CAUTION: VAMPIRE ZONE... I had a dream, And all of a sudden I found myself on ice, and I found the ice was above a pond, and I was with the ice, sky was above us with but water below, and the sky was dark as the water was cold, and when these facts crystallized for me the ice broke and I sank. Expecting darkness below me I was surprised when I saw as I sank a fiercely glowing light, which magnified by the refractive index of terror turned out to be a sign saying naught but: Welcome to the Vampyre enclave you sons of bitches. Clearly I wasn't their first victim! OR THEIR LAST. The enclave is where us "vampires", as we are called, get together to change the v to a V and the i to a y: Vampyres. We drink blood, we poof in to bats and when it gets late we flap flap flap flap flap back to our dorm rooms and apartments. A typical evening for one of us goes something like this: At around nine, (after I've supped on blood or popovers) One of my Vampyre friends calls me, On the Dracula phone, So that I might not be alone, In the TERROR OF NIGHT We go to downtown providence, where nothing is open apart from that theater that Paul Auster mentions in one of his books and maybe the piano store if they're having a sale on a particularly popular key and can't drive the crowds away until late. If there is a crowd, we blend into them, as if we were just like normal people except more elegantly dressed and for the most part sweeter smelling. We blend in subversively, like a speck of yellow in an unbeatable volume of egg whites - as the yellow dooms meringues, we doom theater-goers and Chinese restauranteurs. We are afraid only of garlic, unless delicious, and ska music, unless unavoidable, and only as infrequently as we would like to believe we eat garlic and listen to ska do we dare question our way. For in truth, although garlic and ska music are frightening, they are not as terrifying as the greater power which looms over us, both crushing our soules and defining our existence: THE VAMPYRE CODEX. Forged in a cold fire was this Codex, which means a bound manuscript, generally of ancient scripture. Forged in a cold fire and tempered in a pail of hot blood, held by tongs of terror by the blacksmith of the black night. Rested next to other codices was this codex, ones generally forged in hot fires, then tempered in cool water, being held all the while by a perfectly ordinary blacksmith's tongs during ordinary work hours. These other codices must have totally shit themselves when they saw the VAMPYRE CODEX rest so casually and yet so menacingly on whatever it was rested (that detail is not included in the Codex since when you forge a codex you have no way of altering it after the fact as one must have to do to have included details concerning events that occurred after forging!) It instructs us to take the names of terror so that we may be known for nothing else. I took the name Phylicia Rashad, which translates in Vampyre to "Horned Fastener" although the real meaning is in my translation's terrifying brevity lost. Together with Tempest Bledsoe (" Terrible Blowjob") I do go to the festival of death, cater-corner to the festival of carnage, on the street of despair, sometimes taking a shortcut on blood avenue if it's October and Dunkin' Donuts has some of those orange and black pastries that so sooth our psyches while, ironically, making us lust for blood even more. It instructs us to pursue our prey through disguise. We live our lives as you do. We attend creative writing seminars. We hold down jobs, we pay rent. Sometimes, on a lark, we go to the Gap and take pains to hide our disgust for the colorful merchandise. We are among you as we are amongst you, slowly increasing our numbers using our wits, our cunning and our two extremely sharp teeth. In my dream, as I sank, I saw you swimming towards me. I had no idea you could swim so gracefully, like terrible mermaids, or fagotty sharks. Your time under the thick ice had left your scales pale and your fins as boney as your claws were calloused, from clawing things. When you bit me, and as I floated helpless, and as my blood drifted from me in desperate clouds, I began to understand you. When you bit me even more cruelly as I grasped childishly at your locked jaws, I grasped the knowledge of the terrible Codex. When I saw your gills fan out in ecstasy, I in ecstasy felt my gills grow to fill the void that my lungs, in their uselessness, had left. Twenty short minutes later, as my human form drifted downwards, something greater soared upwards, murmuring "Thank you...thank you". Then I hit the ice from the underside and bonked my nose on it, which is why I don't feel like doing my homework right now. THE END.