#avalil

god, shut up. 

because i wanted to.

her, specifically. to fuck her or to know her. to irritate her pretty mouth with the taste of cheap cigarettes. 

the page takes her lies like a good lover takes the width of all the useful parts of your body and her handwriting has gone scratchy. It is an overeager wound. 

And so what, if it was lurid? 

how a tongue in a mouth opens it in a shape that you can never measure. Ava, then, is thinking of her mouth (their mouths, both of them) and not about shaping her g’s or her l’s or her b’s the way she taught herself.

(maybe she is more honest like this, unrecognisable to herself)

you can see dead things in mirrors. She knows this now; has watched certain hands tilting the blade of a butter knife this way and that. a mouth concealed inside the metal, a flash of strange irises. 

and later, as the sound of the tape running and running – a companion to their punctuated silence - echoed through that dim-lit flat on that very forgettable street, Ava remembers seeing herself in a mirror.

a dead thing behind her, inside her, watching the shape of her mouth. Watching both of them, in the mirror and alive in all the ways that are tangible. Touch and taste and the helpless sounds you make when there is no difference, for a while, between you and the girl inside you.

“Don’t be afraid,” she’d said. Ava sitting at the kitchen table with an unlit cigarette in the palm of her hand. “Just start the tape.”

she isn’t troubled by tenses today. Everything feels like it’s happening to her again. the good parts and the terrible ones.

ava leaning forward, small hands outspread on the cheap tabletop. she can feel splinters teasing at her palms like the tips of tongues. a glass of something amber and expensive there between them – (unclear who it belongs to, but when ava takes a sip the thing, creature, monster opposite her grins and takes a sip on the exact opposite rim. It’s as if they’re playing chess, or kissing)

(not yet)

the sound of the tape, winding their words into something she can touch later (now, here, in the quiet aching after) and ava tasting fear in the back of her throat like another fluid entirely.

inelegantly, because it was all she knew, she’d tilted her head half-disbelieving, still. they were drunk and this girl was pretty in a dangerous sort of way (Ava thought, for example, that Lilith would hurt her if she asked) and so Ava felt willing to play this game where she pretended to believe in vampires.

“so…” she’d spoken into the sudden silence and into her little tape recorder, sitting next to the glass of something on the table. “how did you die?”

“badly”

this is how it begins

….

this is how it ends

“i used to be afraid of water,” she says this softly into that space between them. it feels like a third body made of shadow, hand forming a dark blot at lilith’s throat. can she see in the dark? – ava wonders. ava is not worried – her eyes are near-luminous now, snatching every stray bit of light that tries to dart over her shoulders.

the hallway door yawns open and ava feels more naked for it. that shape behind Lilith’s back that admits to light. the shower doors are fogging up now as lilith dips her head tentatively beneath the flow of water, letting it dance across her ears and down her throat. over her chest.

ava is not worried but she is still too afraid to do what she wants, watching the stream of water (and not me) take lilith’s nipple in its mouth.

Ava brushes her thumbs over the band of Lilith’s soaking boxers, following a line of muscle to the peak of hipbone above it. all of her miraculously unscarred. “i keep thinking about what they did to you.”

she pushes the words out between them like a paper boat on a real river. the kind you make almost especially to watch them sink.

a noise above her, low in lilith’s throat, and a soft exhale. “they only painted me, Ava.”

but there’s evidence in the room behind them. a stack of tapes placed clumsily on the kitchen counter, next to a half-empty pot of coffee. the way Lilith had spoken that part of her life mostly to the ceiling so ava worried the tape recorder would never pick it all up.

hot wax... they wanted me to be as close to the thing itself as possible…

her smile (sad, ava would have written in the margins of her notes if she were sober enough to take any) when she looked back down at ava. took another sip from the glass. her hands did not shake when she put it down but by then (i did.) ava believed her.

that she was-

“ironic, don’t you think?” as the glass went back to its circle of condensation on the table. “that I, in imitating Icarus, felt hot wax on my skin just as he must have?”

“i don’t think Icarus was real.”

she liked how lilith laughed at that. it gave her a moment to let the shock of everything she’d heard slip through her ribcage like a knife. how they’d bought her, hundreds of years ago, and what she remembers of the world.

