things you catch in clubs

It's I don't know how late. We've just eaten and we're in the bathroom, me and two girls I don't know. It's barely lit by pink bulbs and I'm puking in the sink. They're in the two stalls.

I raise my head and drop my hair. It's messy on purpose anyway, it still works. I rinse my mouth and the extra drops spill down my chin. I grab my touch-up kit befor either of them can weasel a space in front of the mirror. I lay fresh foundation across my cheeks. It's a little dark, it hides the post-puke paleness. I have eye drops, too. Then we all light our cigarettes and we go, talking to each other about I don't know what, some bands, some boys. I don't know these bitches.


The club is new and filthy. It used to be something else that used to be something else and now it's this, unadvertised, exclusive as hell. I lose those girls and the guys we were with. Doesn't matter, I'm having a good time, dancing, doing lines in the bathroom with whoever.

I meet this guy and he's pretty nice. He's got a pinstripe jacket and a scarf and about a week of beard growth which scratches my face. I go home with him. Find out later the condom broke so I email myself from my phone a reminder to get a morning after pill.


About a month later that club is old news and they're taking street style photos of last year's socialites outside. We're going to some new place painted all white inside and barely lit so it's supposed to look like you're dancing in the belly of a ghost. I'm sharing a cab with some guy I don't know. He's got his hand up my skirt and I'm texting this girl who's going to meet us there. I keep swatting him away and he keeps pretending he forgot.

And then it's just like I heard something. Some animal over the tire noise and the driver speaking another language into his cell phone. And it says something true, it says, "You smell their blood." I do, I smell it. The pervert next to me and the oblivious cabbie. It's good.

He pulls his hand away and I look down to see hair growing fast, like time-lapse. Trippy. I bite right through his neck. Takes a minute for the cabbie to notice and I eat and eat. The cab stops with a screech and I jump out, into darkness, trailing neck blood.

I just charge from one meal to the next, through the alleys where the kids fuck up against slick walls and buy their drugs. Where people mind their own business. I move through so fast I'm gone before they find the bodies, they probably think I'm a slasher or someone's illegal pitbull. When I charge at them I can smell the fear and it smells good.

There's a fmiliar smell then, in some alley in I don't know where, I don't know how far I've run. My blood knows it, it's in my blood. It comes around a corner, just like me, covered in hair and other people's blood. I stand still and it raises its wet nose to my neck, makes my heart beat. I hear my own steamy panting roughen as it examines me, smelling me and the blood in my mouth. It grabs me and we run. We go until dawn.


Same guy from a month ago. I wake up in his bed, confused about why it's familiar. His sheets are smeared with dark stains, and the blood on our skin has dried to dark brown.

It occurs to me I should call the people I've slept with since. But the light hurts, so I just go back to sleep.