that he offered her.


***


When you have no heart, it’s as if that heart belongs to everyone. And so, Maya’s heart was every man’s heart. But that was really only because men were easier.

There were women out here, in the cold, but it was as if most of them had no intention of exploring their wants or giving in to their urges. Men on the other hand were dripping with need and all Maya had to do was be there.


Just like Carl’s friend had told her.


It had been a night after the boys were all too drunk to remember that she was, in fact, a girl. An average kid, average height, average face, but there had been a glint in his eyes that made her think he was smarter than he let on and perhaps the alcohol only really opened his mouth and let out the words that had already been inside his mind.


“I’ve tested it out,” he had said.


Maya hadn’t understood.


“I’ve tried it, and it worked,” he continued. “Not like, stalker style, but just...you know, texting her on a Friday afternoon, or mid-morning Monday. Times when you know she needs attention. Just be there. Be there.”


Maya had only been half-listening at the time, with her mind on other things (though, she didn’t know then that she was pregnant), but now, these days, she found that it worked. And it worked pretty fucking well.


Just be there.


***


Perhaps it was just because it had been so long since he had been close to someone; touched someone, or felt something other than his own isolation.


Jayden found himself picturing her naked, this girl across from him at the table, looking up at him with big, wet eyes. He wondered what her nipples looked like; if she was shaved; what her skin would feel like underneath his fingers.


He took a long, calm breath and sipped his soup. It must have been Christmas Eve messing with him — making him think of home; making him wish he had a home of his own — a wife, child, dog. A lawn that needed mowing, a garden full of bright colourful flowers, a home cooked meal on the table every night, bacon and eggs in the morning.


All the things that he would never have.


No, he thought. Stop it. All he had to do was rest up, make it through this night, fucking Christmas Eve, and get his load upstate, on time, without incident. Then he’d be done. Home free, as other people said. Ready to chug on to the next job.


***


Maya found it oddly comforting that his truck cab felt more like a home than any other she’d been in. Normally they were littered with greasy crisp packets, empty soda cans, sticky used condoms, crumbs, and shards of broken glass.


But this was different. There was a sturdy blind that pulled down and covered the inside of the windshield blocking out most of the sunlight that had already started to finger it’s way through onto their legs.


The way she was now, Maya could feel everything, but when she touched her fingers to Tall Beard's chin and the sides of his face she was taken aback to find that it was total overload.


His thoughts came flooding in and there was no gate. The kid was an open book of feelings.
Mostly there were images of a small family home. Blurry, angry memories of a father. Tall Beard himself, picking coloured flowers against a brightening morning. There was a girl as well. Soft and curved and smiling, as if she herself, was the actual sun inside his memory. Big, pearly-white teeth; cherry red lips; bright blue eyes that sparkled. A girl — slipping away, fading away; moving her lips, but Maya heard no words.


She knew Tall Beard had lost himself to this girl. Maya knew that Tall Beard's heart had been rendered as useless as her own. She felt sorry for him. She had seen heartbreak before, she had felt it, but this was different somehow.


This was closer and louder.


***


Carl had scrambled on top of her in the motel bed, and, thinking he was on a bender, Maya had given up fighting him. It hurt less if she relaxed.


And then, just as she did, she had felt his teeth. By that point they were sharp and elongated. They opened up her neck and in response, her chest rose in an unintended arc towards him, pulling her upper body away but simultaneously giving him more space to straddle her and get at the hot blood that was running down her neck and into her hair on the sheets underneath her.


Carl. She had pawed at him but he was different. He was strong. Too strong for an addict. Too strong for the pathetic excuse for a human that she knew him to be. His skin was cold against her own and it was as if he was fevered, or pumped full of adrenaline, or something else...


He hadn’t fully drained her that night and then, eventually, she had turned. In the midst of her mindless convulsions Carl had dragged himself out behind the motel and died.


And then it was just Maya and Baby then. Maya. And Baby.

***


Jayden was nervous. His little brain was telling him what he wanted, but at the same time it was hard to think that this tiny pretty girl was anything other than dangerous.


She straddled him with the ease and grace of the experienced, and licked from his collar bone to the edge of his jaw. He was hard — a coiled spring — and he had the strong urge to toss her into the back, get on top, and hold her down while he had his way.


That was wrong though. Merely an urge. Not the way you act around other people. Jayden knew how to act appropriately and that was exactly what he intended to do.
As he let her move on top he noticed that she was lighter than he had anticipated.
She kissed his neck. She kissed his beard. She kissed his lips and then the lids of his eyes. Her pants were off (he hadn’t noticed her taking them off) and she pulled her knickers aside. Jayden could feel with his fingers how wet she was and it only made him realise that he was much closer to an edge he hadn’t noticed before. He wanted to buck up into her. He wanted to push her down and use her. He stopped himself.
This tiny, pretty girl slid herself onto him just as her razor sharp teeth pierced the warm skin of his neck.


Jayden clawed at her shirt trying to detach her from his neck but her hands were suddenly so strong that she had him pinned and he could feel nothing but the warm red blood that slicked out from his carotid.


***


Penetration.


Maya knew it had never been her word, but it was hers in that moment. She had penetrated him.


Her fangs had punctured his soft skin and it was as satisfying as anything she had ever felt. Even more than the first time. She sucked hard, desperate to get her fill, desperate not to waste a single drop. Tall Beard's blood flooded her system; overwhelmed her; set her cool, pale body afire.


The morning Carl had turned her, Maya had been in pain. It was Christmas Eve. Carl died out behind the motel but she woke the next day to a fresh hell that she didn't want any part of. And then she had become hungry. So hungry. Too hungry.
 
She had grown weak.


She had failed.


Failed Baby.


Baby had been her first meal. Tall Beard wouldn’t be her last.