ANTI-VENOM
I scream, waving her off with a bronzed arm that spent all of yesterday in the surf and the sun.
On Friday morning, I wake up with two pimples stacked vertically side-by-side like they are the best of friends cavorting along my jugular. I am sick of acne and decide they will be puncture wounds from a vampire bite. I know I have to really lean in, so I seal myself off in my room/tomb and hiss in wretched agony when my mom enters and attempts to open the blinds. The sunlight! I scream, waving her off with a bronzed arm that spent all of yesterday in the surf and the sun. At dusk, I call my sister Jetta and say take me to the ER, I’ve been bitten by a vampire and need vampire anti-venom. She asks if the vampire was hot and I say yes I think so, but I don’t want to be a vampire so just come and get me. I write “vampire bite” on the ER intake form and ask the nurse if they have vampire anti-venom. She asks Jetta if I am on any drugs and for some reason I say your mom is drugs! But that just gets me a spot in a psych observation bed. The bed is not a bed. It’s a stretcher that smells like Clorox and rubber with a thin cotton sheet that went through the dryer with one of those thingies they stick to your chest when you get an EKG that is now stuck to the sheet in perpetuity and I hate it because it also looks like a melting metallic pimple. But Jetta says no, it’s just a nipple and that makes it a little better. After two hours and three minutes, the doctor visits me and he is sweet and young and can’t be much older than I. He bends in to examine me and words roll off his tongue that hint at a misdiagnoses of the bite as acne or pimples or zits. I reach out like I’m going to grab him around the shoulders and suck at his neck to prove that the vampire blood is activating in my system. He steps back into a steel bedside table and the top tray slides off and clatters to the floor along with my dreams of planting a vibrant indigo love bite just south of his ear. Jetta grabs my hand and says we’re going now and we melt from a place of fluorescent white squares into a humid night buzzing with cicadas and small buoyant pockets of neon. She says we should take advantage of my vampire powers and stay out all night and I meow, because apparently I am also a witch’s familiar in that particular moment. We end up at ‘Habeas Corpus’ where they spin any and all genre of music into thin hours of the thick velvet night. I turn the hospital gown they made me wear over my clothes into a cape and Jetta secures a stack of glow stick necklaces from the base of my throat to the soft underside of my chin. Will I will always be this young? I murmur to no one in particular. Jetta chews a million dainty cubes of ice and we dance until even my immortal feet start to experience human aching. She says we need to get home and pulls me out into the pre-dawn where everything is still dark but you know the sun has ceased dreaming. She ducks into a CVS and I say where are you going and she says I’m buying vampire anti-venom. We walk three or four or ten blocks and collapse onto the beach. Will the sun kill me? I ask. She says no and smacks two circular zit patches onto the side of my neck after we pop off the glow sticks and watch them become dimly lit pasta in the pale cool sand. Sweet perfect Jetta. Sunrise teases lava into the waning sapphire sky and I don’t burst into flame or turn into dust that swirls away into the ocean and the rest of the day.
Casey Jo Graham Welmers was named after a Grateful Dead song. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bending Genres, wildscape. literature review, The Argyle and others.