“a series of closed doors, mostly. the scent of linseed. holding still for hours and hours. mostly i never saw the paintings – i have only seen most of them now, that were not lost during the Great War and the second one, after – but i did once or twice see the originals. fresh.”

she’d drifted to the bookcase and taken down a set of prints in a Filofax, taken a few of them out for ava to look at. the girl in those pictures looked different – very slender. “i was not a vampire yet. they used me first, until time threatened to make me…” she’d trailed off.

cleared her throat a moment later, “well, as you can see they made me very light-skinned here. and my face is not entirely the same. i was an object, to them, so i had no looking glass to see myself. for years, a glimpse of this was all i knew about my own face.”

she’d looked on as ava moved through the postcard-size copies, occasionally commenting on how, in one painting, she’d been almost blinded by the paint they used to imitate shadow falling across her eyes – “the room they chose to paint in that month was airy, you see. too much light and the wrong kind of shadows at night, apparently. i’m not sure what was in the paint, but it made all the skin around my eyes bleed and i could not see much beyond my own hand for days.”

she’d explained a little then about gender and time, and ava tired not to linger too much on the paintings, flicking through them as each new and slightly-alien version of lilith appeared. sometimes they only lightened her skin, but other paintings warped her features and kept only the too-thin slantlines of her body.

“you’re rushing.”

“i…” she’d put them down on the table very carefully, as though handling pottery and not cheap postcards lilith probably bought for a euro each in some distant city. dusk falling in places she had known variously, over time. “does it not bother you, at all?”

frowning. “no?”

“what they did to you- it… people go and think of it as art. they call it that.”

Lilith shook her head, and ava could see notes of her now in the paintings. a certain slanting of her jaw and how it held emotion tightly inside the crook of itself. not that ava knew her at all, of course, beyond one night in a bar. one ride home on the back of lilith’s motorbike, feeling the heat of her through leather and the scent of old cigarette smoke inside lilith’s spare helmet. of someone else’s perfume in the motorcycle jacket she insisted ava wear. “i have tried making skin-to-skin contact with asphalt at high speeds. you will not enjoy it.”

“i like this lie of yours.” ava, with the feeling you get when you are just shy of drunk. the sky seemed wider and darker than usual. “it’s like… elaborate, or something. does it work on other girls?”

“often enough.” lilith’s long fingers on the shiny surface of the spare helmet. it was plain and black and ava contrived, on the short ride to lilith’s shabby apartment, to put one of her bird stickers on the side of it. lifting her hand from around lilith’s waist for a second only to feel her vicelike grip putting ava right back where she came from.

she watched, transfixed, as lilith reached across to snatch the little postcards out of her hands. the one of Icarus she had described – where they glued pretend wings to her shoulder blades with hot wax so she could look convincingly angelic and doomed – was not among them.

her lips pursed – they were not bruised, though ava had pressed all her strength into them back at the bar. dizzy with it, her, and the slight copper taste to her mouth. alcohol hid the truth only slightly.

“this,” she flipped one of the paintings onto the table. tape running between them. “it is art, no matter where it came from. or did you think it was all bloodless, all the time?”

as though to punctuate this, her amber eyes darted up to find ava’s. they seemed deep and liquid. livid things that made ava shiver. “what about the rest of it? the fact that-”

“i am a girl now?” her laugh was soft, strange. wistful. “no one has painted me in 400 years, you know? this child is someone else. you imagine vampires as though death stopped us, but we’re still alive. we are not frozen like glass. so long as there is blood in our veins and not too much light in the world, we live and we can be changed.”

the tapes – fragile things made of film and plastic now laced with lilith’s halting voice, had placed a little girl on the docks of some city that might not exist anymore, now. swallowed by time or changed by it. lilith (“that wasn’t my name, then.”) in bare feet, squinting at sunlight. fingers in her mouth to check the condition of her teeth.

at the table in her loose shirt, her jeans and her hair now loose around her shoulders. ava could hardly make the two images match. she was also afraid, somewhere.

of all the blood it had taken to bring lilith here.

the girl in question leaned back, pulling another cigarette from her pocket, instead of from the open pack on the table. she lit it, then, with a click of her fingers – and ava jumped almost out of her seat.

“fuck”

“this surprises you?” a raised eyebrow and lilith was, is unfairly beautiful. she is centuries wrapped in skin and now that she is not pretending to pretend ava can see how the first sharp hit of weed makes her incisors grow down to trouble her bottom lip.

they catch the light. ava didn’t think they would.

