Ch. 5: The Boat.

This is the fifth chapter of Icky the Vampire, part of the Draft Zero Project. If you need a reminder of what happened last chapter, you can read that here: Chapter 4 A bat of beaks.

Storms come, and terrible waves take walls and tides rake sand and mud and our clams from the shore. One side of the ocean would churn against the island and the other could be flat as glass.

Jokes from the gods. 

And we rebuild our walls. We live by the moon, and time is lunar. We fix walls and clam and sometimes Mushi looks up at the moon and I know he thinks of the others like us. Then, he looks at me, and I at him, and want to know what he knows, but he nods and goes back to the ledge, the stick into the mud, the days of remaining. 

We rarely talk. Salt papers my tongue whenever I think to. Years, I think, (time is an odd thing when you live by the night), go by without words. 

One day, on our clam bed, I say. “How come you never asked me about my life before this?”

“Because that was not your life, Ludima.” 

“I remember it. I can still tell you the taste of figs.”

“Do you remember learning to drink?”

I don’t. I jam the stick into the mud and pull up a big clam out of the sucking sand. 

“How about walking or breathing and, all the other things that we can do? That thing you remember is just a thing that is different abou tus: we remember life in the womb. Humans remember only their lives after it.”

I want to be back in that womb. 

No, I want to be out of it in the sunlight. I wish I could be a on a grassy knoll chasing Adrianae, her black hair whipping in the wind, he dark skin bending under the pumping of her veins…

Why must I think of veins?

*

In the year of the rainbow moons, when it would be red then yellow or blue, never the same, the boat finally comes. 

Like the others, it had the sound of staid drums and no sails. It was small, a boat too small to warrant a drum, perfect for ferrying us to Hades. But, it beached roughly, crashed, shattering sounds like pottery, not something sea worthy. 

Washed up on a far rock, the invisible rock only to be seen when the winter moon pulled the tide way out so far that even the line of dark of the cliff under the sea is seen separating the black of the deep and our shallows. The boat was white, like chalk. It had black glass. It’s drum goes silent after the crash. We can hear the voices of men and women inside from our seats at the mouth of the cave.

“Is that,” I ask Mushi, “our boat?”

“It seems so,” Mushi says. 

“But not for Hades,” I say.

“No,” he says. “There’s no Hades.” 

Out of the boat, a man hangs his head over the side and vomits. Another behind him, holds own head, a look of dismay, the body language of dismay I remember from my father so many times, elbows tight to the ribs, hands clasped, holding the head, bracing for a great disaster to come in with the shift of the breeze. And the breeze shifted for us too and I smelled that smoke of something that made my stomach growl, my mouth water. 

“The gods have sent us a boat of drunks,” Mushi says, “and blood.” Out on the sea, he’s searching its horizon, as if waiting for something large to rise up and snatch the boat from rocks. A baby god playing with its sacrifices, a cat batting its spine broken mouse. But there is no storm, monster, jinn, god, cat demon, only riffled calm sea lapping against the beach, rocks, boat. 

Something groans, not living , but a thing tied down yet only able to pace, roll, within the sway of the boat.

My stomach growls. 

There is the sting of sweat with the breaze. I know there are four alive and two dead on the boat. I can hear the heart beats of the four, even over the shouts of the men at one another after their vomits. 

“This, Ludima, is what I felt the day you fell from the sky.”

“Hunger?”

“No, hope.” 

*

We wait. Their fight ends and after they weep they sleep. And we come for two who sleeep on the deck. We take them, carry them, drag them to our cave before they could even scream.

*

The first moment, there is still fright twitching in my stomach. I know things are slow. The flutter of his heart ripples the skin of his neck rather than pulse, little waves of smokey sea. Mush had already bit his man, and the ahh that leaves the man’s mouth was so quiet, so subtle, it could be the breeze between the crevices or pits in the weathered sides of the cave’s mouth. But looking at the man I had carried, so light he had felt, soft, smelling of spices or fruits or flowers of things that I think I remember, but dimly, like a fire once watched in the night.

Or the fire on my own scarred rippled skin. 

Our damp cave. Moldy and batshit stained, smells different with them, the breeze carrying off the strange boat, the smell of blood, who, too, would wake wondering if this was hades.

Is it wrong to feed on his blood like feeding on some seagull? 

Mushi lays his man on the ground. Mushi would look up, I know, call me Lumida, no, no he will not speak, he will pounce and feed on the one in my arms too, sucking more than his share. 

My fangs sing right where blood ripples the skin and suddenly opens is spurts into my throat, my tongue, my gullet, my stomach and like the track of the blood all I can see is the hole in the world of our cave, the it’s batshit end I’ve never bothered to mine, but now I’m sinking into the rock floor and everything is light and right and for the first time the burns on my cheeks stop sizzling nerves and I know that this is how life is supposed to be: what it means to breathe, gasp, be.