“I’m going to make coffee,” she blurted. trying to look away from the glow at the end of lilith’s cigarette. the room was not very well-lit and the windows were papered in old newssheets. one of them, Ava saw from the corner of her eye as she stood and moved unsteadily into the kitchen, was from the day they shot JFK.

i guess nothing is sacred, to a vampire.

she stole a cigarette, first, putting it between her teeth as she hunted mugs (plural, to be polite) and filters and a bag of coffee pinched shut with a paperclip. as the machine made agonised noises, Ava followed muscle memory to the stove, twisting the gas knob with the cigarette still between her teeth.

nothing.

“um, lilith?”

“yes?” the vampire in question sat watching. the very vision of calm.

“your stove is fucked.”

“I don’t have it hooked up since, well… i don’t use it.”

blood. right. not exactly the sort of thing you heat up on the stove. especially if you’re a vampire, according to lilith’s horrible descriptions. ava hated (and tingled oddly at the thought) of how lilith had sat playing with her own fingers as she talked about the taste of blood – “indescribable, really. it tastes like blood, but from the perspective of a mouth to which blood is life itself.”

of running through streets – in war, in famine, during sieges when the night sky reflected only fire. lilith and her coven (“all dead now, sadly. or, well, i am not very sad about it”) crashing aristocrat parties in the 50s. in Paris, “she wore all her battle scars, that city. and the women were so pretty and so sad.”

she described it all like poetry. the flow of blood from mouth to mouth in the odd incestuous thing that is a coven. how people taste different – rich or bland or too much iron. fatty blood running fast into her mouth, or slow blood you have to suck when the heartbeat starts running out.

but vampires do not eat the dead. it made things a dance. slow-torture meals with victims sitting variously restrained (by broken bones, by pain, by fear) on their pretty little sofas. hot quick kills up against the wall of an alley.

“does it feel like murder?”

a delicate shrug, and halfway through their conversation ava thinks she can tell when lilith lies. “does it feel like that to you when you bite into a chicken leg? or do you not eat meat, little bird?”

so no stove. cool.

ava stares at her cigarette until lilith’s fingers – click – draw her eyes back to that side of the room. “i do have a lighter, ava.”

and there, her name is in the room. in lilith’s mouth like she is trying the taste of it.

“also this.” ava is too dazzled by the sudden dance of flame on the end of her cigarette to see the motion lilith makes, but she hears a second click resound through the room. odd acoustics with all that newspaper blocking the glass.

something off, but ava can’t quite describe what it is. “i though fire was one of the things that can kill you?”

“your point?”

ava poured out two cups of coffee and yes, her hands shook. tapping ash into the tray on the countertop (they were everywhere, in every room. it didn’t seem like lilith’s sort of handiwork, but ava can deal with being skin on the side. she didn’t want to dwell on who else might live here)

(what else)

Ava carried the coffees back to the table. words a little garbled with the cigarette pinched between her teeth. “doesn’t it seem weird that you can make fire when it’s also dangerous to you?”

“you can be killed with fire, ava.”

she sat down, “okay but I can’t, like, summon it with my bare hands.”

“true.” lilith sipped at her coffee. though, from what ava knew, it tasted absolutely indifferent to her. those fangs had disappeared again, but she still had a joint dangling from her fingers. burning away. “i don’t know why we can make flame, really. something to do with hellfire?”

ava couldn’t tell if she was joking. didn’t ask, then, and didn’t ask when lilith let slip in the hot wet dark later that she was more afraid of water. or had been, or was.

she couldn’t tell.

only that it was the middle of the night, and tomorrow lilith would probably be gone. vanished along with this hardly-used apartment sitting vacant under some invented name.

ava was clinging to it by her fingertips. this, and-

(i wanted to go)

she writes this later. it is the only part of the story that is definitely true.

(this is how it ends)

“don’t you worry about it?” Ava looks up, and water from the showerhead scatters onto her lower jaw and she thinks, again, of the livid shape of Lilith, in the dark which is where Ava thinks she belongs – and also here, with her heavy warm weight pressing them both beneath the flow of hot water.

“worry about what?”

“hellfire?” ava chose that moment – perhaps poorly – to dart a look up at Lilith’s face. away from her cock but ghosting one hand closer to it.

she feels lilith move closer. there are still secrets between them but little else, now. lilith gasps as ava touches her, takes her in one hand and coaxes lilith down to kiss her with the other. she tastes like blood very faintly. by the time they are done she will taste of Ava’s blood.

(but not yet)

Ava gasps as lilith draws a line through her centre, gathering her onto her long fingers. soaking her as the water flows over her shoulders. there is steam everywhere.